Then and now - my life before the Madhur Jaffrey project...

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

It's been a few months since I talked about cooking, but work continues on cooking this cookbook.

From Weekend crafting

Noodles with spinach and mung-bean sprouts (Jan 30, 2011)


Now, if you remember, I extended my deadline to July 1, 2011. And then, my life became crazy busy in Sept/Oct/Nov/Dec, and I barely cooked at all. Which means that I wasted away all my spare time, and I'm once again stuck with a ton of recipes to cook in a very short time. (To be specific, I have 200 recipes left to go, ~140 days to do it in.)

Which brings me to yesterday.

I'm not a morning person, by any means, but yesterday, I:

(1) woke up at 6.30 am.
(2) pulled all the ingredients for a couple of pickles together and started cooking them (frantic cooking!)
(3) looked at the refrigerator, realized my enoki mushrooms needed to be cooked - asap! - and make a soup from the book (the only reason I'm buying enoki mushrooms is the cookbook, sigh.)
(4) soaked chickpeas and wheatberries (again, bought only for the book)
(5) and then left for work.

In the evening, I came back from work, and:
(1) cursed a lot. :)
(2) made a miso soup from the book
(3) made two vegetable recipes from the book
(4) cooked up the chickpeas I'd soaked
(5) cleared up the disaster zone my kitchen had become
(6) and then went to bed.

Ok, fine, I also watched a couple of How I Met Your Mother episodes, and had time to cut out a skirt lining, but that's pretty much it.

I'm now fantasizing about the day this project will be done, and I can once again return to activities like waking up late, sitting on the couch, sewing, watching movies, reading books, and the like.

Catching up on a couple weeks of cooking

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

The Madhur Jaffrey project has made me cook almost every day, but it is pretty boring posting photos of food daily. However, here's what I've been cooking lately...

August 23, 2010 - Chickpea, Cabbage & Dill Soup
I'm not going to lie, I ate this soup non-stop till it got over. It was yummy.


August 29 & 30, 2010 - a bit of a cooking spree, brought on by a refrigerator groaning with food.

August 29, 2010
Peas with Parsley and Coconut


Kookoo with Roasted Eggplant


Turnips cooked in Dashi


August 30, 2010
Cabbage with Carrot & Scallions


Zucchini stuffed with Smoked Eggplant


Peas with Ginger (shown on a plate with Rice with Millet and Turnips cooked in Dashi)


September 5, 2010 - Chickpea & Green Bean Salad

This is the photo I forgot to take the other day...

Long weekend cooking

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

When your refrigerator is *overflowing* with vegetables, sometimes, you just have to spend some time and cook it all. And this is what I spent most of yesterday doing, sigh. On the plus side though, I've easily enough food for the next week.

Sept 5, 2010 - Pecel (served with Peanut Sambal)


Pressed bean curd with cabbage


Beet and tomato soup


Kohlrabi with chinese black mushrooms


Spinach with fermented bean curd


I also made a Chickpea & Green Bean salad, but evidently I forgot to take pictures. Good thing there are leftovers - I'll go take a picture this afternoon.

Experiments in Kimchee making

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

I've either made Dong Chimi (White Radish Water Kimchee) - or I've made a bottle of salmonella-infested paste, waiting to kill me.

Dong Chimi (White Radish Water Kimchee) - August 29, 2010


Ok, I'm being dramatic. I tasted some a few days ago, I'm still here. I think it is ok. Cooking horizons are being stretched.

But any kimchee makers (or anyone who knows what Dong Chimi is supposed to look like) - why is mine so cloudy? Is it supposed to be?

It's a cat's kitchen...

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

To paraphrase Karen:

It's a cat's kitchen... I just cook in it.

See something?


Here's who was hidden behind the dishes.


I had my back turned for 3 seconds, I swear. Biscuit is quick to make mischief.

Oh, the food? I made Mung dal na poora (Savory mung dal pancakes with onions) last night. Here's a photo of the batter (turmeric makes it yellow...)


And here's a photo of the finished pancakes. I had these for dinner, breakfast and lunch - they were very yummy. (And easy to make. Just some pre-soaking and grinding involved.)

Monday night dinner

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

I got *no* sewing done this weekend, and won't have any time during the week either, which is annoying! However, I did hit up the farmer's market near my parents, and in an effort to use up groceries before they withered and died, I spent a bit of time cooking last night.

I made a lot of Korean and Japanese food - delicious! A friend joined me for dinner, and she was noticing how I now have a lot of specialized ingredients to cook Korean and Japanese food (like rice vinegar, mirin, sesame oil, etc). True, it did take a bit to accumulate all of them, but now, these five dishes took about an hour and a half to make - easy! (And a sharp knife is very useful when julienning carrots & radish...)

Monday night dinner - Aug 16, 2010 (from top left, clockwise) - Green Beans with Soy Sauce, Carrot and white radish salad, Cucumber and dried shiitake mushroom salad, Rice with Millet, drizzed with Simple Korean Sauce

Thursday night dinner with parents

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

While I *refuse* to sew for other people, I really enjoy cooking for other people. Plus, my parents were going to bring me some sewing patterns, so I told them to stay and eat dinner with me.

Easy cooking, this! An hour - start to finish, and I made, with no rushing at all, three Middle-Eastern dishes - Frozen lima beans, braised with swiss chard and dill (from Iran), Baba Ghanoush, and a Cold yogurt soup with barley. Served it with store-bought pita bread for a nice, low-key weeknight meal.

Mangoes with glutinous rice

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

I try to preserve my Monday nights and stay at home. It typically gives me a chance to cook some, clean some, and sew some.

