So, ELC has been a bit stagnant over the past few months – but it doesn’t mean that we have given up our philosophy of home-cooking or that we’ve gone the way of countless other busy couples and made best friends with our take-out delivery boy. We have been busy, yes – infact, we have completely uprooted our lives and moved continents! From New York to Singapore, it has been quite a ride over the past few months – hence the lack of posts here.

I have always loved Asian cuisine, so you can imagine my excitement about getting to enjoy the delicious food in Singapore! This move also allowed us to see if our methods of home-cooking and healthy eating are viable in a different environment than in the one we first developed them in.  And boy, did we pick the right place to relocate to – Singapore is a foodie’s delight, a nation of serious eaters surrounded but sumptuous dining options ranging from affordable hawker centers to fancy waterfront restaurants.  It did provide a great challenge though – given that it is an island and a lot of items had to be exported in, fresh vegetables and other grocery essentials were a bit more expensive than we were used to. Coupled with the wonderful, cheap, delicious fresh food being served up at the local food centers (the majority of which carry healthy food options, not the processed fast foods of western food courts), it was quite a temptation to give up cooking at home much and to have our pick of the food outside – and it is a temptation we are still grappling to tame.

I moved here in October, with the wifey joining me just a few weeks back at the end of December, so we have yet to fully get back in to our cooking groove. We’ve have family visits take up much of the first few weeks, so the next month will be spent coming to terms with the new kitchen, the different grocery options and how to adapt our home-cooking to the options and environment around us. I will dutifully document our new asian experiments, ofcourse, but you may also see a lot more ‘review’ posts of the new foods and restaurants we are trying during our Asian odyssey!

As 2011 begins, we look forward to reinvigorating our passion for cooking together and making a home for ourselves in our new city, and for sharing our dishes on ELC.

As my grandmother continues to tell me at the end of every phone conversation – “Eat well and stay healthy”!

A good Sunday brunch is an absolute necessity, especially after a long Saturday night filled with too much drinking and dancing. With last night being once such Saturday night, I was in dire need of some quick, delicious nourishment this morning – and the spread you see above really hit the spot: Hearty Wheatgerm Waffles, Scrambled Eggs with Pastrami, Onions and Green Peppers, and slices of fresh, sweet, summer Strawberries. This combination really fit what I look for in a brunch on days like this.

So what do I like for brunches on Sunday mornings when I’m lethargic and need a good meal to get myself going? A few things:

Ease of preparation: The lazy way out would be to get something together with NO preparation involved – but that w0uld be counter-productive. Most things that you get to eat with no preparation, apart from just raw fruits and vegetables, are processed foods – which are filled with sodium, chemicals, corn syrup and a lot of stuff that is not real food. So while they fill you up, they give you no nutrition and will make you just more tired and lethargic. At the same time, you don’t want to be whipping up a breakfast buffet here – what you are looking for it food items that are wholesome but can be put together in a quick amount of time. A bonus of such items is that since it forces you to get up and be active for atleast a bit, those cobwebs in your head start clearing away bit by bit – so that once you get through the short cooking time and get settled in to eat, you’ll feel energetic already.

Nutrition: A good Sunday brunch for ‘recovery’ days after all that drinking and partying really needs to be nutritious to help your body recover quickly. Everyone has their own needs for such occasions, ofcourse – you get to learn what your body responds to the best as you go along in life. For me, apart from lots of water to gulp all morning, I usually need some combination of the following – protein and carbs to help get some energy in quickly, some fat to settle the stomach down and help with the toxins from the alcohol (look it up, your queasy stomach is caused by the byproducts of your body continuing to break down that vodka tonic from last night), and some fruit for fiber and more hydration.

Tasty: This one goes without saying – you need a tasty meal to look forward to, to get you motivated to put in the time to prepare the brunch in the first place instead of laying curled up on the couch munching on junk. This is a good time to cook up old favorites – this way you have a sure-fire tasty meal awaiting you without any experimentation, and you’ll save some time too.

Short cooking time: As mentioned above, you want to make food that involves a LITTLE preparation, but your body will not wait for you to get into Top Chef mode here – the food needs to be quick, fast and easy.

With all that said, the plate of brunch I ended up with this morning met all these criteria.

