En Route to the Epicurean Alley

I have always loved reading blogs. I feel most people do an amazing job of being witty and informative at the same time. I never really thought I would try out writing one myself but the love of food and the excitement of sharing innovative recipes made me turn to my windows machine ( Now now, I wouldn’t do this on my linux, would I !) But still am not too hopeful to create a blog of my own and so would take up a few MegaBytes and appear amidst toastmasters speeches and short stories, adding a little zest to topgunw’s blog (as I did in his life :) ).

A little introduction would be a good starting point. I hail from a west Indian City of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. {You have a gujju ben amongst you.} But surprisingly only a part of my food has been influenced by Gujarati cooking, that too thanks to my childhood neighbors and my mom-in law. The rest is all Hyderabadi.
My friends teasingly call me Hajrati J Not such a tough sandhi is it.
Due to my mom and more so my aunt, I love ginger and green chilies in my cooking. My crisper is dull and boring without them. I believe they have a knack of making any dish fresh and green. Try adding greens to any dish, it can be just cilantro, and experience the change it creates. My friends last week just had a close brush with my green chili passion with an overdose of them in a potato curry. I believe that was the end of my “cooking for my friends” phase. They would never lend their gastronome tract for my experiments again.

Being in San Jose, California, we have plenty of sunlight (or so people say, we have been through this cold dull month of winter recently). Hence I head to the farmers market whenever I can. As a result I get so many “special” veggies which we would have never tried otherwise.
To figure out which recipe best enhances the taste of a particular vegetable, I go through many food blogs before dinner. Recently I came across some who really did a good job of food blogging. Some of my favorites are http://www.nandyala.org/mahanandi/about/ and www.evolvingtastes.blogspot.com/

Next time I experiment, I would be loaded with chilies, ginger, garlic and my canon SD600. Let’s see how much quality contribution I can make to the world of food blogging.