Let me be frank here. I wanted to make a totally new curry for this Blogging Marathon #88 – Dazzling Dal series, so that I could leave my drafts untouched. I even made cholar dal once, but it didn’t turn out well, so I skipped clicking it. Then something happened, that whole thought of wanting to cook and click a totally new dish, really puts me off these days. If you see my camera now, my clicks are so wide spread. I cook new dishes and click them only if I am really in a mood for it. Otherwise, I just leave it at that. I feel glad that my drafts are feeding my blog without me having to worry about the next dish to post. During those times, I used to wonder why am I in a hurry to cook and click, and now I clearly understand the…
Beef Burger
How’s Ramadan going for all of you? This time, I have consciously taken the effort to post less on the blog. Doesn’t mean I will keep it empty, you will still see posts rolling on, but I clearly don’t want to be in a rat race to be posting what is called as “Ramadan specials”. I am not a person who advocates thoughtless eating during this month, whether it is now when I am taking care of myself, or before when I was negligent of myself. I never liked the concept of eating fried food and heavy meals during this month. When the gyst of the month is to practice restraint and patience, how can we go overboard with our food especially? Somehow that thought defeats my logic. I know many may disagree, but when we think deep, we will understand it. After all, hasn’t our beloved Prophet…
Swedish Meat Balls
As soon as I saw “Scandinavian Cuisine” for the Blogging Marathon #86, the first thing my head said is “Swedish Meat Balls”. Anybody who has access to an IKEA nearby will agree with me. The girls and I go for dinner there at least once a month. It’s not that the food matches our taste buds, but we really love the feel of the place. We sit on the high chairs, while I eat and sip my coffee looking into the merchandise, the girls will be busy chit-chatting and eating from each other’s plate. Most of the time, the menu is fixed, Rasha has the meat balls with rice and Azza has the kid’s meal nuggets. I keep moving around with whichever option is available, but if I am undecided, then I also go for the meat balls since it is cheap and filling too. I always have a…
Murgir Khorma ~ Bangladeshi Chicken Korma
One tenth to the next tenth just flies, I feel. 😀 I feel like I posted my last MFB post yesterday… hehe… This month, the theme was cooking from a country, and the chosen country was Bangladesh, which happens to be the third largest Muslim country in case of percentage. There is a lot of similarity between the food from this country and West Bengal, which is a state in India that shares its borders with Bangladesh. I kept searching up and down, as I wanted to make sure I cook up something easy and do not miss the challenge at all. A little peak into history and we will know that Bangladesh once belonged to the Mughal dynasty. It was a part of the India when the Britishers ruled it and then went to Pakistan when the declaration of independence was made in August 1947, when the…
Kukul Mas Curry ~ Sri Lankan Chicken Curry
When the themes for the Blogging Marathon #84 were declared, I didn’t think twice about the second theme to choose. It had to be “Sinhalese Cuisine”. There was a little confusion when I started with it. We know Sri Lanka as a country, but a little digging indicated that Sinhalese are the largest portion of people in Sri Lanka, and they are Buddhist. Their food reigns majority in the country. There are then the Tamils and the Muslims who have slightly varied ways of cooking. Sounds similar to how it is in Kerala too! So having cleared up the confusion of what cuisine I can look for, I ended up getting so confused with what I should be trying. Somehow the first to catch my attention was their chicken curry and I had to make it. Though the curry feels so much like our style, it is different in…
Meat Olive Pita Pizza
The tenth of the month is always exciting for me. I love to participate in the Muslim Food Blogger Challenge as much as I can. True, I am the one who is moderating it, but sometimes planning and cooking does get a little tough in between all things that are happening! Alhamdulillah, till now I have been able to manage and hope to keep it going… This month, the theme was “Cooking with Olives”. Olives, known as Zaitoon, is one of the fruits mentioned in the Quran. Here are some articles you could read to educate yourself – here, here and here. I have an olive loving family. A big pack of olives can disappear off my counter-top within an hour of opening. Even though I had finalized in my mind what to cook for this challenge, my main task was to hide some quantity required to make…
