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Recipe: Lavender Shrikhand – A Little Lavender & A Lot Of Love

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Being born and brought up in Chennai into a traditional Gujarati home has given me a more expansive way of thinking, which is what opens one’s mind to explore. There are times when I think in Tamil while I’m cooking Gujarati food! Even as the world becomes a smaller place, I love keeping local culinary customs alive – but every once in a while, my imagination will take me on an adventure in the kitchen. So it was while making shrikhand one day, a sweetened Gujarati dish made of hung curd. I’d played with various Indian flavours for shrikhand before, including mango and an almond-saffron blend. But I had just met with a friend, Siddharth Murthy, who has an organic lavender farm outside Melbourne in Australia, and he had gifted me one of my favourite foreign ingredients. Next to rose, lavender is the scent I enjoy adding most to my cakes. I wondered: how would my family like to end a meal on lavender shrikhand?

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Recipe: Little Millet Rice With Green Beans Poriyal

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Having lived in Tamil Nadu my whole life, the traditional local cuisine has always been a part of me. Millets were a staple in ancient times, replaced more recently by rice and wheat. Unlike what most contemporary nutritionists believe, Macrobiotics suggests that rice, in moderation, does not have negative effects on health. Adding millets into one’s diet, as a healthy alternative or addition to rice, can boost the health quotient without compromising on taste. More importantly, millets are gluten-free, offering a great solution for those who are gluten intolerant.

Nowadays, the health-conscious hark on about quinoa, which is a great superfood –  however, it is not native to India. They tend to ignore the affordable local millets, which offer the same (if not a greater) amount of nutrition and could themselves be superfoods!

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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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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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Recipe: A Vegan Burger That Will Make You Go “Wow!”

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When most people hear the word “burger”, they think of an oily, low-nutrition meal full of sauces and heavy meat, polished off with unhealthy sodas and greasy fries! But what if I told you that I can share with you how I make something that looks like the real thing, tastes just as (or more!) delicious, and doesn’t do anything but nourish your body and soul?

My vegan bean burger is an improvisation on a dish that one of my teachers at the Kushi Institute, Chris Jenkin, used to make for us for lunch sometimes, in a strictly macrobiotic style using East Asian ingredients. I love innovating in the kitchen, discovering ways to turn a dish around and make it vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and so on. I also consider how to source ingredients that are seasonal and readily available. Call it Macrobiotics meets Madras! Here’s a perfect example of how I fine-tuned a recipe so that it makes the best sense for climactic and cultural conditions.

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