This week of solo parenting is still following its course, and is of course tiring me up. And because things shall always be complicated this had to be the week with only three days of regular school. Thursday was a holiday, and because I knew what was coming I planned yet another easy to pull lunch : idli with tomato chutney.



I know, I know! Idlis are a breakfast food, but they do a great lunch too, and my daughter loves them, which means one less meal time battle to deal with. Now, tomato chutney, you might not have seen that one served with idlis much, because traditionally idlis are eaten with sambar ( which I really don't like much) and coconut chutney (which I love but gets a bit boring after a while). Last year I saw a recipe for "cup idli" and various chutneys to pipe on them in Goodfood India. Basically a twist on the good old South Indian steamed bun breakfast, and while I tried the stuffed cup idli (batter poured into silicon cupcake moulds before steaming), they really didn't exited me as much as their tomato chutney. I tweaked their recipe a little adding more chana dal and giving the grated coconut a miss, and of course added more curry leaves because I love them. The recipe is easy, quick, tasty and all you really need before launching into it is a mixie (blender grinder if you are not in India). This is one of these recipe I had to share and had been thinking about doing so for a while now, never found the time to take pictures, so here it goes :

You will need : two handful of Chana dal (split gram lentils), 2 medium tomatoes, one small onion, a teaspoon of turmeric, half a teaspoon of red chili powder, a teaspoon of salt, a generous handful of curry leaves, and 2 teaspoon of mustard seeds.

In a pan dry roast the chana dal while you are roughly chopping the onion and tomatoes...I insist on rough chopping, you don't need to complicate it, the thing will end up being blitzed in a blender in the end, save your energy and time.

Once the chana dal is roasted remove and set aside, add oil to the pan and throw in the onions, when the start turning translucent add the dal back to the pan and quickly mix and stir fry for a minute.

Then add the tomatoes, salt, turmeric and chili powder and mix, let it cook storing occasionally for about 2 minutes or until the tomatoes start to be slightly mushy but not overlooked.

Transfer the entire content of your pan to a blender and blitz until you have a nice smooth paste. Pour the paste in a serving bowl and heat a little oil in the pan again, throw in the mustard seeds, when they crackle add the curry leaves, stir quickly for a few seconds, and pour the oil and leaves on the chutney, mix well and serve.



It taste better warm, and you can add coriander leaves if you wish at this point, yesterday I didn't have any left so I didn't, but I often do, because...well...you know...I love greens. Idli for those not knowing is a steamed bun made with a batter of fermented rice and split black lentils (which aren't black in this case as it is the de husked type that is used). I usually make my own batter because it tastes better, but it needs a little planning. I soak 2 parts rice for one part lentils separately for a couple of hours, then grind the soaked rice to a slightly coars but runny paste, and then grind the lentils to a smooth creamy paste, mix the two together and let it ferment in a covered container on my kitchen counter over night. If you don't have the time to do that and live in India, you can buy ready made batters almost everywhere, they will do the trick fine too.

I was back on track on Tuesday after my little derailing and subsequent fall from grace, things went far more smoothly and I even stuck to my weekly menu, which was of course planned with my being alone on parenting duty for a week. I just could not bring myself to toss a salad and shallow fry a few nuggets on Monday and went for a dosa at a restaurant, but Tuesday was all home cooked. I have quite a few of these easy and quick recipe for days I know I'll be beat. And if you remember my mini series in January you know that I generally plan my meal in such a way that I am not tied to the kitchen for more than 30 minutes during weekdays. Yesterday's menu was methi and chaat masala chicken served with a leafy green salad and sautéed pumpkin cubes.



You read that right by the way, I said chaat masala, this is not a typo at all. I got that ridiculously fast and and yummy recipe from a friend who like me think the worth of a woman is not tied to the amount of time she spent in the kitchen. She works outside the home too so the last thing she wants to do in the evening is spend hours to cook. This recipe is quick to pull, taste different, and her daughter who is Ishita's age loves it. I had to give it a try myself, and I got converted to it and included in my cooking repertoire. Here is how stupidly simple this one is:

In a big bowl, put chunks of boneless and skinless chicken ( as much as you need, I usually do 2-3 breast fillet that I cut in cubes). Sprinkle the chicken chunks generously with chaat masala (that's right the thing you normally put on salads and fruits) and stir to evenly coat the meat pieces in the spice mix, add a sprinkle of chicken masala if you wish to add a hint of spice, stir again. Then add a generous handful or two of kassoori methi (dried fenugreek leaves), stir once again. Finally add enough plain yogurt to coat the chicken nicely and let it rest for at least 30 minutes, the longest the better as the flavour will intensify.

