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Spicy Black Eyed Peas and Kale Soup
This is a new take on an old favorite . Our new house has a large vegetable patch solely dedicated to many varieties of kale. And while I have always wanted to be someone who eats a lot of kale, the truth is I barely cook with kale always finding it a little on the bitter side.  However now this flourishing vegetable patch is forcing me to find ways to add kale to our meals. The easiest way to get more of kale for newbees is to add it in your favorite soups or daals - paired with a little tartness from lemons, kale really shines in these preparations. This particular soup has black eyed peas - my favorite legume! It can be as thick or as soupy as you want. Mine is usually on the thick side. I love to serve this with a dollop of cream cheese or greek yogurt and some freshly chopped green onions or chives. No bread. But you could also make it a lot thinner (just add more water or stock) and serve with a crusty bread for dipping.  Recipe: Serves 6 …

To Home Cooking & Family Dinners....
About time to say good-bye to 2015 - can't believe another year has gone by! It's time for me to be thankful for the little joys this year has brought and review how well the resolutions held up. On the food front, 2015 was a great year of eating more family dinners together at our household.  Mostly all home cooked. We are not big on takeouts. And I have a whole stash of 30 minute recipes so putting a simple and healthy dinner on table even on crazy weekdays has never been a hassle as long as you have a well stocked pantry and fridge. I truly feel there isn't a more important way to take care of ourselves than managing what we eat. What we eat influences our health & beauty, happiness, stamina to work/productivity and increasingly I am finding out that it heavily influences family bondings too! A simple home cooked meal is the best way to manage what we eat - and it doesn't have to be very fancy either. A pot of hot soup wi…

Leek and Potato Soup
If the soups were to have personalities, I think this leek and potato soup will be the simplest and the humblest of the once I cook. Yet, there is something so homely and deliciously satisfying about gulping bowls of this hot soup on cold wintry evenings that you will not feel like you are missing any fancy ingredients or embellishments! This soup has few ingredients and as long as I buy leek from farmer's market, all other ingredients are pantry staples which is a huge plus for weeknight dinners. It is also very quick cooking - about 20minutes. And the recipe is forgiving so no worries if you are multi-tasking in kitchen or playing with kids while a pot of this is bubbling away! (Incidentaly, I really need to spend more than the 5 secs I have gotten used to spending on my food photos. I went down from an SLR to a Canon decent mid-ranger to my Nexus5 phone for photos and the quality has relatively taken nose-dive too. And while this phone does an okay…

Naankhatai - Indian Eggless Shortbread Cookies
As a kid growing up, I always looked forward to our bakery visits. There was only one reputed bakery in our town - and something about the freshly baked breads and warm pastries there was so enticing to me even as a child -- just as it still is now :)  We rarely baked at our home while growing up. Now I think it must have been because of lack of oven in most Indian homes at the time. So us kids were always in a treat visiting bakery! The one item I bought every time there was naankhatai. Naankhatai is Indian shortbread eggless cookies; meant to be dunked into Chai -- which I did a lot of growing up! I never bought naankhatai in US though plenty of Indian stores sell it here - it just never felt the same as the freshly baked once I was used to eating. So I have been meaning to try my hand at baking naankhatai this holiday season. I was surprised at how easy it is. I made 2 batches. The picture below is from batch #2 where I reduced the butter and s…

Merry Christmas and Have a Very Happy Holidays!
A very merry Christmas and happy holidays from the kitchen of Ginger & Garlic to yours! We hope your holidays are filled with lots of happiness, relaxing time with those you love and lots and lots of cooking and/or eating! We will be back soon with some fresh content but meanwhile here are some of our Christmas themed posts over the years: Mommy & me Christmas Cookies: 2013 , 2014 & 2015 Edible Christmas Tree  (pictured below) Roasting Chestnuts Holiday Craft Projects Espresso Chocolate Truffles

Oven Baked Crispy Sweet Potato Fries
T'is the season for sweet potatoes and I have just the perfect recipe for you! Everyone loves fries and these sweet potato fries are oven baked yet crispy and have just the right sweet notes paired with the hint of heat from black pepper and crushed red peppers. In the winter months, our oven is always working very hard as we cook most of our winter meals in oven. Since the oven is alwats toasty, I often like to throw these in last minute and they serve great either as appetizers or sides to Indian or non-Indian meals. Recipe is quite straight-forward. Pre-heat oven to 420F. Trim the ends off and peel the sweet potatoes. Then cut them into wedges using a sharp Chef's knife. Season the wedges with olive oil, salt, pepper and a pinch of crushed red pepper (optional). Mix well so each wedge is covered in seasoning. Spread the wedges in an even single layer on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Be very sure to not overcrowd (been there, done …

