May 2, 2013
This year – 2013 – at ten minutes shy of 3:00 PM, two misguided, and, to the best of our knowledge right now, self-radicalized brothers set off a bomb each near the finish line of the Boston Marathon at Copley Square, with the obvious intention of hurting as many people as possible. They used pressure cookers to make their bombs, the high pressure amplifying the effects of the explosives inside when the bombs went off. I will not insult the suffering of the victims by saying I was pained by the fact that pressure cookers – my favourite cookware and the namesake for my blog – were used, but I certainly was dismayed. Pressure cookers are not used much in American kitchens. Here people use their ovens for slow and long cooking. They are thought to be mysterious, complicated –elite even – and potentially dangerous. They can be, if not……
Apr 15, 2013
After successfully executing Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread twice, I tried my hand at sandwich bread, which also turned out quite fabulous. I decided it was time to give sourdough a try. Twice, I tried, using Mark Bittman’s sourdough starter and bread recipe from his famous book, How to cook Everything. Both times my sourdough bread turned into this dense, heavy ball of…of something… that was better suited to bludgeoning people to death with rather than eating. I was not dejected the first time — anyone can fail at following a recipe once. But when my second loaf of sourdough went south, I lost courage. “I will leave bread baking to the professionals,” I said, ” From now on, I will stick to just cooking.” But K just would not let me! Any time I stop to look at artisan breads at the market, K reminds me that he loved the……
Apr 7, 2013
No, I have not fallen off the face of the planet. Yes, yes, I still cook most nights. So, why have I not been posting recipes to my blog? First I was giving the blog a face-lift, then I was waiting for everything to be perfect before I started posting again. But I got busy with my PhD research, then I switched labs and started from scratch with new research, then I went and got myself hit by a car and had to recover from that. By then we had moved and I no longer had a place at which I took photos, then…I could make excuses until the sun went down. But I will stop with the excuses and just post my recipe. In an effort to make K appreciate cauliflower more, I decided to have him try the South Indian street food specialty, “Gobhi (cauliflower) Manchurian”.
Aug 22, 2012
Tradionally Chicken Saltimbocca is made using sage and no cheese. The first time I made it, I didn’t have any sage on hand and stuck in some Port Salut cheese that needed using up. K loved it and moved my Chicken Saltimbocca to the top of his favourites… displacing even his long time favourite Tandoori Chicken. Chicken Saltimbocca is now one of our mainstay classy comfort foods. Since common knowledge dictates that one should not mess around with a successful formula, I have never altered my Chicken Saltimbocca recipe. If you wish to be more authentic, you could add some chopped sage with the garlic while making the pan sauce. The proscuitto in this dish should be neither shaved, nor thickly sliced. Thick slices do not stick to the chicken and shaved slices will not cover the cheese. Just have the deli make thin slices for you. Chicken Saltimbocca……
Oct 18, 2011
During the years we spent in Calcutta, India, my parents would plan impromptu trips to Digha, a small fishing town along the Bay of Bengal coast, only a few hours’ drive from Calcutta. I would emerge out of the car in school uniform and backpack to find my mother’s sticking her head through the wrought iron grill of our balcony shouting out to our chauffeur. “Don’t head back to the office,” she would scream out over the din of the city and street cricket matches, “Saheb (Sir) is coming home in a different office car. You’re coming to Digha with us; so go grab some clothes, tank up the car and be back here in an hour!” These trips were always my father’s idea and I never got an inkling of when one was coming until it was announced. He made his decision on the spur of the moment and we always sportingly……
Jul 12, 2011
It’s not that I cannot bake; I just do not like to. Barring cooked tuna and sardines in any way, shape or form, I eat everything. I am allergic to eggplant, but that has never really quite stopped me from eating it anyway. I do my best to ignore the varying intensities of itchiness in my throat brought about by different varieties of eggplant. However, I do not have what is commonly understood as “an evergreen sweet tooth”, with just one exception – but I will save that for another day. Besides, to me, cake batter tastes better before baking than after, so I find it hard to see the point in even putting it into the oven. If it were not for the strong resistance to pollutants, toxins and probably common food contaminating bacteria that one invariably develops when they have spent years and years in India, eating all……
Apr 9, 2011
I bought a pound of shrimp a couple days ago because it was on sale. K is very picky when it comes to shrimp — it cannot just be cooked any which way, the shrimp have to have a good sear on both sides, which pretty much eliminates a lot of Italian recipes and Indian curries. I had been craving polenta since I stole some from K when it came with his braised short-rib dinner at Grafton St. When I saw the cover of the latest “Real Simple” recipe collection with a pretty picture of a shrimp dish with crispy bacon and plum tomatoes over cheesy grits, I thought I could make something like that with polenta underneath instead of grits. That cover dish was my inspiration for this dinner, but I could not make it as is because K does not like tomatoes with shrimp (if he likes tomatoes in……
Apr 9, 2011
I have been trying to restrict my intake of non-vegetarian food to only one meal a day. Usually that means eating fruit smoothies for breakfast and salads for lunch. But on days that I am home I can do some experimenting with new vegetarian dishes. One day I decided to find out what all the hype about steamed silken tofu was all about. Mainly it would give me another opportunity to try out my (then) new bamboo steamer. So of course, we do not generally have a lot of tofu on hand — K hates it, and I do not love it. But my Chinese friends go on and on about the silky texture and the velvety feel of silken tofu…so off I rush to Super88 to buy myself a brick of silken tofu. My recipe is pretty much straight out of chef and restauranteur Kylie Kwong’s book, “Simple Chinese Cooking“.
Jan 30, 2011
I think I stopped blogging shortly after we adopted Oscar Schindler, our cat, which means it has been almost a year now. I thought about blogging from time to time… but just never got to it. My blog would just turn into another one of my many projects that I started with great zeal but abandoned somewhere along the way when I picked up one too many newer projects. I thought nobody would notice. But my friend Nick sent me a text-message one evening; He said, “Bring back The Whistling Pressure Cooker”. And so I will. Thanks Nick. I still cook. I even still take photos of the food I cook. Why should I stop blogging about it then? We were discussing making paneer from scratch over delicious dinner and desserts at Finale on Beacon St last night where we had gathered to celebrate Nelsa’s birthday. It comes out to……
Jul 10, 2010
The French do not believe in medium-rare, medium or (heaven forbid), well done. When you eat at an authentic French restaurant, you really only have two options: blue-rare or rare. If you ask for anything more cooked than that, upon careful observation, you will notice your waiter’s eyebrow rise just a little — a gesture of disapproval commonly used by French waiters and British butlers. The chef will consider you to be a lost cause and bring out that less-than-stellar piece of beef that had been set aside for an uncouth palate such as yours. After all, the way the chef sees it, why waste a prime piece of meat on someone that doesn’t know how to enjoy it? Besides, the well-done steak tastes almost like a sub-prime piece of meat anyway, so why not help it along a little? Of course, being a steak-snob was not my intention at……
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My culinary adventures started with an old, battered, whistling pressure cooker from the 60s delivered to my doorstep in a USPS flat-rate box. It was all my family could do from India to keep me from starving all alone in the US.
I do research in a lab for a living, run regularly to stay healthy, dream of travelling the world, fuss over my two cats, and adore my husband, Keith. 
