Wanderberry Tales

Shibin's office shifted about a year back. Earlier, he had to invariably walk through a supermarket twice a day. ( shortcut, instead of having to walk two more blocks and go all the way around the building). Twice a day includes one crawling and the other running - crawling to the office ( everyone crawls in the morning especially during the beginning of the week) and running out of it in the evenings (It is my belief that he ran to meet me :P). In the process, it is hard to ignore those items that stare at you from the shelves beckoning you to pick them or those that scream out offers  or the ones that flatter you with the lighting .  So atleast once a week, he came home with a treat to my delight. I am still a kid at heart, such treats fascinate me . Anyways with the shifting of his office to a core business area , there were no more supermarkets to pass through and there went my treats. He comes home empty handed these days! If you are wondering why I chose to tell ...

I am relatively a beginner in bread baking and this is probably the only bread I have baked more than the fingers on my hand! I tasted focaccia only when I came to Dubai and that was the first time I even heard of it. Back in India, I knew 4 types of bread - white bread, brown bread, multigrain bread and fruit bread - that was my extent of bread knowledge.  I would not label bread baking as difficult - it is only time consuming - so if you have the time in hand - Foccacia is definitely worth a try. Focaccia is an Italian bread with a generous amount of olive oil - topped with herbs, olives, onions, sun-dried tomatoes or any other vegetables that goes along. Focaccia, I realised recntly makes a good sandwich bread too! I have tried topping with olives , tomato and onions but the best for me was the shallots. It is easier to chop them into cute little rounds - it caramelizes well and the looks quite pretty on the bread too. I read an article today by Nandita Iyer from the Saff...

And it is a year already! This blog was born with little or no idea how long it would sustain but here we are - Our first milestone! And we intend to attain many more. It has been a tremendous learning experience all along. We confess that we are not the experts, we experiment, trial and errors along the way and happy successes too. We have presented our successes to you and learnt from our failures to better the food we present to you in every way. My gratitude to all my family, friends and everyone of you for the encouragement through your constant likes and comments! Cheers to one year of happiness through food blogging! Lemon Cake with Honey Lemon Drizzle - that is our latest fad. Here is the recipe for you - Ingredients For the cake -  All Purpose Flour - 2 cups Sugar - 1 cup Vegetable Oil - 1 cup Egg - 3 no.s Vanilla essence - 1 tsp Baking powder - 1 tsp Lemon zest - 2 lemons Lemon juice - 2 lemons salt - 1/4 tsp For the drizzle -  Ho...

It is Ramadan season. Festive display of dates and sweets made of dates fills the supermarkets in Dubai. So why not something made from dates for Iftar this season. This is my first attempt at making dates loaf and it was a colleague who suggested to add in the walnuts as well for the crunch.  Dates by itself is quite sweet and I wanted to make sure that the loaf does not become extra sweet by regulating the sugar content. Again, like my most recipes it is simple and quick. Here you are - Ingredients Dates - 3/4 cup de-seeded and chopped Milk - 3/4 cup All purpose flour - 1 and 1/2 cup Sugar - 4 tbsp Egg - 2 no.s Cinnamon powder - 1 tsp Baking powder - 1 tsp Salt - 1/2 tsp Vanilla essence - 1 tsp Walnuts - 1/2 cup Vegetable Oil - 1/2 cup  Honey - 2 tbsp Method Heat the milk with the chopped dates on medium flame for 5 minutes and let it rest. Sieve together the flour, baking powder,cinnamon powder, salt and keep aside. Break ope...

Jam roll always reminds me of the summer vacations while we were still at school -a long two month hiatus in Kerala along with my cousins. There was a routine established for the four of us and the most important of it all being the 5 pm wait on our balcony for my aunt to get back from work - for pouncing on the goodies in her bag. She never failed us.  Jam Roll was my favorite, it always intrigued me. Sometimes I would just bite into it hungrily and sometimes I took the time to unroll it lick away the delicious mixed fruit jam and then dig on the cake. The 'little me' never would have imagined that she would actually be making jam roll one day. The idea of trying out something like this popped up when we brought orange marmalade. I was tasting it for the very first time and it did not fascinate me much. I had a bottle full of it and did not absolutely want it to rot away. That is when my hubby told me why not try a Swiss roll? I was clueless how this was done. Ye...

It all started for Christmas in 2012 when a colleague gave me a cake recipe. The very same day I purchased all the ingredients and made my very first cake. I did not have an oven and resorted to baking the cake in a cooker. ( you need to be careful, you don't use water and gasket and the cooker gets mighty hot). Since then, I have tried a lot of cakes in the cooker. It did turn out tasty but often a little too hard with the bottom and the edges burnt, I have also tried the traditional method of baking where the cake tray is inserted into a vessel with hot sand generally kept over the traditional chullah. The vessel is then covered with a lid with burning coal on top as well so that the cake gets evenly baked. I was too scared to handle that and it was my mother who was a master in that and me just a by stander. It was only post marriage in 2014 that I learnt to use an oven to bake cakes. I had no idea about the right temperature nor the timings .After a few burnt and also...