The Married Man's Guide to Creative Cooking

My cooking is like a roadside mechanic's fiddling and tinkering.

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In the land of the endless cloud: Dazzling landscapes, unpredictable weather and warm people. Our trip through the East Khasi and West Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya and the Rumnong kitchen, which is where I learned to make Donna’s khasi pork

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Summer in Bangalore is when the gulmohar trees turn flame red, the branches of mango trees bend with the weight of the fruit, the days are warm, and cooling evening showers sweep the city. A good summer salad must reflect the season and use its bounty. The family salad

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For the first time in eight years, my daughter has left me. That’s right, she decided to leave for the US with her grandparents to visit her little cousins. The biggest change since she left has been food. How I ended up making Mutton ‘sai bhaji’ with apricots

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I did something I have never done before, something I never thought I would do, and something I knew nothing about. I made a dessert, the first time ever in 45 years of keeping culinary notes. Stale croissant pudding with rosemary and rum

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Why you should never worry about wasting wine

A leftover Merlot can do wonders for pork chops as well as it can for zucchini (but don’t leave too much)

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Seeking our rice roots in the red, brown and black

For too long have Indians endured the tyranny of basmati in a country that is still flooded with varieties of traditional rice

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Cooking with my mother and other adventures

Gossip and recipes are welcome byproducts of an afternoon devoted to combining greens and stinky, dried prawn

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As I made tahini sauce for a family lunch, I was acutely conscious of Tahani’s story, extracted from the misery of war-torn Syria and thrust into my calm life under the rain trees of Bangalore.

Food is a memoir of humanity, its joys, traditions and traumas. There are other memoirs, of course, but what we eat is the most memorable record of where we have come from, where we have been, things we have witnessed and lived.

Trauma can change that, especially collective, epochal trauma. It abruptly makes people aware that their food is a memoir, which must be preserved because it may be among the few things they can carry from old lives to new...

How I wound up learning to make Mutabal kusa  

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Bangalore loves to celebrate farm products, including a millets marathon and a peanut fair. But the wildest culinary experiments are at a bean festival. That’s where I got inspiration for the Hithkabele Dosa

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On a flight home last week, a little scrap of paper with words scrawled on it tumbled out. “Senegal,” it read. “Thiéboudienne. fish/rice. seasoned with paste: parsley, spring onions, chillies, black pepper. Eaten on Saturdays.” That was it. There was no recipe. There never is.

Despite possessing more than 60 cookbooks, I am bad at following recipes. One reason is my inability to pre-organize, so I tend to cook with whatever is at hand. That’s what I did when the scrap of paper fell out. Thiéboudienne, Indian Style

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What we must learn from the Nagas and the Meteis, and why their food is among India’s best (yes, even for a vegetarian).

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In our Bangalore neighbourhood of Richards Town, food stalls, families and the Holy Ghost church cement the ties that bind. Vegetarians are welcome (but eat before you arrive). To mark our gratitude, Pork with rum and rosemary 

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Islands are marked by culinary idiosyncracies which remind you of isolation and why your lunch doesn’t really matter, as indeed we found out on Taquile Island, Peru. Nueva Delhi, it said, 16,341km—somewhere out there, on the other side of the world.

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“What is this?” The wife, after a deep intake of breath, had spotted what I had forgotten to quietly put back.

“Surely you did not use my good single malt as a marinade for your pork ribs?”

I did, actually, and put the purloined bottle of Glenlivet to good use. Single malt pork ribs on a bed of pesto-flavoured foxtail millet

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An annual cookout in a neighbourhood park leaves behind a bottle of home-made masala, good enough to invigorate tricky millets. My Magic masala and Foxtail millet with vegetables

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After 17 years of failure, a kitchen garden emerges in our house, notorious for being a graveyard of plants, thanks to my woman with the black thumb (hopefully, the locusts will stay away).

https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/SQ8IIz7YcQtjnHT7ZNjCnM/The-woman-with-the-black-thumb.html

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When I returned to Delhi after a two-year absence, culture shock quickly kicked in. But there were my friends, the great parks and the joys of learning to add water while sauteeing and leaving it lipta-lipa. Shammy’s mummyji’s ‘saunf’ chicken