Onam sadya recipes – Documenting heirlooms

Priti eating her sadya. Clockwise from top left – Cabbage Thoran, Sambar on rice, Avial, Tender mango pickle, Ghee on gunpowder chutney, Ginger and jaggery coated banana chips, banana chips, Theeyal, Inji curry, Kalan, Olan, Beetroot Pachchadi, Mallu pappadam

Each year, when Onam arrives we (I along with Meryl and now Sheryl since she has been here in Mumbai) talk endlessly about all the food we will eat and then when the day arrives, lazily lament the loss of good old home cooking, deride ourselves for not having planned better, make half hearted attempts to find a sadya in Mumbai, scramble into a set sari or atleast salwar kameez, play act at being mallu girls with mullapoo in their hair, try to haul ourselves to a sadya anywhere nearabouts that has a table free, inevitably feel disappointed at what (if we do) we manage to eat and spend much of the day in one long session of reminiscing good old days when we would just go to our ancestral home with our parents and stuff our faces till we could just lie back like beached whales. Yep, we are rather proactive like that.

Brown Butter Hazelnut Cake – The Changeling

This is about a hazelnut cake that lead the life of a the Bollywood film, Highway. The concept started out distinctly exciting, baked into a bit of a disappointment before then surprisingly redeeming itself at the end. What a deceptive little fellow, this.

Eating in Penang. Warning: Food porn ahead

 

I love this image for what it captures of my memory of the food streets in Georgetown. The fresh food being cooked, tourists and locals mingling to sample the local fare or just get their evening meal and all that simmering action. I clicked this picture in the minute I could tear myself away from hogging with a couple of local friends.

This is a post on a bingeing trip in Penang, from over a year ago.  By the time I settled in, I was eating everything I could lay my hands on. Typical to me in my moments of greed, I didn’t often get around to doing the sensible thing and writing down the names of what I was eating even though I asked for them, discussed techniques and ingredients and sometimes lingered around just to watch the fascinating action. I do however remember so much of the atmosphere, the flavours, the educational experience that eating Penang was. So here’s the post I wrote but never did publish..  Writing this and wading through the hundreds of other pics of Penang that I clicked, has left me with a craving for unfamiliar, exciting food. A longing for the inimitable experience of being a in a truly unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar flavours, smells, sounds and sights. I’m going to have to travel soon, I can see.