Archive for Express cooking

Ananda Vikatan – Express Cooking part 2

April 23, 2009 at 6:09 am · Filed under Ananda Vikatan, Express cooking

Here’s part 2 of the 52 part series Express Cooking. All the 10 recipes were cooked using one small saucepan, 10 plastic cups, 1 mixie, 1 knife, a 7 compartment spice box and 1 microwave. It took me around 40 minutes to cook 10 dishes ( photos at the left) and this time includes  kitchen cleanup time too !   

From next week onwards we move on to One page cookbooks which free you from the tyranny of a single recipe, and shows how you can mix and match stuff according to a few simple rules.
I promise you that you’ll find this way much more fun, creative and fulfilling than slavishly duplicating a recipe.
I’ve had my share of ribbing from friends on Ramki, the Kitchen King title. But I guess I have to learn to live with it as I guess Vikatan would persist in addressing me as such throughout this series ! 

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Ananda Vikatan Express cooking series part 1/52

April 23, 2009 at 5:49 am · Filed under Ananda Vikatan, Express cooking

I was surprised and to be honest mildly pleased to see Ananda Vikatan referring to me as Ramki, the Kitchen King ! I do not deserve this title and would certainly be embarassed to use it. I like to think of myself as a primary school teacher, teaching how to string up words into meaningful sentences. In my One page Cookbooks, I explain how the base, flavouring and additive combinations are strung up into meaningful recipes according to a few simple rules.  But this is the very first step and there is much more to cooking than this. 

After you move over from primary school (One page cookbooks), some of you might end up as poets( gourmet cook). I might never write an immortal poem, but I wish and hope some of you will do that ( create great recipes). I’ll get my kicks from the knowledge that I played a part in helping you form your first sentences ( basic cooking). 
This issue of Ananda Vikatan carries the first of a series of articles titled Express Cooking where I cookup quick and easy recipes, which first timers can easily create. 
This series will hopefully run for an year, at the end of which it would be published as a book. For this issue, I got a friend of mine, Nathalie Van Der Berg, a Dutch girl on her first visit to India, to cook up traditional Tamil dishes. She has not cooked before and has never seen / heard of  these dishes. So, with just a 10 minute instruction and armed with this One page cookbook, she started cooking and cooked up Carrot Thayir pachadi, Thenga Thogayal and Kaara podi in 10 minutes flat.
Yes, Tamil cuisine is easy, if you get the basics right !

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