Blogger to Wordpress

Filed Under Tech | 27 Comments

Since I spent some time this week on moving this blog from blogger to Wordpress, and I know some of you out there are contemplating a move, thought I will share my thoughts and experiences with you.

First of all, I am not recommending everyone to move to Wordpress, I think blogger has its own advantages, it really is much simpler to use than Wordpress, if you are just starting out. But I wanted to list out my reasons for the move, and to give you some tips if you do decide to move.

Disclaimer: I have been on blogger for about ten months now, and on Wordpress for about two days, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

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Good Bye Blogger, Hello Wordpress!

Filed Under Random Musings | 19 Comments

I’m in the process of moving the blog over to WordPress. The site will be down for a few hours during the weekend. If everything goes well, we will be up and running by Saturday evening.

The URL for the new wordpress site will remain the same http://blog.sigsiv.com, but some permalinks will be broken. RSS feed links will probably need to be updated too.

Thanks for your patience, have a great weekend!

Update

It was much faster than I expected. I’m on wordpress now. If you see anything broken, please let me know.

Update your RSS Feeds to http://blog.sigsiv.com/feed

Lemon Garlic Trout with Sicilian Harvest Salad - A Quick Fix Dinner

Filed Under Greens, Mains, Seafood, Soups and Salads | 32 Comments

I haven’t been cooking much lately. After about three months of social hiatus, there was a lot of catching up to do. When my parents were in town, I spent all my spare time with them. I think that is the least one can do for their parents, especially when they visit only once in a blue moon. Luckily all our friends are very understanding, and we could pick up right where we left off. Since most all of our social interactions are centered around food, be it going out with friends to restaurants, or going to someone’s house for a nice home-cooked treat, there is always food and drinks present. That means less cooking at home these past weeks.

Well, anyway we are almost caught up on the social front, and the cricket season is over too. Congratulations to Siv, whose team won the North West Cricket League championship, second year in a row under his captaincy. I think I’m more thrilled than he is, it is not like I’m a cricket fan, in fact I hate the game, but the last thing I wanted was to deal with a husband mopping around the house. Luckily all is well, and he is in seventh heaven.

The point of all this intro was the fact that I hope our lives get back into some sort of schedule from this week on. To start the new week right, I made another one of our quick fix weekday dinners - an easy breezy salad with a side of protein.

Today’s salad recipe is from Michael Chiarello’s Food Network show Easy Entertaining.  I chose this particular recipe, because the main ingredient in here is also the theme of this month’s AFAM -  Grapes. This salad uses both fresh grapes and raisins. The dried apricots and the raisins adds a rich sweet flavor to the salad, and along with the fresh grapes, the salad was the perfect accompaniment to my spicy pan-fried trout.

The original recipe called for radicchio and baby spinach. I used the pre packed European salad mix that contains radicchio, mache and frisée.   I also omitted the fried rosemary and prosciutto. Refer to the original recipe here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_25831,00.html 

And here is my just slightly modified version.

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Banana Colada

Filed Under Banana, Cocktails, Coconut, Pineapple | 24 Comments

Summer is almost over, but there is no law against having a sunny cocktail on a dark cold evening, right? There is nothing that fills my heart with sunshine like a fresh tropical island cocktail, bringing back some sweet vacation memories of lazing on the beach…

A Pina Colada is normally made with pineapple, coconut cream and rum. Add one more fruit and you get drinks like strawberry colada, banana colada etc. Can you think of a more tropical combination than banana, pineapple and coconut?  A banana colada is not only refreshing, it is quite filling as well.

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Restaurant Review: 94 Stewart

Filed Under American, Downtown, Mediterranian | 9 Comments

One of the after-effects of maintaining a restaurant review blog is that your friends start treating you like an expert in the area, and sometimes call on you to get restaurant recommendations. This is an easy task when you are not part of the guest list, send them to one of your favorite restaurants. But when you are also a member of the dinner party, there is a huge dilemma. Should you recommend a tried and tested restaurant that you know is good, or should you go with one from your wishlist so that you have a subject for yet another post? The first one is the right choice, what a good friend should do, but then what will you write about? 

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Sambal Shrimp

Filed Under Mains, Seafood, Shrimp or Prawn, South East Asia | 29 Comments

This recipe is based on two different Sambal Shrimp recipes I found in two of my cookbooks. One is an Indonesian Tangy Sambal Shrimp from the book Fabulous Asian Homestyle Recipes, and the other one is the Malaysian version Sambal Udang from Savoring Southeast Asia. There were some differences between the two, but I didn’t have all the ingredients for either. So I combined both the recipes, and made some substitutions and additions, and ended up with my own version of the Sambal Shrimp.

Sambal is a term used in Indonesian and Malaysian cuisines to describe a variety of spicy condiments and side dishes used to add flavor to other dishes . It is made out of peppers and is often used to substitute for chilies in recipes. There are different types of sambals available in stores, and one common variety is an Indonesian product called Sambal Oelek (Ulek) that combines chili, vinegar and salt.

