Panfusine

If you're a South Indian 'Tambram' (Tamil Brahmin) who went through the traditional 'whole nine yards' , wedding ceremony to literally 'tie the knot', you would probably remember the 'oonjal' ceremony. Its a beautiful social part of the whole 3 day event (yes, the ceremonies span 3 days!). where the bride & groom are seated on a double swing (decorated to the hilt with fragrant garlands)  & are revered as Lord Vishnu & Lakshmi. They get their feet washed (albeit, just ceremonially, with a fingertip's worth of milk) and are fed a mix of milk  with bananas ( 'Paalum Pazham' ) by the spoonful, by all the older married female relatives. and this is where the interesting innovative hacks begin to fall into place.

After a perfect meal with a choice of your favorite dishes, have you ever felt so satisfied that you could (almost) give away your wealth & precious possessions? I think this could fall under that oft shared slide of wisdom from the social networking sites.. "Never speak when you are angry, never promise when you're happy, never decide when you're sad." and food definitely falls plumb into the second category. There is something so lulling about certain dishes that are categorized under the umbrella term 'Comfort food' and its usually the stuff that one grew up with.

Its been a bountiful summer, in that every week I manage to get a couple of food sessions done with veggies picked from my own back yard. This week it was half a dozen decent sized tomatoes. The thing with such personal experiences with produce, is that you want to ensure that they are used in dishes that are specially created. In a sense thanking them for the priceless opportunity of sampling food at its sun kissed best. These tomatoes found their way into a dish that in all fairness, is  in search of a better name. You see,  I happen to  belong to the foodie camp that cringes at hearing terms like 'Chai  Tea' and 'Paneer cheese'. Pleonasms , as they are called, refers to redundant words paired together, such as 'join together' or 'exact same'. So here I was with a recipe idea that seemed quite deliciously possible and ingredients to match,  - organic tomatoes from the backyard, Organic Tofu from Whole Foods Market in ...

You know you're passionate about something like blogging when missing out on one post for  a week sends you into a spiral of guilt & blanked out grey matter. The confusion, nagging feeling of  the high that invariably kicks in once you click on the orange 'Publish' button.