Wanderberry Tales

Roast chicken has always found its way into our Christmas eve dinner menu. What better an accompaniment than beautifully roasted potatoes. Some things are hard to do away with and I am sure this year's menu is no different. Rather, we would want it to remain the same - a reminder of our first Christmas together when we attempted baking a chicken that was marinated and frozen with potatoes layered and spent hours trying to get it to cook at varied temperatures messing up the oven and kitchen in the process. Finally we had our dinner at 12:30 am after giving up on our oven attempt and frying the chicken and potato on the stove top. If everything were to be be perfect then we would have hardly remembered our first Christmas together. The imperfections set our traditions! Here is a look into the roast potatoes recipe. I chose the Indian potatoes and it worked well for me. Ingredients  Potato - 500 gms Rosemary - 1 tbsp Garlic - 6 cloves Garlic Powder Olive ...

This blog was born out of sheer boredom of relocating to a new country combined with an interest to cook.  We have come a long way since then and we just turned 3 this week! This time, we have a simple no bake chocolate tart recipe for you. Desserts are a rarity in my house but this one has made its way into our menu various times because its not complicated, uses easily available ingredients and takes very little time to make. Here you go to the recipe - Ingredients  For the tart base Marie biscuits - 40 no.s Butter - 150 gms For the chocolate filling  Semi sweet chocolate chips - 300 gms Whipping cream - 250 ml Corn starch - 1 tsp For Raspberry topping Raspberry- 1 pack  Mint Leaf - a few Method Grease a tart pan and keep aside. Powder the marie biscuits coarsely in a food processor Add butter and let it combine such that the butter soaks the biscuit crumbs and holds it together lightly. Tip this into the ...

Christmas waves a magic wand over this world,  and behold,  everything is softer and more beautiful.                                                                -Norman Vincent Peale Dump it all together - there you have a dessert on your table! Cranberry sauce, topped with cake mix and butter drizzled on top - that is the name of the dish deconstructed for you! This is my first guest post and I am happy I got to do it with thebigsweettooth  . Rafeeda of The Big Sweet Tooth is one of first bloggers I got introduced to through blogging. Her blog is a repository of recipes - a go to website for all your recipe needs. I am so glad I could add to her repository. Head over to her blog to check out my recipe for Cranberry Cobbler Dump Cake .

It is the best time of the year again. I may be a little too early.  Nevertheless,the weather is too tempting and the carols playing are just so joyful that I cannot let it go unnoticed. That is how I came to bake today after a long day at work. The aroma from the hot oven is tickling palates around here. Shibin ( that is my husband) and I love Christmas. Perhaps that is what drew us close - our love for Christmas. I remember how endlessly we could chat about Christmas and the holiday season earnestly before we were married. This is our second Christmas together and we vow to make this Christmas even more beautiful than our first one together. Carols to wake us up in the morning and Christmas movies that make our evenings! I would be doing a grave injustice, if I forget to mention CBN radio - an American radio station that plays carols round the year. That is what is playing right now, giving me the Christmas spirit. For those who love Christmas as much as I do, google up CBN ...

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...

The English version of our very own Indian Dosa is what I would want to call it -Crepes. A good way to begin your day, an easy brunch for those lazy days, an evening snack or even a relishing dinner - the way you like with the filling of your choice.  We chose to have it as our Saturday Brunch! The first time I heard of crepes..hmm..Of course from my husband!! Heard, may the wrong word. He 'made' it for me on our second Valentines day together!! What fascinates me about crepes is the choice of filling you possibly can have. While we chose Jam, you may opt for anything from Honey to Nutella if you want it sweet. As a savory dish, you can choose any fillings of veggies or meat and roll it up. Also, this could turn into a perfect snack for your kids tiffin box:) Get innovative with crepes - roll it up and slice it or stack it and serve with fresh fruits and glimmer of honey. I am sure kids and adults will enjoy every bite of it. So here we go -  I...

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...

Appam has been my all time favorite. It's appam for Birthday, Christmas, Easter, Anniversary and any occasion you think of. Appam, according to me goes best with stew and hence set out to explore the best and easiest way to make stew. I have come across various recipes for fish molly but I found my mothers recipe the easiest and the best . I tried out this recipe on my husband - the guinea pig of all my experiments. He seemed to pretty much like it and not to lie - I loved it too. So without much delay I decided to put it up here. This post is for my dearest Mamma from whom I learnt the tricks and trades of cooking. Let me not forget to thank my hubby who willingly tastes all that I cook. Ingredients For Marination King Fish - 1 kg sliced ( Any fish of your choice but I personally feel it tastes the best with King Fish) Pepper powder - 1 teaspoon Salt as per taste For Curry Onion - 3 medium sized thickly sliced lengthwise Ginger - 2 tsp finely cho...

My inspiration for blogging is a college friend of mine - Anupa. We first started blogging when we were done with our MBA and were awaiting campus placements. A while after we got job, Anupa moved to USA and restarted blogging. Well, this time it was all about cooking and I was quite impressed with her work. I guess I took the inspiration from her again and started posting recipes here. Few days back, I was just going through her blog - palaharam.blogspot.in and I came across this recipe of lettuce wraps. I had quite a bit of lettuce in the fridge and the pictures of the wraps Anupa put in looked lovely. Well, I decided to have my own take of the recipe. Let us take a look at what goes into the recipe - Ingredients Fresh Lettuce - cleaned and dried Chicken - 1/4 kg diced into small pieces Onion - 1 big diced Ginger - 1 teaspoon minced Garlic - 1 teaspoon minced Soya sauce Tomato sauce Roasted Peanuts - 3 tablespoons Spring Onion - 1/4 cup Chopped Coria...