Once you are ready to cook, take a big non stick flat bottomed pan out and heat a little oil in it on the stove (I use my Dutch oven pan). Place all the chicken chunks in and put the lid on. Cook for about 10 minutes or until the chicken is cooked to the middle (smaller chunks will cook faster). That is IT, it takes no more than 2 minutes prep time, and 10 minutes to cook. You can serve it with any vegetables you want, and it pairs great with a leafy green salad of your choice. I usually don't sever rice with this one as it is filling on its own. The yogurt turns the chunks soft and juicy, the chaat masala gives the meat a nice tang that goes great with the pungent taste of the fenugreek and Ishita likes it most of the time too.

With Summer pointing it's ugly nose in Mumbai this is one of these recipe that will end up on the menu more often since I plan to start bringing back the light salads for the season and need a nice protein side to them without sweating out on no end in the kitchen.

Last Saturday was one of these days. You know? The lousy craptastic type that should never have started in the first place and should end up quicker than they actually do? One of these days not only you don’t feel like doing a thing, but when you actually do tackle a task it end up failing miserably, hurting yourself or others in the process if not breaking things. Yes THAT kind of days!
That is how it was for me this weekend, held hostage by PMS, mood not even helped by the weather, DH in office, a daughter with far more energy than I could produce, and by the time I attempted to wash my hair with conditioner and slammed my head into an open kitchen cabinet…TWICE, I figured out I was better off leaving the task of actually cooking something for lunch alone altogether. On days like this, leftovers usually feel good and are easy to pull off, except that this weekend I had none left, being a bit too efficient at managing them during the week. Beside at this point I wasn’t entirely sure my microwave would not end up exploding in my face as clearly the universe was not working in my favour…that kind of lousy day…remember?  

Came lunchtime and I ended up craving udon noodles and chicken teriyaki from my favourite restaurant. But the idea of getting a hike by Auto for 6km to hit the mall just for noodles was really not appealing (beside we never just end up getting food at the mall). This is the point I remembered receiving several promotional emails from a service called Foodpanda. Which I explored in the past just because it had the word “food” in their name, and that is when I found out that my Asian restaurant was listed and actually delivered as far at my place, but never ordered anything through the site. With such a lousy day as Saturday was, I had the perfect opportunity to give it a try.
I don’t know about any of you, but while I love the option of take out and how easily available it is in India as opposed to Switzerland, I end up not liking placing orders over the phone, half of the time I have to repeat the order 5 times before even Dominos Pizza get it right, repeat my address the same amount of time, and of course it all start with me locating a menu in the first place so I know what to order. I will admit there that I really am not a phone person…not even to call friends.
Foodpanda seemed to solve these issues when I first checked it out a couple of months ago. It is basically a listing of restaurants that will entertain take out orders, the restaurants are categorised by cities and area where they deliver within said city. Currently the service is available to 19 Indian cities and has a total of about 3000 restaurants. All metros are covered as well as a few others big cities in the country, and I suspect the list will keep growing in the future.
All you need to do is first visit Foodpanda.in, select your city in the list, then the area in which you live for the site to generate the list of all restaurants in your area that will deliver to your place. Then you can click on any restaurant to see their terms and conditions, opening time, and their menu. Where it becomes very nifty though is the part where you can select the dish you want from the menu directly on Foodpanda and place your order from there. No need to call anybody, just do it all online. Some restaurants will even accept credit card payment through the site (not all of them, be aware of that fact). And if that wasn’t even simple enough, the listing generated for your area will be broken in two categories: Restaurants that are currently opened, and restaurants that are closed but with an option to pre-order.
My favourite restaurant was closed when I logged in at 11.45am, with an opening time at 12pm. I chose the option to pre-order knowing that the estimated delivery time would be 1 hour and 10 minutes from the time the place got the confirmation of said order. The biggest most pleasant surprise however was that that particular place offers a 50% discount on all food items on the menu when ordered through Foodpanda, the only drawback being that the minimal order amount should be 600 rupees for them to entertain a delivery. At full price that place is already getting you enough food, at 50% off you end up having a lot more than one adult and a pre-schooler will eat, but that was no issue, DH loves Chinese food and I know he would not mind having some of dinner, so I went ahead and threw some potato cakes and dim sums along with my original craving. I opted to pay by card, Foodpanda sent me a confirmation email and sms with all the details, and informed me they will let me know as soon as the restaurant confirmed the order, which was done at exactly 12pm when said restaurant opens.
With the confirmation text Foodpanda explained that from then on the follow up of the order was between me and the restaurant and sent me the phone numbers to contact them. By 12.45 the place called me to inform me they were about to send my order out for delivery and asked me to provide a landmark to locate my building (which I omitted to do at the time of order), I did and knew that by then it was a 30-35 minutes before my food would come to me. By 1.30 however it was still not there and I ended up calling the restaurant again, and they told me they just got a call from their delivery guy who informed them he had trouble finding my building, as soon as I hanged up it was the delivery guy calling asking me where I lived and by 1.35 he was there, apologizing for the delay. Frankly I didn’t even mind the delay, I was expecting it, as it is rare for restaurants entertaining take outs order for such a wide radius and I was sure that they didn’t get many orders for my area, and yes my building is not the most obvious in the area.