• Waffles are one of my favorite brunch items on any Sunday – they are easy to whip up (just mix in your favorite combo and turn on the waffle iron), and have enough protein and carbs in them from just the regular flour / egg combination. If you add in wheatgerm and use wholewheat flour, and throw in some pecans for crunch like I did today, you up the nutritional factor up quite a bit. Plus, while you wait for each waffle to get cooked, you can continue with your second brunch item
• Scrambled eggs are the perfect complement. Eggs are one of the best sources of protein you can have, and scrambled eggs are endlessly customizable – you can us whatever odds and ends you have in the fridge to throw in to make them healthier and tastier. I had pastrami on hand to add in some nice flavor, and onions and green peppers to get some veggies in.
• I love strawberries in the summer – they are bright, juicy and sinfully sweet. Slices of the fruit stand up nicely to the earthy taste of the waffles, and also the salty, buttery eggs.

A nice tall glass of whatever fresh or bottled juice you have on hand, or just some ice cold water  will round out this brunch perfectly. And I promise you it worked for me – else I wouldn’t have had the energy for such a long post today!

As the temperature is firmly in the 80s around here, comes the realization the summer is well and truly upon us. And what better way to celebrate summer sunday’s that with those old-fashioned childhood treats of icecream sundae’s (get it?). While ice cream tastes great during any season, sundaes work best during summer, when the ice cream melts quickly but the addition of a few other select accouterments go a long way towards dragging out the dessert into a delicious meal-ender.

For my first sundae of the season, I chose to keep it simple – because, like with most things in life, sundaes are best when kept simple. Throw on too many ingredients and you lose the essence of this wonderful melding of flavors. So start with your favorite ice cream flavor (or 3, if you really must), add some textured toppings, and a sauce of some sort to bring it all in together – and voila, a perfect sundae. Here, I used vanilla icecream which really is the best base for all kinds of sundae toppings – and complemented it with some of my homemade ganache and some toasted walnuts. Done.

The ganache adds a silky, smooth, warm touch to the cold, classic flavors of the vanilla, while the toasted walnuts (simply heated in the toaster over for a couple of mins) add a crunchiness that works wonders with the softness of the overall dessert. Walnuts also have a subtle, nutty flavor which I really like with chocolate – it adds a bottom note to the sauce without overpowering it like pecans would, for example.

Enjoy the summer, enjoy the ice cream, and there will be other ice cream sunday’s to follow, I am sure!

This will be a quick post, in honor of the food item the post describes – scrambled eggs. They are one of the best breakfast items – short, quick and easy to make. They are much more forgiving than an omelet (a broken omelet being very easy  to transform to scrambled eggs, ofcourse!), and equally customization. All you need is a saute pan, some butter or olive oil, eggs, and whatever other meats or vegetables you want to add in to the eggs.

Scrambled eggs with onions, peppers and bacon is a classic breakfast item in countless diners across the country; I decided to switch it up a bit by using Pastrami for bacon – it retained the salty punch of the bacon in the dish, but also added a nice dollop of the cured-meat flavor to the eggs.

THE RECIPE: Scrambled Eggs with Green Peppers and Bacon

You’ll Need:

• 4-5 slices of good deli pastrami, chopped into pieces
• 1 big onion, sliced
• 1 big Green pepper, diced
• 4 eggs
• 1 tbslp milk or cream
• 1 tbslp olive oil or butter
• Salt and pepper to taste

The Method:

• Heat the oil or butter in a saute pan on medium heat.
• Add in the pastrami and cook till slightly browned (about 3-4 mins) – you can leave for a few more mins if you want it cripsy, just make sure you keep moving it around or lower the heat so it doesnt burn.
• Add in the vegetables and cook an additional 5 mins till the peppers are tender. Add a little more oil as needed to ensure the meat doesnt stick to the bottom of the pan.
• Separately, break the eggs into a bowl, add in the milk and whisk till frothy
• Once vegetables are cooked, add in the egg mixture and gently move around to distribute the meat and vegetables
• Allow the eggs to set for a couple of minutes. Then, gently break them up and stir around the pan till they reach the level of doneness you desire. I usually let them go for 2-3 mins more as I don’t like my eggs too soft.

As I’ve written before, there is usually only one time an year that I yield to the temptation of delivery pizza. This year however, another Football even led to my breaking this tradition and ordering in again – the NFL Draft. Usually, this mid-season football extravaganza is over the weekend, when I settle down with my other favorite pigskin food – fried chicken. This year however, the NFL wanted to make more money and drag out the event, and thus started in on a freaking Thursday night – Thursday, I tell you! And since I try not to eat meat on Thursdays, I had to settle for pizza – the wife and I decided that we might as well check out what this Papa John’s hype was all about.