Yesterday however, we had a mini-party to celebrate a friend's birthday. It was a wine & dessert party. (John's vegan, and therefore, cheese is out.) Originally, I thought I'd make coconut flan, until I realized - duh - that flan has eggs. Instead, I made mangoes with glutinous rice. It was really easy to make (just mix the cooked rice with coconut cream and sugar), and very tasty.



This new, slower pace of the Madhur Jaffrey project is working well for me. It's summer - I really don't want to be in the kitchen. (Or in the sewing room, for that matter.) I want to explore the city, to soak in the sun, and to chill on patios. I'll get back to lots of cooking in winter, when there's nothing else to do.

Monday night's cooking frenzy

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

When in Montreal, I lunched at the market, and stumbled upon some morel mushrooms. They were ridiculously expensive, but I had two recipes that called for them, so I sucked it up and bought them. They dried up somewhat by the time I was able to use them, but I rehydrated in some hot water, and they were fine.

With the morels, I made Morel Mushrooms with Peas, and Kashmiri-style gucchi pullao.




Since I had a ton of groceries in my frig, I also made Brown rice with spinach, Spinach cooked in a Bihari style, Cauliflower and peas with yogurt and Besan (A savory, chickpea flour quiche).






I promptly gave my parents the brown rice with spinach, since my frig was overflowing with food.

I was in the kitchen from 5.30pm until midnight. I stopped for about an hour to give a friend some career advice, and maybe watched a half hour of mindless TV, but that was still a lot of cooking. (I am a slow cook when I follow a recipe, I guess, since I don't really work on multiple recipes in parallel. I'd wither and die in a professional kitchen.) I'm really quite insane.

And I (sort-of) give up!

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

Ok, here's where it stands.

- I started with 484 recipes to cook.
- I've cooked 174 (~36%) - leaving me 310 recipes to cook in 6 months.

And this is, ladies and gentlemen, the point where I throw my hands up in despair and reexamine this.

I've seen the writing on the wall for a few months now. But I was determined to plow through.

Then, I stopped to think of why I was doing this, and whether I was doing all the other things on my list this year.

I had a theme for the year - a year of consistency. I wanted to clean consistently, cook consistently, sew consistently, and do other things like learn French, attend lectures, etc. The Madhur Jaffrey project has, however, because of its sheer size, taken over. My apartment is a shambles, my Burdas lie untouched (although contributing to that is the sheer suckiness of the offerings in the last six months), and I'm pretty sure Biscuit hates me.

It is time to reconsider.

The goal was to force me to cook new things consistently - so I'm pushing my deadline back. I'm adding 6 months to the clock. Which means I have to cook a managable 6.46 recipes a week. I can do that.

New deadline - July 1st, 2011.

(I spent Monday evening cooking 6 dishes, so I'm almost done for this week. Yay.)

PS: My mom thought I was stressing myself out by cooking all these recipes. That isn't precisely true. I still really enjoy the cooking process, and in a perfect world where the amount of spare time I had was doubled or tripled, I would love to cook 310 recipes in 6 months. However, the stress was that so many things were being left undone, and I didn't feel balanced at all.

April Cooking Catch-Up

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

My computer has been having issues. I'm at relatively serious risk of losing all my data, and I spent most of yesterday evening backing up data. And so I better post my April pictures, before it is too late...

April 6, My parents came over for lunch, I cooked up a feast.

April 6, 2010 (Lunch with parents): Potatoes with chickpeas; Tabouleh; Yogurt with Roasted Eggplant (and store-bought pita)

I even made dessert - zucchini halwa.


April 8, 2010 (Dinner with a friend): Creamed Eggplant


April 17, 2010: Breakfast for friends visiting from Michigan - Omelette with a spicy tomato stuffing (during the cooking process, and closed on a plate)



April 21, 2010 dinner: Green Beans and Peas with Ginger


April 24, 2010 Cooking: Vangi Bhat (Rice and egglpant cooked in Maharashtrian Style)
Lunch with a friend. We were hanging out, and I didn't want to go out to eat.


April 25, 2010 Cooking: (in sequence) Bean Curd with Chinese Parsley, Japanese Cucumber Salad, Potato Stew, Hot and Spicy Hyderabadi Tomato Chutney, Cacik (Cold Yogurt Soup in a Turkish Style)

May Cooking Round-up

Read more here about the Madhur Jaffrey project - one of my 2010 goals. For an index of recipes, click here.

Like I said, May was a terrible cooking month. I barely cooked, which has the unexpected benefit of making this post relatively easy to write.

May 2, 2010 Cooking: In sequence, Stir-fried asparagus flavored with sesame oil; Chickpea and tomato stew; Sawsawang kamatis (Filipino tomato salad); Korean-style cucumber salad





May 3, 2010 Breakfast: Sauteed bean curd, with Korean dipping sauce number 2


I woke up early one morning, and made some food - both the stir-fried bitter melon, and the salad of mung-bean sprouts and egg strands. I then proceeded to eat the salad for breakfast, which sounds weird, but was delicious.

May 7, 2010: In sequence, stir-fried bitter melon; salad of mung-bean sprouts and egg strands



I had a potluck for Mother's Day, and I actually made my mother cook. Am I a horrible daughter? Still, I did cook. I made a bunch of Indian food.

I'm South Indian, and was especially curious about how the potatoes and sambar would taste. Pretty credible - I'm impressed to note. The sambar isn't quite the way I'd make it, but it was pretty tasty.

Potluck Brunch May 9, 2010: In sequence, Very spicy, delicious chickpeas; Potatoes and onions; Sambar




This is what my friend Anna thought of the food. :)


May 24, 2010 cooking for the week: In sequence, Green beans with onion, garlic and tomato; Bean curd with broccoli