The word salad invokes a lot of old memories - most of them unpleasant. For a country that boasts the lowest meat consumption rate in the world, India surprisingly lacks salads in their meals. In fact, I don't remember ever eating a salad as a meal in India. I think this has something to do with Indian families trying to stretch the meal budgets; making a curry out of the vegetables allowed us to eat other cheaper carbs with that curry. So we would have smaller portions of the vegetable dish, what we called Subzi, and pair it with roti bread or rice. My mom would occasionally slice up an onion or carrots if they were about to go bad, but I wouldn't call that a salad by a long shot. Salads … [Read more...]
Archives for August 2014
Tomato Soup
"You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day. Unless you are too busy. Then you should sit for an hour." - Old Zen Adage It has been sunny for the past few weeks which is unusual because it tends to rain here so much all year round. It was a beautiful summer morning in Vancouver today, we woke up to the sound of two pigeons cooing on our patio! Anup is a morning person and he generally is the first one to get out of bed and make our morning tea. What a sweet hubby! I am not the princess type, but if you saw us in the morning you would think I was the queen! I have to be coaxed out of the bed. The aromas of mint and ginger tea on the stove definitely helps. So we had … [Read more...]
Cabbage and Summer Squash Salad
You can tell a lot about a family by observing what their daily meals look like. If you saw my family's meals in India for example, you would know that our family valued health and ease of cooking over taste. You would also know that we were creatures of habit - my mom would make certain things on specific days of the week, and there was logic to the whole schedule. She would make khichari, simple rice and daal porridge cooked together in a pressure cooker, on Friday night. She will knowingly make more so she could use the leftover khichari as breakfast on Saturday, the day she had to leave for work early in the morning. If a dish could be prepared in less than 15 minutes, it was on the … [Read more...]