Wanderberry Tales

Time flies by in Dubai - yet another winter is peaking over the horizon. I love winters. If only I could do away with the occasional flu that tends to interrupt the weekend outing plans. We are done with the first flu of the winter which I would like to call the 'change of season flu' that has so become ingrained in our lives for the past three years. Looking forward for a blissful few months that includes a vacation home and not to forget the impending festival season. On that note, we head over to the new recipe on the blog - Fish cutlet. The type of fish you choose is absolutely your choice - the lesser the bones the easier the task of mincing it. Cutlets can make your weekday dinner cooking a little easier. Just prep a batch over the weekend and freeze it! Here goes the recipe -  Ingredients Fish - 1 kg Potato - 2 medium sized Ginger - 1 tbsp grated Green chilli - 4 to 5 finely chopped Onion - 2 medium finely chopped Turmeric powder - 1/2 tsp ...

If you are a malayalee, then you must be quite familiar with the Kerala Banana which is an integral part of a malayalee household. Breakfast, lunch or even snacks, if you love them, you always have a way incorporate it into your food. Raw banana is thinly sliced and fried to make the popular Kerala banana chips( yes, the very same chips you ask your malayalee friend to get when they come back from their vacation). The ripe banana is good eaten as is or if you do not like the taste there are always ways to modify it. Crisp it up by battered deep frying it, make payasam for your sadya, halwa, kaipola , pullisery, unnakkaya and a healthier option of simply boiling it or jazz it up with a little butter and sugar. If you are looking for something quick with minimal ingredients, then this is the recipe for you - a frequent dish at our place be it breakfast or evening snacks. Here you go - Ingredients Banana - 2 Ghee - 2 - 4 tbsp Sugar - 1 tbsp Method Slice the bananas...

I keep saying that every dish has a story behind it and Shibin says every photograph should tell a story. So we definitely have a 'Once upon a time' in this dish and a 'happily ever after' too. Most of us have heard of Barbeque Nation and have atleast been there once to satiate our barbeque cravings.What you probably did not know was this restaurant chain is owned by Indore based Sayyaji Hotel. I was fortunate enough to spend two days here and that is where my love affair with crispy fried sweet corn started. I have tried making this snack couple of times - but never achieved success till about two weeks back. This definitely does not meet BBQ Nation standards but still we loved it this way. Last week, we had a family over for dinner and we spent most of the time playing carroms. The need for a quick snack at the carroms table was what reminded me of this recipe. It turned out crispy as I wanted it to and that led me to making it again the very next day for ...

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...

A small tea shop in front of our college campus was the favorite hangout place during our free hours in college at Brahmavar. This is where we have feasted on the Mangalore Buns as it is popularly called. Do not go by the name Buns! It is nowhere similar to the normal buns baked out of the oven. It is deep fried in oil and usually served as tea time snack along with chutney. It is sweet, hence can be eaten without a chutney also. That is precisely what I did roaming around with a piece in my hand and preparing for our trip to Al Ain Zoo. That is a long awaited trip and we finally did it this weekend Yay! Guess what we were lucky too! Got to see the majestic White Tiger and White Lion in all its glory and majesty. I had packed a few buns for our evening snack time which we gorged on after the visit to the Zoo. I hope you guys too try out this recipe, you could make it a tiffin box recipe for your kid too:) A simple way to use the overripe bananas which you do not feel like eatin...

Beetroot Cutlet makes me quite nostalgic. My earliest memory of this dish is when I made it in Class 9 for a proficiency badge in Guides movement. For those of you who are not familiar with the Scouts and Guides association, it is a movement to develop the young boys and girls as responsible citizens which may not be achieved through civic education alone. You need to cross various stages and tests to be eligible for the Rashtrapati Award. Each of the stages consists of a set of badges that need to be achieved and one among that was a proficiency in cooking for which we were to take to school a dish prepared by us. It was my mother’s suggestion that I try this recipe which she had noted down in her diary sometime back. The examiner being a vegetarian and a foodie loved it and I landed the proficiency badge. The second story dates to my PG days in Bangalore. My room mates had gone home for the weekend and I was left alone in the PG with nothing better to do. I thou...

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...