About

August 2021

Mutton chops and fried fish were the two things my sister and I requested from our mother for our first meals when we came back from boarding school. Exhausted from the many hours of travel by bus and plane and car, we’d walk in the front door, look around the house to see what had changed in our absence, wash our hands and sit down to eat. My sister wanted to eat her fried machchi with rice, dal and lots of ghee. I wanted to eat the pepper chops my mother made with 839247 rotis.  My mother is an incredibly gifted cook but also a voracious eater, and because of her we have eaten all kinds of food and find the kitchen a creative space. Our larger family are foodies, enthusiastically planning and gathering people around an inviting spread, telling juicy stories of new food experiences.

Pre-pandemic, our kitchen across continents felt seamlessly linked, maintained by winter and summer visits, phone calls about imminent arrivals. All of this will happen soon. But for now, we can have some fun. And connect through sharing new recipes and telling old stories.

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Like many South Asians, some of my happiest culinary memories involve mango season. Sweltering summer months sweetened by mangoes, which appeared in my mother’s kitchen in wooden crates wrapped in straw every April, May. My childhood pursuit of the sweetest and juiciest fruit of the season is the spirit this site seeks to channel. 

I started this blog in graduate school when food blogs were relatively new. I loved reading Purple Foodie and Amateur Gourmet and scores of others, following the stories of home cooks across the world. I was finishing up my dissertation at the time–a traumatic process!!!–but I loved writing and documenting my culinary experiments in my little graduate student apartment. I haven’t blogged in five years partly because of the disappointing way in which the internet was monetized and partly because I was just having too much fun IRL. 🙂 

I’ve returned to this space to pick up where I left off, chronicling life in my kitchen and my pursuit of all things delicious.

All photos are taken by me in my home kitchen, wherever it may be at the moment: Durham, Bombay, Pune, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, Surat, Ahmedabad, Seattle, Lewisburg, Cambridge, Providence, Port Louis or Los Angeles.