As soon as I got the food and filled my grumbling tummy and appeased the PMS monster in me, I called DH to let him know what was on the menu for dinner, and told him about how awesome I thought Foodpanda was, with the excitement one would get finding the Holy Grail might I add. DH to tell me he knew about it, and how neat it is because that was the site he ordered the Punjabi food we had a couple of weeks ago when we last had last minute guests over. He even pointed out that they have an app I could install on my phone. What? And I didn’t know? How out of the loop can I be? I immediately installed it on my iPad, and this is when I had another revelation. The first thing the app asked me was to select my country. Country? I thought that was an Indian service, but apparently not just so, Foodpanda is available in a number of countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East. A thing those of you reading me from outside India might be interested in checking.
I plan to install the app on my phone soon, and I only wished it existed a couple of years back when we were all stuck in relocation madness, as it is the perfect tool to know what is available in your area when you are brand knew to said area and haven’t already been flooded with paper menus via the newspaper.
And on a last note, I found out there is an ice cream parlour doing home deliveries through them…that will become very handy in a few weeks when Summer hits us with all its might.


This is a sponsored post, but the opinion is mine alone, based on experience

Last year I offered myself the wonderchef pizza pan for my birthday and said it was the best 2k I spent on a kitchen appliance in a long time, and I still mean it. I also mentioned something about cooking more than just pizzas in there, and by more I meant this :



These are homemade naans, and I never have been able to achieve the softness and elasticity required to make them tasty in my convection oven. Most recipes will tell you to preheat your oven to as high a temperature it can go to, but the main problem is that it applies to the overall heat of the oven when what you need to cook a perfect naan...or a perfect pizza base for that matter, is the surface heat. Naans and pizza have a lot in common, they are both bread that need to bake very quickly and do so when in contact with a scalding hot stone surface. Pizzas were and still are cooked in clay or brick ovens to have that traditional feel and taste. Naans are cooked in a tandoor, which is a vertical clay oven, and if you ever watched a TV show about Indian cooking you will see that they are smacked on the side of the tandoor oven in direct contact with the overheated clay and cook in minutes.

If you want to cook soft and elastic naans you need to replicate this cooking process as close to the traditional way as possible. In short you need to have a very hot cooking surface as opposed to an overall hot oven. If you still plan on using your oven, the best is to invest in a pizza stone, but be mindful that these will need around 40-45 minutes of preheating, that is a lot of energy waste for just one pizza or a couple of naans, not to mention that pizza stones might not even be available in India. You can as an alternative use a baking tray and preheat it for about that long too, but again that is a lot of energy you are going to waste that way, not to mention making it really long to get these naans done. Which is why most people will order them around here, the problem is that many restaurants do make the a bit chewy, and they are almost always meant for immediate consumption, and of course you get no control over the amount of oil and butter used in them.

So I quickly figured out that my pizza pan being good at making pizzas it could just bake naans equally well, and I was right! the only difference between the two is that I can flip a naan to roast them on both side! a thing you obviously can't do with a pizza. And here is my pan in action :



As you can see I already flipped it at this point! and it still is bubbling. Contrary to the method to make a pizza in there, you need to set the temp to high immediately and let it heat, then throw in a naan once it is hot, naans will bubble in seconds, but not roast as quickly as the pizza does. Once the side in contact with the hot surface is cooked, flip it and grill the other side, you will approximatively spend two minutes per naans. The one I did that day were plain ones! but you can make them buttery by brushing melted butter in them as soon as the naan is out of the pan.