Holiday Pinwheels (Green and Red Pesto Pinwheels)
These pinwheels are so easy to put together, so delicious and are the perfect party appetizers. And in the spirit of holidays, I chose to make them with holiday colors of green and red -- making them the perfect holiday pinwheels! Recipe: 1) Make (or buy) basil pesto - grind together basil leaves, olive oil, parmesan cheese, roasted pine nuts, one clove of garlic, salt & pepper - set aside 2) Make sundried tomato pesto - grind together sundried tomatoes (I used once packed in oil), a clove of garlic, parmesean cheese, salt -  set aside 3) Thaw puff pastry dough per package instructions. Each package contains 2 sheets. One sheet will give you about 10 pinwheels. 4) Generously flour a large cutting board or work surface, spread the puff pastry dough. Spread basil pesto on the bottom half of pasty in a thin and even layer (leaving half an inch of each side bare to roll). Spread thin and even layer of sundried tomato pesto on the other hal…

A Rainy Party Menu...
We hosted a birthday party at our home recently. And as is expected with any December parties, one way or the other they evolve into holiday parties - there is just so much holiday spirit around! I have used restaurant catering for every single event of 30-40 people we hosted so far. And after each event I resolved to cater the next one myself. Well, for one reason or another it never materialized.. that is until this one. The day turned out to be stormy and rainy. When the weather forecast didn't show signs of budging, what best to do than to make use of it --- change the party menu to evolve around the rainy foods and warm, homy aromas! So that's exactly what I did. Drinks: We had the wine and the beer and the coke, but the warm drinks which greeted the guests were spiced mulled apple cider (love it!! and so easy to put together) and of-course a large thermos full of ginger chai . We also kept a hot water dispenser and a couple of bagged …

Christmas Cookies
Continuing with our own cooked up mother-daughter tradition of 2013 and 2014 , this year also we baked many cookies, shared them with friends and family during a holiday get together and ate them in delight! This year we made a mix of sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies with the focus on cookie decoration. Sugar cookie recipe was the same tried and trusted one from here  - proportions quartered. Gingerbread cookie recipe was from here  with the only difference that I completely cut the white sugar and added local wildflower honey instead. Cookies weren't sweet per say, which is what I wanted, but had just a bite of sweetness from the icing and were perfect with a hot cup of coffee (huge plus!). I'll probably go back to using molasses in gingerbread cookies next year, for the intense sweetness and the color. As for the decoration we used the standard tubes of holidays colors green and red from grocery store with plain white icing leftover from a…

Easy breezy pad thai
I have always had a love-hate relationship with pad thai. My first taste of pad thai was at a Thai restaurant in San Diego. An evening out on a student budget used to be a huge treat then! A group of us visited a decently good bus accessible Thai place we used to pass en-route to university. As it was our very first Thai experience, we asked the waitress to order whatever she likes within budget and she ordered this extremely tasty spicy pad thai followed by coconut ice-cream! I absolutely loved the flat rice noodles drenched in a tangy, hot and sweet sauce with crunchy peanuts on top. Over the time though I realized that a good pad thai is hard to come by. Many times either the sauce is too strong or the whole dish is oily.. After a few unfortunate encounters with pad thai I switched my go-to Thai dish from pad thai to a green curry which probabilistically is always decent (yes, I calculate probabilities when ordering food). But the cravings for a that…

Preschooler Lunchbox Tips and Ideas
The first time I faced the daunting task of preparing lunchboxes for my preschooler, I have to admit I was worried. I have been spending hours in kitchen for years, but let me tell you, pleasing a preschooler with his/her healthy lunchbox is not a simple task! As always before starting a new endeavor, I scourged the web for tips and recipes. I found lots of good once for kids but not as many for preschoolers or 3-4 year olds. I wanted the lunchbox recipes to be healthy, home-made and quick with no more than 10mins in the morning to assemble! So below is a compilation of my tips and some tried-and-tasted lunchbox ideas which I hope will come handy to other new moms faced with the daunting task of preschool lunchboxes :) Some tips to make the daily lunch boxes hassle free: Bento style lunchboxes with a little bit of everything works best for preschoolers. I add one portion savory meal, one portion fruits, one portion vegetable, one portion dairy and a swe…

