The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Looking for a creative/unusual gift for a food lover? Here are some gift ideas based on my favorite buys and stuff from my wish list, which you could pick from. Hope your food lover likes them as much as I do!

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An assorted collection of food words, one for each letter of the English alphabet. Every word in the list has something special to recommend it – the quirkiness of the dish it represents, the sound of the word as it rolls off the tongue, or a bit of both.

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There are times when we want to exclude onion and garlic from our diet – religious festivals, a lifestyle choice borne out of ayurvedic principles, or more earthly matters such as exorbitant prices.

The good news is that a “no onion no garlic” diet need not be one of frugality. Just because you aren’t eating onion or garlic does not mean you are doomed to subsist on bland watery boiled vegetables instead. Curries without onions and garlic can be so tasty, you will not even notice that a conventional ingredient is absent.

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We moved to Delhi from Patna when I was twelve. Before the move I thought that apart from the differences in personal pronoun usage and transitive verb syntax, the two places spoke the same language Hindi.

It took me by surprise when I discovered that in discussions about food, my new non-Bihari friends and I were often talking the equivalent of Greek and Latin. I told them I disliked kaddu, they assumed I disliked red pumpkin. When I said "Red pumpkin is not kaddu, it’s kohra! I meant bottle gourd", they said – "Bottle gourd is not kaddu, it’s lauki!"

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It is one thing to know how to cook individual Indian dishes, quite another to combine the dishes harmoniously into an appetizing meal. Rajma masala and chhole masala are fantastic house party food, but would you serve them together? Not if you have a modest number of items on the menu. You love pooris as much as you love kadhi, but you would pair them with each other? Not if you want to kill the essence of both.

There are flavors that cohere and flavors that clash. You wouldn’t put multiple items of the same genre – such as gourds or dals – in the same meal. Pooris would possibly go with potato curry, kadhi would most definitely get served with plain rice.

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Today is the 200th birth anniversary of Edward Lear (12 May 1812 – 29 January 1888), a British author and poet renowned for popularising the limerick form of poetry.

Twitter is agog with wishes of Happy Limerick Day. I’m adding my little bit with verse in limerick form.

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Mothers in Hindi movies may dish out copious amounts of halwa and kheer for their beloved betas but it is the men who rule the roost when it comes to playing food-centric roles on celluloid.

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