Panfusine

 It almost seems like yesterday when a group of us bakers (wannabe) started with posting  yeasted goodies for this series. It was pull apart bread and a part of me gets nostalgic and wants to make some right now when I think about it. Well, thanks to the fact that Aparna Balasubramanian (My  Diverse kitchen ) is constantly on the search for different delightful breads & cookies, there is only a slim slim chance of a repetition! We had a poll about what we should bake in January & my pick got the most votes (I detect a whiff of gloating at my end here, don't you?) and so, this months recipe is that of Focaccia Caprese. Focaccia is a classic Italian bread, with Greek origins interestingly and is native to the North Eastern part of the county. Caprese, as the name suggests involves tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, just like the salad. I had 2 iterations with this particular project. The first a straight forward try with Aparna's recipe , and the second

The New year certainly got off to a great start for me, as I resurrected my 'dish - a - day' project that I had successfully completed in 2012. This time around, I decided on a bit more of structure around the 365 dishes, each day has a theme that will be repeated 12 times around through the year, and yes recipes for each one of the dishes I make, or provide links to the recipes from other sites anlong with my photographs. As prepared as I was. when it  came  to Mexican earlier this week, I blanked out. I had none of the ingredients needed for an Enchilada sauce from scratch and basically had to change plans at the 11th hour. SO the enchilada got postponed to another session while I got ready to try & replicate my favorite pick at the local healthy Mexican fast food. As with most dishes, the exact replication is simply not possible, but I must say the taste was close enough to be heartily approved by my foodie guinea pig 8 year old. The best part, I found myself making

 What in the world am I doing? Cranberry season went out 6 weeks ago, as soon as the Black Friday sales swept into each and every retail establishment in the country. Yeah well, looks like I've misplaced that memo. I'm still rejoicing in the availability of those gorgeous crimson berries. A good recipe is one that you want to make repeatedly, a GREAT recipe inspires many other creations that become favorites. In this context, I owe a big vote of thanks to David Leite & that awesome  recipe for cranberry sauce posted by Renee Schettler Rossi . When the first batch of cranberry sauce got used up as is, the next batch made for some delicious craisins that went into Christmas time chocolate bark.   A tweak to the original recipe gave rise to this weeks post. A 'chunda' - a sweet & hot lip smacking relish that is native to the Western Indian state of Gujarat. The classic version is made with shredded raw mangoes that are set out to 'cook' un