It is not yet soup weather here in Seattle, but then again I am not really one of those by-the-season eaters anyway. I can have a nice hearty bowl of soup even when it is 100F outside, provided there is air conditioning inside. This soup was invented out of necessity last week as a quick fix lunch by throwing a bunch of ingredients together from the pantry and the fridge, aren’t all good dishes invented that way? I didn’t have any chicken or vegetable stock in hand, so I used …

This one is a rather boring looking curry, but it was really tasty for a quick fix dish made with this and that from the pantry and refrigerator. I have never really combined chickpeas (garbanzo beans) with eggs before, I wasn’t planning on it this time either. As the chickpeas were simmering in the gravy inspiration struck me and those eggs poached in the spicy coconut gravy was just so delicious.
 
Ingredients

1 can cooked chickpeas (garbanzo beans) washed and drained
2 eggs
1 tbsp oil
1 tbsp …

Aval is the Malayalam name for flattened or beaten rice. Growing up, one of my favorite snacks used to be Aval Nanachathu (which translates to wet aval), which is just flattened rice mixed with grated coconut and jaggery or sugar. It is very easy to make, so it was a frequent tea time snack at my house. But after I left home, I never bothered to make it myself, no idea why!  When I went to India in March, I found brown rice Aval at the store, anything brown rice …

It is May, and can you believe we still have stew weather here? I can’t wait for summer, but I am sure I will be complaining about the heat then. I guess we have the best of both worlds right now, with just a couple of warm sunny days per week, and the rest of it wet and cold. All this rain sure makes us appreciate the sunshine that much more!
This hearty stew would’ve been a great candidate for my Hunger Week collection. Stew meat is really cheap and with …

Third day on the hunger challenge and I am beginning to appreciate the cause more and more with each passing day. We both worked pretty late today and normally after a late night like that, we just get some take-out without thinking twice about it. Obviously that wasn’t an option today, we had to come home and make dinner. I was so worn out that I could’ve just eaten some bread and crashed. But I wanted to do this right; my whole intention for this challenge was to share some …

I am not exaggerating when I say that this is my new favorite dish! I have always liked chickpeas aka garbanzo beans aka Kabuli Chana, but the black chana which we call Kadala in Kerala has always been my favorite. I normally buy canned garbanzo beans only for quick fix dishes and for salads, but recently I came across an interesting recipe called Lemony Chickpea Stir-Fry on 101 Cookbooks. Just reading about the golden, crusty, pan-fried chickpeas had me drooling and made me wonder why I never tried chickpeas this …

I ran into an old friend a couple of weeks ago. We were meeting after quite a long time. After the initial pleasantries were exchanged, she asked me a question that shocked me a bit. Don’t you cook any normal food anymore? I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that, so I asked her to define “normal food”. Her definition was – stuff I can cook for a weekday dinner. According to her, lately I’ve been only posting party dishes.  I didn’t really agree with this analysis, since all …

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 …

If you are a regular visitor here, you’d know I am not big into Vegetarian cooking. Growing up I used to like very few vegetables, my mom used to include at least one vegetable dish into every meal. Some of those I truly hated, but we were supposed to eat everything that was on the table, something about building character! Among those dishes that I disliked were anything with eggplants or snake gourd, sambar, rasam, and most types of dry legumes and daals except for chana daal. Olan is made of black eyed beans, which …