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Recipe: The Curry Leaf & Raw Mango Cooler (aka “Madras Summer”)

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What does summer look and feel like in your city? Here in Chennai, temperatures have been crossing 40 °C (104 °F) – and we’re bracing for May, usually the hottest month of the year! The streets are at their sunniest and most scorching, but pleasantly lined by flowering trees and stalls selling fruit. A few weeks ago, on a short road trip, water mirages accompanied me all along the highway. As for what the season feels like: sweat, thirst and the longing for a cool breeze and a chilled beverage are our primary sensations at present. Come visit, I say – just not today!

Fortunately, there’s a method to the madness of every season. Traditional wisdom and the science of macrobiotics make the best culinary use of fruits, vegetables and grains that thrive at different times of the year. Here in the subcontinent, if there is one kind of produce that is ubiquitous with the sweltering, sultry days of summer, it’s the mango.

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Recipes

Recipe: The Done-To-Death Chia Pudding… With A Difference

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The dessert du jour is the chia seed pudding – fuss-free, and usually requiring very few ingredients. If you’re like me, you’d have gotten introduced to chia seeds because of your curiosity over the current craze of having them in puddings. The first time I tasted them, they took me back to childhood visits to Bombay and the city’s famous bright-coloured, super-sweet dessert drink known as falooda. They tasted just like the takhmaria (sweet basil) seeds I loved catching between my teeth as I slurped it down… And that’s when I had an inspiration about a very Indian twist on the done-to-death chia seed pudding.

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Musings

A Tale Of Two Cups

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Call it a tale of two cities, or a tale of two cups! Like many who love travelling, I form bonds with now-familiar niches all over the world. And between two such niches, I found a particular connection. A connection that smells like heaven and tastes like perfection… Coffee.

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Recipes

Recipe: The Salad We Call Sundal

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What is the most descriptive collective noun for coconuts? A cluster? A clump? A crowd? None of them quite sufficed for the copious numbers I found myself with! With five thriving trees in my garden, dangerously dropping their heavy drupes at any given moment, I responded to this abundance in the best way I know how: by bringing them into my kitchen.

So I hired a nimble man to climb up the trees to cut most of the coconuts down, and then we segregated them into tender ones, which yielded nutritious coconut water, and ripe ones with flesh that could be shaved. One of my coconut trees is also the site of an experiment of mine. I have a little basket on a lovely pulley system which takes pieces of papaya up to a nice altitude for the parrots that often flit about. It took a while to convince them that this odd contraption was actually a friendly gesture, but as with people and animals both – at the end of the day, appetite always wins!

restore shaved coconut

The shaved coconuts found themselves in many of my recipes: from coconut rose cupcakes (which you can order here if you’re in Chennai) to sweet-savoury kachoris (which you can make in your own kitchen, with my recipe here) and more. And in the late afternoons, those pristine white shavings of coconut were perfect for a local lentil dish: sundal.

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Musings

Muesli & The Madras Floods

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This time, last year, the city I live in was devastated by the worst floods it had seen in over a hundred years. An unusually heavy northeast monsoon unleashed its might on Madras, also known as Chennai, as well as the coastal regions of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Pondicherry. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, at least 500 lives were lost, and damages ran into billions of rupees.

While my city was being submerged, I was away in Massachusetts at the Kushi Institute, deeply engaged in the study of Macrobiotics. One morning, I received a phone call from my husband back home, who told me that the seasonal weather was something much more this year. Water was fast rising in our home, and he was calling from our terrace. Most homes in India have flat rooftops, where laundry is dried, potted plants may be grown, and parties are held under the moonlight. These terraces saved many people in the South Indian floods.

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