Cooking is my first passion, passed on from my mom who was a great cook. Dad also cooked, once in a while but he was more an enthusiastic eater. We were a family of 5 people with my 2 siblings.
Mom though she worked, went out of the way to keep us all satisfied when it came to food. Like all Indian moms, she never let us ‘strain’ ourselves by cooking until we finished our studies.
She came from a small rural background and though she knew only the routine South Indian fare, she learned quite a lot from colleagues and friends. She is my greatest inspiration when it comes to cooking and caring for the family.
As I was born in a Malayalee family in the South Indian state of Tamilnadu, our routine cooking revolved around both Malayalee and Tamil traditions. Rice is the staple here and most of the stuff is pretty healthy. A lot of country vegetables, varieties of greens, medicinal herbs are used in cooking.
In fact, we have a lot of grandma’s medications passed on through the generations in every family for common ailments. Our everyday cooking does not use dry yeast, baking soda, or baking powder, though for fermentation we do rely on wild yeast. Even today in the countrysides our traditional cooking is held intact.
When I was browsing for the healthiest cuisine in the world, I came across the cuisines of Chad and West Africa. It was a pleasant surprise to know about the millet balls that they consumed which were considered the healthiest in their cuisine.
Our people have been consuming millet balls from time immemorial. There is so much to the cuisine of this part of India that the world needs to know.
Coming back to cooking, I have always been interested in trying out new varieties of food. That has led me to collect a huge number of cookery books and cuttings from popular magazines.
I also have this habit of collecting menu cards from the restaurants we visit, much to the chagrin of my family 😀 , so that I can look up and try those dishes.
My most valuable possession is my old diary in which I have scribbled up recipes, that I try out with a lot of revision entries for each recipe. Most of the time I never had a keeper recipe, coz I kept re-doing, trying to reduce the unhealthy ingredients to the minimum quantity possible.
I never use food colors in any of my preparations. When it comes to looking up food, I have the patience of the entire world put together. I read a lot of recipes, go through all the comments and then finally devise my own recipe.
In this cooking recipe index page, I have dealt with all the cooking that I have done to date, with detailed explanations and step-by-step pictures. Though most of my cooking revolves around South India, I also deal with the healthy and popular recipes from the rest of India as well as the world’s cuisines.
For recipes related to baking look up my baking recipe index.
The gas stove, induction stove, wet grinder, mixer, and pressure cooker are my non-living mates, making life a lot easier. Thanks to the inventors 🙂 .
Get going!!!! Click on the images below to access the recipes.
Recipe Index
More to come…..