Both the original recipes called for making a spice paste with red chilies. But I used Sambal Oelek instead. Since that is an Indonesian condiment, guess my version is an Indonesian Sambal Shrimp.

Other substitutions I made were ginger paste for galangal, and lemon juice for lemon grass (yeah, what a shame, but I didn’t have lemongrass on hand!). I also used a generous amount of curry leaves, not as a substitute for anything, but just because I wanted to. Nevertheless my version turned out quite tasty.  Here is my version.

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Egg Roast Recipe from My Favorite Cookbook

Filed Under Eggs, India - Kerala, Side Dish - Gravy | 49 Comments

Nags of For the Cook in Me blog is hosting a fun event this month - Show Me Your Cookbooks! You don’t even have to cook anything for it, just take a picture of yourself with your favorite cookbook and send it to Nags.

I decided to stay home this Saturday as I’ve been partying pretty hard past three nights. Since there was nothing good on TV and Siv was off to play cricket, I was pretty bored around here. The easiest way to entertain myself was to turn to my obsession, food blogging of course. Since I was in no mood to cook, this event seemed like the perfect time pass for the day.

With nobody in the house to take my picture holding my favorite cookbook - yeah yeah, I know how to use the self timer thingy in the camera, the real reason is I didn’t really want to go through the trouble of making me look presentable to the world right then- I decided to go with just taking a pic of my favorite cookbook sans my beautiful face. Of course Nags had mentioned that “ if you are really shy you can send a pic of your fave cook book, but taken by you, please!” . So, I am going to pretend that I am really shy.

I just counted my cookbooks, and I have 32 totally, at least that’s all I could find… There must be a few hidden in some shelf somewhere! Anyway, I have no idea if that is too much or too less. I have used a few quite extensively, and some of these I have never even looked through all the pages.. Some are just plain old paperbacks with just recipes, no pictures. Some are hardbound, glossy with some beautiful food porn. But out of all these, my favorite is a Kerala cookbook called Flavours of the Spice Coast by Mrs. K.M.Mathew.

Now, Nags also wants me to write, Why I like this book in one sentence.

I like this book because all the dishes in this book taste exactly like the way my mom makes those!

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Restaurant Review: Brasa Belltown

Filed Under Belltown, Mediterranian | 11 Comments

Another favorite neighborhood restaurant of ours is Brasa – the Mediterranean restaurant on third avenue. Frankly, the food is one of the best around! The entrées are slightly pricy ($25-$30), but with Microsoft prime card, it is one entrée free for us. We seldom order out of the dinner menu though, the lounge menu is even more fabulous, the prizes are better, and much more choices (No prime card accepted there though) and we get to share 4-5 dishes, which is how we like to dine normally.  Also, if we get there during the happy hour (5-7 pm daily), the lounge menu is half prize!

This has been a venue for several girls night outs, our impromptu dinner outings and even a new year celebration. Brasa has never disappointed me even once!  The ambience is super classy. The dining room and the lounge area are well separated, and both areas are spacious, we could always find seats at the lounge on walk-ins.

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Carrot Thoran - Shredded Carrots with Coconut Stir Fry

Filed Under India - Kerala, Side Dish - Dry, Vegetarian | 31 Comments

You think if you’ve seen one thoran (a traditional Kerala vegetable stir fry with coconut and spices) recipe, you’ve seen it all, right? Well, that is true to a certain extent. But this one had to be blogged about, since I normally hate carrots. Yep, I hate cooked carrots, I can have them in salads and stuff. But my mom made this delicious carrot stir fry, by shredding the ingredients in the food processor first. I loved it! Okay, most of you must already be shredding carrots in a food processor, but somehow I’ve never thought of it before! So for other ignoramus friends like me, here is the simple carrot thoran recipe.

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Kori Sukka (Mangalorean Dry Coconut Chicken) Sandwich

Filed Under Chicken, India - Other, Mains | 38 Comments

We seldom have elaborate dinners at home on weekdays, unless Siv is in charge of cooking. The guy doesn’t believe in moderation! If he is making chicken biryani, he has to have mutton curry on the side and vice versa. If he is making fish curry, he will need a chilly chicken to go with it, you get the drift! So if I can, I don’t let him cook on weekdays. He does most of his cooking on weekends.

I try to get my cooking done as soon as possible on weekdays, normally I just make a gravy that can be served with bread or rice. When I feel like making a dry dish, we normally fall back to two options to make it a complete meal. First is to just have it with beer (hey, its full of carbs!). But this is typically towards the latter half of the week. Second option is to make a quick side salad, which is the norm for us. But since I had a salad for lunch today, I was in no mood to have it again for dinner, so tonight’s dinner ended up being a sandwich, which turned out to be quite filling and super tasty, and much easier than a salad!

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