I’ve had Papa John’s a few years back, and remember that my buddies at the time were crazy over the garlic oil that came with the pizzas. So we got a few thin crusts with a variety of toppings amongst them – and were surprised at how quick the delivery was! The pizza boxes smelled really good – which was a very promising start indeed!

Opening the boxes led to another surprise – a little pepper in the corner and a packet of special seasoning in every box. My, its almost like they are making an effort to make there pizza look presentable – kudos Papa! The toppings looked a bit sparse though, and the green peppers werent nearly as fresh as I’d expected them to be.

The crust was thin enough, but did not have much flavor to it. The sauce was ok, nothing to write home about but definitely better than the much hyped new Domino’s. The garlic sauce and the seasonings did add quite a bit of flavor to the pizza, but I could almost feel the amount of fat and sodium I was ingesting as I was eating them!  However,  for the most part the pizza was tasty enough to go down well with the draft.

Watermelon is a terrific fruit to keep in the fridge as we head in to the warmer months. The fruit is loaded with enough water (duh!) to act as a wonderful hydrant, while providing you with enough fiber and other fruity goodness. The fruit is pretty sweet all through the year – you just have to pick a dark red fruit which feels heavy for its size.

Watermelon is also wonderful as a stand-alone dessert, since its subtle sweetness stands up well to a variety of add-ins and seasonings. The wifey loves her watermelons sprinkled with some salt and pepper; if the fruit is not as sweet as you like, you can always add in some sugar. My favorite add-ins are some freshly grated ginger and some lemon juice. The watermelon cubes can be stored in the fridge for up to a week this way, and are delicious eaten straight out as a cold treat.

There is really no recipe needed for this – it is as simple as cubing up some watermelon, grating some fresh ginger over it and squeezing in some lemon or lime juice over it. Mix it all up, add in some sugar for sweetness if you want and you’re all set. At times, I throw this in to the blender with some ice for a wonderfully refreshing drink also.

I love pizza, but I have become something of a pizza snob recently – I’ve tried most of the home delivery options available and they are, to put it kindly, eatable maybe once an year. There is definitely some good pizza to be had in little restaurants and pizza places all over New York, ofcourse – but for days when we are just looking to stay home I and have a pizza nothing but my own home-made pie will do.

For days when I don’t have a ball of pizza dough waiting for me in the freezer, I’ve come up with a way to get the same thin-crust crunch and cheesy goodness that a pizza provides – Pizzettes (or tartlettes, or flat mini pizzas, or whatever you want to call them) made from good old Puff Pastry sheets! We always have some sheets lying around in the freezer – and these little pizzette are so easy to put together individually that they can be customized to whatever toppings we are in the mood for.

Last night, we had frozen corn and broccoli on hand -  the wife just wanted corn whereas I went in for more texture and nutrition and piled on the broccoli. We just thawed the veggies in the microwave, used some regular tomato ketchup as a pizza sauce, roughly cut the mozzarella and baked these individually in the toaster over. Talk about an easy-going dinner – no fuss, no hassle and ready in a few mins with minimal clean up - wonderfully easy for a Thursday night!

THE RECIPE: PUFF PASTRY PIZZETTES with Broccoli and Corn

YOU’LL NEED:

• A few sheets of Puff Pastry – thawed per instructions on the package, makes 4 pizzettes if you use the regular Pepperidge farm versions
• 1/2 cup of frozen corn and broccoli, thawed in the microwave
• 4 tblsp tomato ketchup
• Fresh Mozzarella cheese, sliced or shredded

THE METHOD:

• Pre-heat the toaster oven to 450 deg F
• Roll out the puff pastry sheets into a rectangle, and divide into four mini-rectangles
• Roll out each mini pizzette into the desired thinness – you want to leave them slightly thick if you want more toppings on them
• Fold each edge about an inch thick for each of the pizzettes, and seal the edges by using the tines of a fork and press the corners down into the dough.
• spread about a tbslp of the ketchup on each pizzette, taking care to stay within the folded edges.
• Spread with the thawed veggies and cover with shards of the cheese.
• Toast individually (or two per cycle if you have the space) in the toaster over at 450 for 10 mins or so till the cheese bubbles

Continuing my reminiscing of the wonderful cruise the wife and I took in January, with one of my favorite (atleast visually) desserts from the cruise – a molten chocolate cake. We had this on our second night on the cruise, and after a nice soak in the hot tub watching the JETS win, I found this little gem to satisfy my late-night sweet tooth.

