October brings a plethora of pumpkins after the fall harvest. The 2 famous fall pumpkin recipes - pumpkin spice and pumpkin pies are not something I enjoy or look forward to, and one doesn't even have pumpkin in it. But pumpkin as a vegetable is versatile and it can be used in savory and sweet dishes. Pumpkin Indian flat breads are the softest and most tastiest. To make these pumpkin muffins ..read more

<!-- Halloween time is synonymous with pumpkin and wondering what to do with all that pumpkin. When the DDs were younger they took visits to the pumpkin patch and brought home pumpkins but these days unless I buy them there is no reason for the huge pumpkins to make their way to our house. The huge pumpkins seem a waste to buy, carve and then throw away. Anyway these pumpkins huge, not as sweet ..read more

Having a sweet tooth simply means, it is a daily struggle to keep your hands mouth away from anything and everything that has sugar = these days anything that is processed. Even products that are sold as savory or healthy options have sugar in them. Think Fat Free means Sugar Full :) Store bought jams and jellies for morning breakfast means you are consuming 4-5 tsp of sugar right in the morning ..read more

Try as you might, you always end up having over ripe bananas. They are great in smoothies or banana bread. I started freezing them whole with the skin and all to be used up for a banana bread 2 months later. I can thaw them and remove the skin and then use it in the bread. For use in ice creams though, it is better to peel and slice and then freeze. It comes in handy in the summer months when you ..read more

Paneer dishes are one of those things that no one can get enough of. My family is no different. I have come to liking it after quite a while. I still do not like or order paneer dishes in the restaurant. I do not like the way it is smothere in cream and has that pale orange look which sends me to the exits. The trick to making any paneer gravy is not make it overly rich. Since paneer is ..read more

Chilies are easy to grow. The biggest problem is harvesting them. I sometimes delay harvesting them because of lack of time. So they start to ripen. I had no idea how dried red chilies are made until one year DH's cousin was visiting from India. She suggested that we make dried chilies with the ripened ones. I wasn't too confident since we were already in late September and thought how it is ever ..read more

We all make the assumption that cooking techniques, spices the way of cooking - all make a dish taste good. IMHO these are all just secondary reasons. The first and foremost is the quality of the ingredients. If you source good ingredients, that should pretty much take care of the taste mostly. Everything else you do is just icing on the cake :) If you don't do anything specific for the earth ..read more

Good Lime or lemon pickle reminds me of two people - my grandmother and my mother-in-law. I don't remember my grandmother's pickle making all that much but it had green chilies, garlic and sometimes even green (black) peppers. Whereas my MIL's without fail packed us lemon pickles every year. Without the slightest taste of sourness or bitterness but nice and smooth, these were some of the best no ..read more

I grow several kinds of chilies, some of them spicy and used for cooking, some are not so spicy and used for making fritters and jalapeño wghich I grow mostly for making pickles (in vinegar) and also for making stuffed jalpaenos or even making a gravy. In the height of summer, when everything needs to be harvested, peppers seem to be the ones left behind because they don't go bad. While most ..read more

During spring, summer and early fall we eat mostly what is grown in the farm. Fall is when everything is finally done for the year and we are harvesting what produce is left before the frost and freezing temperatures hit. So I harvested all the peppers and the beans that I could before our frost hit in early October. I had a variety of peppers and the one I chose to do this stuffed ..read more