Couscous Mint Chutney Side
If you are in a hurry and want a healthy side or a big serving of a side-salad as your main course, this recipe is a great idea!  If you are not familiar with couscous, it's a Moroccan/Middle-Eastern grain made out of semolina which is cooked by streaming. Yeah, just steaming and that too cooks in minutes! Making it an ideal pantry staple for every busy cooks who wants to put something healthy and home-cooked on table or in lunchboxes in minutes!  If you are looking to be a bit carb conscious this year, then  Quinoa , another wonder grain packed with protein is also a great substitute for couscous. Or the good old rice of-course works great. This is also a great lunch box meal. Mint chutney is another staple at our home. I tend to buy 2-3 huge bunches of fresh mint whenever I see them in season. And then I make a big pot of this chutney, really "making" is an overkill, it's all about throwing things in blender :) Use half the chutney …

Black Eyed Peas Fritters (chavaliche bonde)
There is a really good reason behind why I never posted these fritters here even though I have made them countless times before. And that is because I never managed to get a photo. And there is a really good reason behind why I never managed to get a photo. And that is because everytime I make it, each and every one of them gets over in about 15mins after they are out of the fryer :) So, I am going to post them today anyway even though I still don't have a photo. You just have to take my word for it that these are amazing and a sure to be crowd pleasers. This is a fried snack which I make when we have guests over. If I am in the mood for fritters just for us at home, I make a baked version which is also noted below. Fried version of course gets a better crunch but other than that they both taste the same. Recipe: Serves 4 Ingredients: 1C dried black eyed peas 2 strands green onions handful of fresh cilantro 2 cloves of garlic 1/2tsp …

Roasted Red Pepper & Tomato Soup
Winter has finally made it's appearance loud and clear. Temperatures have been steadily dropping last few days, evenings are chilly, mornings are frosty and my hot cup of cocoa is just that much more warming to body and soul - and that means one thing in our household, lots and lots of soups! On many winter weekend our quick lunch is a pot of soup with some thick crusted sourdough bread brushed with olive oil and broiled at high temperature with just a rub of a fresh garlic clove. Throw in some salad (my favorites are  couscous with butternut squash and dried cranberries salad  or  quinoa salad  or a simple greens salad topped with some fruits and nuts dressed with an easy olive oil red wine vinegerate) and it's my perfect meal any time of day any season of the year.. This soup is my favorite and there are endless variations I keep trying on it. The recipe below is a slight adaptation of an old recipe I had posted earlier (but no new photos this ti…

Instant Shrikhand (Sweet Thick Yogurt with Saffron)
I am not a person with a sweet tooth but as it happens often my daughter is.! So after years of hiatus from sweet recipes I am starting to poke my hand back into the dessert section. Even though we love Indian main course and appetizers, almost always when I think of desserts I think Italian, American - Tiramisu, cakes, puddings and pies or the simple ice-cream! The two exceptions being Shrikhand (sweet thick yogurt with Saffron and nuts) and puran poli (sweet roti) both of which are Indian/Maharashtrian sweets our family loves. The characteristics of a shrikhand is a thick yogurt which is usually achieved by tightly wrapped regular yogurt in a cheesecloth and hanging it in fridge using a spatula and a pan for hours until most of the water in the yogurt drips out and you are left with a thick shrikhand class yogurt. However if you have access to greek yogurt, which now a days is available in pretty much all supermarkets, then the whole process of shr…

OT: Holiday Craft Project Update (Crocheted Very Hungry Caterpillar Hat & Quilled Children's Flower Card)
Holidays are a perfect time for small craft projects to get your creative juices flowing. And really, if you are caught at home with chilling cold and short daylight outside, these craft projects are a really good way to keep everyone occupied in a productive way without bringing the house down! This holiday we made two small projects. First, a crocheted very hungry caterpillar hat for my daughter. She loves the book and was super excited about this hat, so much so that she made two trips to Michael's with me and stood patiently while I selected the yarn and the needle and even made some useful color suggestions :) It has been years since I last crocheted. I enjoy knitting and crochet but my day job takes over most of the time I have (though no complaints there, it's a rarity to be able to earn your bread doing something you love and I don't take that for granted!). But after years of yarn hiatus I was starting to worry if I forgot the y…

The One Food Resolution Everyone Should Consider for The New Year....
Happy new year to everyone! As we say Good-bye to 2014 and welcome 2015 with open arms and with lots of hopes and expectations for a happy, prosperous and fun-filled new year, it's also the perfect time to make resolutions! Review what was good about the past year and identify where things could improve for the new year. If there is one food resolution which is most near and dear to my heart for many years now it is to eat home-cooked meals often and buy locally and seasonally grown food as much as possible. Before global transportation was as pervasive (think our grandparent's generation), eating local and seasonal is what everyone did. You ate apples in fall, squashes and tomatoes in summer and strawberries in spring - it was all part of enjoying the season. And you preserved or pickled seasonal vegetables to enjoy year-around.. Then happened global transportation boom and food industrialization - both resulted in foods being easily transpor…