A Plate of Good Food

My adventures in the kitchen and other things

What do you do with leftover apples?

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Make apple turnovers of course! I’d some apples leftover from an attempt at making apple pancakes one weekend. On my next trip to the supermarket, I picked up a roll of ready made puff pastry with the intention of using it with the apples for a quick and tasty treat.

While browsing through food sites and blogs looking for a simple apple based recipe using puff pastry, I came across Molly Wizenberg’s ‘Chausson aux pommes’ or French apple turnovers recipe on the ‘Bon Appetit’ magazine website. I found the recipe very simple and easy to follow. In fact, I don’t think I even need to look at the printout the next time round.

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Quick-Fix Pasta

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Every evening, there’s one question that looms large over me – what do I do for lunch tomorrow? My workplace does not offer free lunches unlike some other companies where people are ‘feeling lucky’ all the time or are busy networking socially 😉 So I’m left to my own devices to create something easy and edible for my lunchbox. I do sometimes carry leftovers from the evening’s dinner the next day.  The other ways I survive during the week? Get some easy to cook veggies, prepared canned lentils, etc from the supermarket and make something that lasts the next 2-3 days. Use leftover ingredients from the fridge to rustle up a quick lunch for the next day. Buy a salad/sandwich.

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Rhubarb Crumble Tart

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Lovely ruby coloured rhubarb has been making it’s appearance again. This is one fruit/vegetable (which one is it?) I have never tried cooking with. I’ve never even seen anything quite like it in Indian food markets, maybe it does not or cannot grow in tropical climates? Not sure.

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Delicious Kerala Style Lamb Curry

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Indian food is as diverse as its culture, regions and people. Each region has its own distinct cuisine that may be similar in some aspects and at the same time, completely different from each other. The cuisine of Kerala where my family is originally from relies heavily on seafood, vegetables and coconut. Given the large Christian minority in the state, meat also forms an important part of our food culture more so than any other state in India.

Though I’ve learned the basics of South Indian cooking from my mother who’s an excellent cook, I’ve been looking for ways to expand my repertoire of Indian recipes. I am now pretty comfortable with cooking up a few North Indian dishes as well thanks to my North Indian friends and excellent online resources.

In my quest for new Indian recipes, I chanced upon an Indian cookbook by Atul Kochhar titled, ‘Simple Indian: The Fresh Tastes of India’s New Cuisine’. It’s a collection of recipes from different parts of India and gives a refreshing insight into flavours from various regions of the country. A welcome change from the usual ‘rogan josh’, ‘butter chicken’ type recipes 😉 So far, I’ve tried a few recipes from this book and all have turned out really delicious. The only issue I had with one or two of them was with some of the instructions not being clear enough, especially, with things like the time required to cook something or whether the pan should be left covered or uncovered while cooking, etc. You’ll see what I mean when you read the method for the lamb curry.

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Dutch Spiced Loaf

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Baking has always intrigued me and ovens were always mysterious electrical appliances never to be played with. The only oven I was ever familiar with while growing up was an old fashioned contraption my mom used to bake an occasional cake. Once that broke down, that was the end of her baking experiments. Unfortunately, my father in spite of being a food lover,  had no interest whatsoever in freshly baked goods simply because baking was not really part of our food culture. This meant that the poor oven was never repaired or replaced and we never had a home baked cake ever after that.

Years later, here I am in Ireland and in the process of adapting to Western ways of life, I’ve slowly and surely grown confident of using the oven on a regular basis. To keep this confidence up, I felt the need to bake something, a loaf of bread, a cake, something that would give me a smug sense of satisfaction. That’s how I decided to try a recipe from Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra’s gorgeous book, ‘Warm Bread and Honey Cake’. It’s a wonderful collection of baking related recipes from different parts of the world and brings exotic flavours and their stories from around the globe straight into your kitchen.

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