Who, What, Why, When?

I know these are questions that come to your mind the minute you open a blog. So, here is my attempt to find answers for you.

Who - Let me begin by giving a background about the author. I am a working Indian mom, brought up in a conservative Bengali family in Calcutta, living in California, working full time and a mother of a one and half-year old little girl. But there is more to that, I love food :-). And not just eating food, but creating recipes as well as learning the science behind ingredients and techniques.

What & Why - So what is all this about? And why am I writing this blog? I have been living in the US for almost 6 years now and my love for Indian food has just grown. As all who live here will know, although there are lots of Indian grocery stores, getting all the ingredients you want all the time is not very convenient. The last thing you want to do is to spend your weekend to go to ten different grocery stores. With that in mind, I started incorporating easily available ingredients into my daily recipes.

If you are thinking this blog is about giving you fusion recipes, then stop reading immediately because this is not about fusion recipes. This blog is about a challenge I have set for myself - a relatively difficult one for me because any parent of of a toddler will understand what an ordeal it is to get dinner ready with a miniature you hanging from one of your legs or running away with your cooking utensils. But I digress... The challenge that I was talking about ... I have decided to create atleast one easy or semi-home made Indian recipe every week and document my failure or success on an ongoing basis. I am hoping to get some creative recipes out of this process which will appeal to anyone who loves Indian food and would like to cook them at home, irrespective of their nationality. When searching for Indian cookbooks, I saw that all recipes start from the scratch and there are none that can be made with semi-homemade ingredients. So, here is my attempt.

Where - I am going to start cooking these new creative recipes from next week and document the success or failure. The result I am hoping to get out of this is to get some good creative Indian recipes using American ingredients, that are easy to cook and above all, great to taste!

Now, now...I know you are already curious about the coming attractions - so here are some of them:

- Chilli fish
- Tandoori sea bass
- Chicken Tikka Masala from ready to eat grilled chicken
- Naan from pizza dough
- Aloo tikki (spicy pancakes) from mashed potato mix

Many more to come.....