My blogger buddy Cynthia (who coincidentally celebrated her birthday yesterday. Happy Birthday Cyn… ) tagged me for a meme to write seven random facts about me. So here you go…

As a kid, I used to be (still am to a certain extent) a big germaphobe and would refuse to drink/eat anything from restaurants. That lasted till I went to college, hostel food made me a convert. Yeah, and now I live on restaurant food.
I was as thin as a person could get till I was about 21. Then I came …

Isn’t it great when you set out to make one dish and it gets messed up, but you realize that your mess can be called something else? That is what happened to me last night. I intended to make a sorbet, but it never quite became one, the texture was too coarse, and looked very much like granita. I have never made a granita before, so I wasn’t really sure if I can call my creation by the name. An online search brought up the following in WikiPedia.
Granita (in Italian also granita …

Growing up, all the breakfast dishes at my house fell into one category - Spicy! Dosa + chutney, idli + sambar, puttu + kadala, appam + egg curry, kappa + fish curry, poori + chicken curry, the list goes on…  Don’t think I grew up in a weird family, these are the typical breakfast dishes of a Malayali.
But after moving to US, breakfast- if it ever happens- is normally cereal or yogurt. My body doesn’t even need breakfast anymore, the two cups of coffee I have in the morning can normally …

I can’t resist picking up some of fresh berries on my market runs in summer. When I see the colorful berries I get so many recipe ideas- desserts, sauces, salads etc. I pick up a box or two while daydreaming how beautiful the dishes are going to turn out, but I get too lazy and end up just eating those as such, or adding those to the morning cereal, which is not a bad thing, just that I don’t get any pictures out of those. 
Another way to make sure that the …

It’s been a few days since my last post. My parents finally arrived last weekend, so as you can imagine I’ve been busy with the onboarding process. Its been almost five years since their last visit, also we weren’t living in the city last time they were around, so it took a bit of orientation time. Even though we have less space now, it is less boring for them now that they have places to go to when Siv and I are at work. Today they walked down to Pike Place Market …

Has this ever happened to you? You find this interesting recipe in a cookbook. You check the fridge and pantry and see that most of the ingredients are there. You put your chef’s hat on and get cooking, adding your own special touches to the recipe. The dish turns out to be a masterpiece, tastes wonderful, looks great! You are so hungry you could faint, but you feel it is your duty to share this gem with the world! So you transfer the food into a serving dish, click some pictures in a …

Tomorrow is our Ninth wedding anniversary. We’ve known each other for eleven years now!
Do you know the best part about getting married really young? You grow up with each other, you mature into adulthood with each other. You know every small thing about each other… You can sense what each other is thinking without having to utter a single word!
Now, do You know the worst part about getting married really young ? You know every small thing about each other… You can sense what each other is thinking without having …

After I wrote about Mistral in my Fave Five Seattle Restaurants post, I’ve been craving Mistral food. So for an early wedding anniversary celebration, instead of going to Herbfarm as planned, we headed over to Mistral to check if the food is as good as we remembered. We had it right, the food was as good or even better! Haute cuisine at its best.
During dinner, we did a cost-to-value analysis of Mistral versus some of our other favorite restaurants in town. The seven course chef’s tasting menu at Mistral costs $75 per person. So …

Do you think the name is a little too long? I actually wanted to call this post Cardamom infused Jackfruit Yogurt Panna Cotta with Blueberry Coulis and Jackfruit Puree… but it looked just a tad too long. I like naming my posts with the names of the major ingredients, since that improves the search engine visibility. Yes, it is fun to come up with clever names for a dish, I could’ve called this dish Jackotta, but until I get my own cooking show and make Jackotta a household name, nobody is going to type in Jackotta …