Happy Vijayadashami!!

I have always wanted to have my own food blog for a very long time. For some reason or the other it always got delayed. So today, on this auspicious day of दसरा  2011, I am taking a step forward towards this new culinary journey! 

My whole life has been about food; it has always been a central theme of every celebration(of any kind) I have been a part of, not just about eating, but learning and preparing different recipes, serving, food etiquette in different cultures and for different occasions, learning and knowing more about various cuisines, relentlessly speaking about food, I could go on forever. My primary influences about this food obsession have been the most important ladies in my life: my Aai, both my Aaji's , my Aunts who have taught me the basics and my Tai, who is the reason I have so much practice in making food that goes down well without being regurgitated. 

As far as I can remember, some of my most earliest memories revolve around sitting atop the kitchen platform and watching Aai make पोळ्या  for the daily tiffins, me talking random things while she does so, waking up from a sunday afternoon nap to the smell of ground cardamom for बेसनाचे  लाडू  or a खमंग  फोडणी  for a big batch of चिवडा ! Inspite of being a working mother, Aai always saw to it that we were never ever deprived of any kind of food that we loved, may i specify that it was made available by her making them for us and not just ordering it in. I quite don't know what to feel about the fact that my Aai had to toss out her religion for me when I became an avid seafood eating toddler, growing up in south Kolkata refusing to eat at nowhere else but the Bengali neighbours, eating 'betki maachh' and 'chingdi'. 

We 'Deodhar's hail from the Kokan coast of maharashtra and kokani and malwani food culture is predominant in our household. Having grown up in cosmopolitan Mumbai, my extended family has members from gujrat, karvar, kerela, marwadi maharashtra. So it is natural, that the food we eat at home is wide mix of different tastes and flavours from each of these regions and many more! Aai cooks a lot of kokani and karvari food on a daily basis, which I have now come to appreciate so much after living as a hostel-lite student for 5 years and I do genuinely believe that 'घरचं जेवण' is the best.

As I grew up, my involvement in the process of cooking kept increasing exponentially! One summer I was fiddling with Aaji's 'gharghanti' in-house flour-mill, next summer I was learning to make a seive like pattern on 'अनर्से', a sweet snack, with sugar and poppy seeds and by the time I was 13, I had already made Prawn curry malwani style,doing every single step from peeling and de-veining the prawns to making the masala, all by myself ! When TLC got introduced to Indian cable networks, the 'domestic goddess' Nigella Lawson introduced  me to adapting recipes to meet your tastes, instead of simply going by the book. One can easily notice the impact that she has on my food philosophy. Programs like 'Food Paradise', 'Planet Food' fed my thirst to know more about different cuisines of the world. Food blogs like 'Chakali', 'Aayi'srecipes', 'cookbookcherie', 'cakejournal' amongst many others have introduced me to a new genre of recipe sources.  Aai disagrees with my philosophy though, which is: easy, go by the flow, measure by the eye and instincts and never really follow any recipe word by word ( I must say here, so is Aaji's philosophy too although, she is a genius experimenting with ingredients as extreme as cactii  for toffees)! Aai says, cooking skill lies in being able to re-create the same taste in any recipe, every time you make it.

Hence this attempt to blog my recipes in a structured manner to share with people who need quick fixes for home made food, learn from people that have similar love for cooking , hear their opinions and just have this place where my obsession gets a vent!! I dedicate this blog to my Aaji and the culinary heritage she has passed on to me through her daughter, 'AajichiPhodni' is just the tempering my culinary adventures need!

P.S.: This page full of ranting on and on is about introducing one to my food philosophy and how it got developed to being what it is today, I just hope some of my friends do not consider it bragging or a narcissistic article! :P you know who you are!