Light Meatball Soup
The last post of the year is the toughest to write. It is like racking your brain to go ahead 365 days and think how the whole year fared for you – in all aspects. Life is a multifaceted drama that gets hit from all sides, so thinking from one angle doesn’t really give a full picture of how the whole year looked like. As I think about the year, all I can think about is: We as a family got older by a year, whether by age or by togetherness…. hehe… I took a tiny step of incorporating one hour of activity into my weekday schedule, which was broken during Ramadan, my vacation in August and now… but InShaAllah, hoping to keep it on continuity in the coming year and the years that follow InShaAllah… We hoped that the year would be better, but that was not…
Herb Crusted Baked Chicken
Some recipes happen to us in very interesting ways. This one happened on a metro journey. Last year, for a few months, I used to take the metro to office after parking my vehicle at the first station close to my house. Later, when we got parking within our office building – such a relief, Alhamdulillah! – the metro trips stopped. There is a weekly newspaper that appears at the stations every Sunday and I would faithfully pick up one copy for my browsing. There would be nothing much to read as such, but it would have some pretty pictures, little titibits and at times, easy recipes too! This baked chicken is what I discovered in that magazine and got cooking as a part of a Friday lunch as side to some corn peas pulao. The recipe comes together really easy. There is no marination required. The washed…
Thari Choru/ Thari Biriyani ~ Malabar Semolina Biriyani
Hangover is for real, isn’t it? We had a long weekend last week for the Milad-un-Nabi plus Martyr’s Day plus National Day, all clubbed together with the weekend, and once that finished, then the next sadness is that it will take a while to get another long weekend like that. We as human beings are never satisfied with our condition, right? 😀 So without cribbing too much, I guess I get straight onto the recipe for today. Have you ever heard of a dish called “Thari Biriyani”? A biriyani with no rice at all, it is basically a jazzed up version of an upma! I am on a lot of food groups on FB where I can’t promote my blog as such but still stay on since it is a source of constant learning of so many new dishes, traditional and otherwise, that my saved drafts are overflowing…
Baked Rice Casserole
For the Bake-a-thon, I wanted to make sure that I don’t have only sweet bakes being posted. So my eyes fell on this delicious baked rice casserole I had made and clicked sometime back. Usually baked casseroles always involve pasta, like this tuna one and sausage one. As this involves rice instead of pasta but cooked in almost the same style, I had to make it. This recipe was part of a cook-along hosted in a lovely FB group that I am a part of, not only that the recipe was shared by someone who is a good friend too, Nuzha. The other recipe I had posted on the blog after learning from this lovely segment was this jiffy pasta. Anyway, coming back to this dish, it involves a little bit of work, since there is some cooking involved of the layers involved. But the recipe was too…
Chutney Chicken
Sometimes I feel that I can go any length to prove that I am a lazy cook. Everybody asks me, how I manage to cook. I must tell you – there are many many days that I really don’t cook, or just do it to survive because eating out all the time is not an option! Before I started blogging, my favorite pass-time was gawking at food blogs. At that time, the craze of cooking was just catching up. I used to go through, save a lot of them up, print them and also wonder how come these bloggers are all thin when they are eating such heavy stuff! 😀 Now that I am a blogger myself and get asked the same question by others, I can’t help but smile. First of all, I don’t make blog-worthy stuff everyday. Most of these posts you are seeing are all what…
Saucy Fish
Fish is something I love to eat, though I am not able to pull it into my diet as much as I would love to. 🙁 The kids are not really fond of fish and neither is HD. Moreover, for them, fish is more of any afternoon affair than dinner. So if I cook at night, then they frown. I don’t understand this mentality. Actually, I suffer from it too. We are fixated with a few thoughts and norms since childhood that we don’t feel like accepting any change, for example, eating upma at night. One day, I came home, pushed my bags and told HD, “Come, let’s make upma and fish fry for dinner.” He gave me a big stare, and asked, “What??? Anybody eats upma for dinner?” I just retorted, “It’s food, no?” 😀 Somehow even the girls gave a very odd look, but we still ended…