I have recently begun to love cooking with fenugreek leaves.  It started with eating them kneaded into spicy rotis.  All as a result of becoming a frequent visitor of a take-out food counter called Rajbhog Foods in Jersey City. Rajbhog is a grimy, flourescent bulb-lit store that ladles out Gujarati food.  When I enter the store,…

I’ve grown to love the change of seasons in the northeast United States.  Each year I find that I wait for spring blossoms and fall leaves.  I’ve been here for fourteen years now, but this longing for the change in seasons keeps growing.  I crave it more with every passing year: there is something so…

    I have to confess that my mother-in-law’s recipes hold an exotic appeal.  Whoever heard of cooking with freshly roasted and ground chana dal and urad dal and white sesame seeds in the form of a spice mixture? This mixed vegetable dish of hers allows me to throw into a pan every leftover and straggling…

Mom’s left again.  Her twice daily cooking has left with her too.  Now every time I go into the kitchen and try to toss a bunch of wilted spinach or throw away leftover rice, I’m accosted by the question “what would mom have done?”  That spinach would have found itself in a dal or a…

My roommate in college, Serena, taught me how to make a moist banana cake studded with chocolate chips during our sophomore year in school.  I still remember how I fell in love with it at first bite.  And despite having a pastry chef for a sister, it was the only cake that I knew how…

I’m often at a loss for weekday lunch meals for Agastya.  We did a one-pot khichdi for a long time, but after a while he seemed to crave variety, and I somehow couldn’t manage to gather a proper Indian meal with roti, dal and sabji in time for lunch.  For dinner, yes, but not lunch.  So…

After each of my two boys was born, my mom arrived from India with strict postpartum dietary instructions from nani, my maternal grandmother.  Never mind that I had been eating all kinds of things up until then. Nani’s recommended diet consisted of ghee, milk, ajwain, and a couple of less-known compounds such as gond, which…