The dessert itself is cookie-cutter – an average chocolate cake filled with some chocolate sauce, topped but some strawberry syrup and a piece of hard chocolate – pretty standard fare for a cruise dinner. The visual presentation of the dessert was good, however (like most of the desserts served onboard, I must add – they do an excellent job of making up for the actual quality of the food!) – shaped as an orb with ridges running along the side of it, with the red syrup strikingly flowing down one side of the dark brown base. Nice.

The taste was quite alright too – the strawberry syrup didn’t really taste like strawberry, but the chocolate inside the cake did taste like chocolate so I was satisfied. For a dessert on a moving vessel at 11pm at night, this was not a bad choice.

A knife-sharpener is actually a profession back in India, or atleast it was when I was growing up. There used to be a guy who would ride around in a bicycle outfitted with wooden slats carrying a wide variety of sharp knives – and a really heavy whetstone to sharpen knives with wedged somewhere in front or behind him on that flimsy bike. He was the original dare-devil; imagine riding around the bumpy Hyderabad roads with so many sharp objects close to your body!

My mom or grandmother would flag him down and present all the knives in the house to him for sharpening; in a very ‘green’ display of using human energy, he would hook up the whetstone apparatus to the cycle in a way that the stone would whirl around as he pedaled – and he help up the knives against that blade to produce a deafening ‘grrrrr’, plenty of sparks that amused my 8-yr-old self, and a brilliantly sharp edge. I would watch my mom slice through piles of vegetables the day after this awesome feat of low-tech machinery, and sorely miss the ingenuity of the true ‘cutting-edge’ technology of the good old days!

In the so-called high-tech days we find ourselves in these days, hoping for a pedaling, knife-sharpening daredevil to make his way around New York is probably a lot to ask for. However, home cooks soon come to find that sharp knives are some of the best tool to have around the house – contrary to the fears of all beginner cooks, the sharper the knife, the safer it is to use. A dull knife will slip off the surface of whatever it is you are trying to cut; use a sharp knife with precise strokes and you can slice and dice without endangering your digits.

After quite a bit of research on appliances to use to sharpen my beginner knife set, I settled on the JA Henckels model pictured above. It has a few things going for it that I like:

• the horizontal design yields a heavy, sturdy base, and a nice curved grip that I canhold with one hand while I move the knife back and forth between the blades
• The base had a rubber coating so I can lay it on my coffee table and sharpen the knives while I catch up on the latest Kardashian dramas (I mean, as I watch the NFL)
• The blade design workes on any kind of knife blade except for santoku-style serrate knives, which I don’t use anyways.
• stored vertically, the gadget takes barely any space and can be thrown in to any back-corner of a cabinet. I usually sharpen my knives once every couple of months, so I don’t need to be reaching it frequently.
• It has lasted my over 3 yrs now, and still does a great job sharpening all the knives we have.

There are a few newer models that have come out in the few years since I’ve gotten this one, so make sure you check out your closest home store to find the one that best fits your knife sharpening needs – and remember, if you happen to find a true human knife sharpener in your travels around the world, pause and take a picture with an original daredevil!

As anyone who has grown up in India over the past few decades will tell you, Maggi noodles are one of the most craved breakfast items on weekends. The promise of ’2-minute’ cooking was a boon to the Indian mom’s who had to feed hungry tots in a hurry; I truly believe these instant-cook noodles were the initiator of the fast food industry to desi households. And the genius behind the noodles was the flavor packets included with each – with flavors well suited to the Indian palate. Plus, the marketing campaign to include stamps in the packets for an year was brilliant – like with me, I’m sure philately was introduced as a hobby to many Indian kids as a result of this promotion.

Masala was the ubiquitous flavor as I was growing up, but there were various other flavors introduced along the way. The green capsicum was my personal favorite (didn’t hurt that I found some ‘rare’ bird stamps in those packets!), but chicken was always around, and I think Shrimp was introduced at some point also (and pulled back in a couple of years, apparently the instant craze didnt extend to seafood). I remember getting up on Sundays excited to get started watching the Jungle Book and other Sunday cartoons, while my mom got a steaming hot bowl of Maggi ready for me – what a treat!

My first few years in the US, back in the early 2000s, we had a few of the regular Maggi flavors available – and my early cooking experiments began with adding vegetables, spices and soy sauce to regular Maggi. Lately, there have been so many new flavors of Maggi available that the wifey and I have been finding  a new monthly favorite! Our fave for the past month? Machurian Maggi – a perfect combination of the desi-Chinese flavor and the quick cooking Maggi magic.

I just add a few freshly chopped scallions (green onions) and we are set to enjoy a delicious weekend breakfast!