And here is my naan recipe, which does not use any yeast but baking powder instead: 4 cups white flour (maida), 1 heaped tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp soda bicarb, 1 tsp salt and 2 tbsp plain yogurt.

Mix all the ingredient Ina bowl and add a little water to form a smooth elastic dough, then rub your dough ball with oil to coat it and let it rest for one hour in a dish covered with a towel. Then roll dough into flat rounds, which will need to be as thin as you can make them (chapati thin), they will puff and rise while cooking so do not worry about them not being soft and puffy rolling them that flat. Then throw them on the hot pizza pan as explained previously. This recipe will yield you about 8 naans, you can half the recipe to make less of them of course. And it goes without saying that you can add herbs and garlic flakes to the dough while preparing it to make flavoured naans.

Last but not least, if you don't have a pizza pan like the one I own, I heard and read many successful stories of people being able to make naans in a heavy skillet on the stove, preferably a cast iron one, so you could try experimenting with that too.





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One of the many thing a lot of expats I know wonder about when trying to live in India is where to find certain things to buy be it baking gear, rare ingredients, good furniture stores, a good tailor...and craft supplies.

Crafting is one of these Western hobby that is just now starting to become more common in India, and I know that I myself found it difficult to get my hands on some in the past! and would still be in that pickle if it wasn't for a treasure trove of a school supply and stationary shop in my neighbourhood. That guy hasn't let me down once since I first visited his tiny store, and what more his shop is always packed with customers. Of course I suspect that his proximity to three or four schools made him that popular, but I also suspect he is bridging a significant gap enough in the consumer's demand. Be it parents looking for sturdy paper and a glitter glue to complete a school project or people wanting to find embroidery wool and trim, all people in the area end up at that store. Quilling, knitting, stitching, rubber stamping, painting, scrap booking...you have a hobby, that store is likely to have the basic supplies to get you started. Many of my friends told me they are happy that someone out there has all the stuff a kid needs to replicate Disney's Art Attack projects, or the now defunct CeeBeeBies Mister Maker.

We are lucky to have that store around, but if you don't live in an area with one such shop, there are ways to still stock up. I never ordered from them but there is a craft supply online store called itsybitsy.in that is according to many I know reliable and has a lot of specialised craft supplies. Flipkart also sell artist paints and basic craft paper. Another place to look in if you are living in a big enough city is the vincinty of an art college or institute, students in these places usually need to buy supplies regularly and need them quickly without having to travel all over town to find them. If it is stitching and sewing you are into, ask people in your neighbourhood where the wholesale market for textile goods is, you will find a lot of trimmings, wool, and embellishment there. I still remember tagging along with my MIL in Lucknow to find a saree border and embroidery sequins and beads, we headed to the Chowk there and there was a whole street devoted only to these supplies, and I know all cities have one of these old bazaar where specialised shops can be found tucked away in a corner, as long as you know where to look.

Papers and glue, and other stamps can usually be found in stationary shops and if the shop you visit is a good one, they could even point you in the right direction or order things for you. The best stationary shops are usually found near schools, the bigger and more well known the school, the better the chance at finding stationary shops around. Kids needing notebooks and basic art supplies to complete school projects. If you have kids in nursery and Kg chances are they are doing craft projects in school on occasion, which means the teacher can point you in the right direction for supplies as well, so it is worth asking them too. Bookstores and toy stores are another place to look as well, they might not have as much as a stationary shop, but will have crayons, paints, and pencils. Crossword has Crayola products, Landmark has basic supplies and stickers. And toy stores usually have a few craft kits in stock as this has become a nice alternative to Barbie, Dora, Spider-Man or Mickey & Co when it comes to birthday gifts. The brand Troy seems to be found even in tiny independantly owned toy stores.

And of course never underestimate what you can recycle at home, old tissue rolls, glass jars,old shoe ornaments, empty tin can, the sleeves of that kurta you never wanted to have stitched and remain in a drawer...just in case. These and much more make great craft material, with a little resources and a lot of creativity you can continue with your good old hobbies living in India, even if the sourcing of said supplies might at first seem tricky. It is all a matter of where to start looking.