Photo credits : Shymon
Parippuvada is a popular evening tea-time snack in Kerala. Spicy and crispy, the dish is often made from chana dal, green chili, curry leaves, ginger, onion and salt. After the ingredients are ground, the mix is rolled into small patties and deep fried. Continue reading
Photo credits: Shymon
Banana leaves are used in many traditional dishes in South India, often wrapped around the food before it is cooked. Food wrapped in banana leaves can be grilled, steamed or deep fried. In Kerala, banana leaves are frequently used as a completely biodegradable “plate” in a Sadya (traditional Kerala meals), but they serve many other purposes as well. Continue reading
Sarah Anne Ward for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Maeve Sheridan. Parmesan-Crusted Rack of Lamb
With Spice Harbour‘s restaurant, 51, open and having passed through the swelter of late summer, we find ourselves sampling new dishes that work well in a water-front setting during these luscious monsoon showers.
At the same time, we are approaching the opening of what we believe will be Kerala’s most fabulous beach resort and its restaurant will offer cuisine worthy of this sort of a “comfort zone” hideaway.
Between Spice Harbour and Marari Pearl we have done more sampling (someone has to do it) than is generally good for the waistline, but we are committed, dear reader, to your comfort.
Photo credits: Renuka Menon
Idly is a popular breakfast food of South India. The main ingredients for this healthy and simple traditional food are rice, black gram dal and salt. Continue reading
Shutterstock/KuLouKu
We appreciate the increased interest, across all the media we track, to the cultural and environmental aspects of beer production. Thanks to the Atlantic‘s intrepid investigators for this one:
In late November of 2009, the town of Cockermouth, in the Lake District of England, had a flood. Heavy rains—16 inches in 24 hours—led the rivers Cocker and Derwent to overflow their stone barriers; the buildings of the medieval town, as a result, ended up submerged in 10 feet of water. Among those buildings was Jennings Brewery, one of the few establishments in the world that brews real ale—a beer, rich and dark and featuring a texture that connoisseurs might call “chewy.” Real ale is, to the extent that beers resemble animals, endangered. This is partly because it requires a very particular type of yeast in its brewing: a yeast that, during fermentation, sits on top of the wort, the sugary liquid extracted from the mashing process, rather than sinking to the bottom. Continue reading
Photo credits: Renuka Menon
Poori is a deep fried flat bread made of wheat flour. A dough is prepared by mixing fine maida flour with water and a spoonful of ghee, which is then divided into small balls. These balls are flattened using a rolling pin and individually deep fried in cooking oil. Continue reading
Photo Credit: Jithin Vijay
Kerala Egg Masala is a tasty and simple gravy dish which goes well with Kerala style palappam. A favorite dish for breakfast, the main ingredients for making egg masala is boiled egg, grated coconut, chili powder, coriander powder, onion, tomato and garam masala.
Photo credits: Nobi Pauls
Tapioca is traditionally used in all Kerala cuisine, almost three to four days weekly, usually as breakfast or dinner. The root is prepared in a wide variety of ways. Boiled tapioca and green chili with onion chutney is one method; another is boiled tapioca mixed with grated coconut, chili, turmeric and salt. Continue reading
Photo credits: Jithin Vijay
An easy to make Kerala original, Sambaram is a spicey, refreshing drink perfect for a hot summer climate. Traditionally used as a welcome drink in all Kerala homes, it is also served at the end of Kerala fest which helps in improving the digestion. Continue reading
Photo credit: Jithin Vijay
Kozhakkatta is a traditional, easy to make evening snack. The sweet dish is a steamed rice flour dumpling filled with jaggery, cardamom powder and grated coconut.
Tasters have compared Soylent to Cream of Wheat and “my grandpa’s Metamucil.” Photograph by Henry Hargreaves.
Life without food as we know it? After our inspiration and efforts to launch 51, and all kinds of other good reasons to love food as we know it (and all the forms of food we have yet to know), some tech fellows want to do away with all that? Food without form that we can recognize is fine for short term bursts of unusual pleasure, but not as a dominant replacement. We will resist and delay this as long as our breath and imaginations hold out:
In December of 2012, three young men were living in a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, working on a technology startup. They had received a hundred and seventy thousand dollars from the incubator Y Combinator, but their project—a plan to make inexpensive cell-phone towers—had failed. Down to their last seventy thousand dollars, they resolved to keep trying out new software ideas until they ran out of money. But how to make the funds last? Rent was a sunk cost. Since they were working frantically, they already had no social life. As they examined their budget, one big problem remained: food. Continue reading
Photo credits: Jithin
Ela ada is an authentic recipe of Kerala cuisine. A mixture of grated coconut, sugar and cardamom is layered inside a rice flour batter and wrapped in banana leaf and steamed. It is served as evening snack. Continue reading
Photo credits: Jithin
Mambazha Pulissery is a classic Kerala sweet and sour ripe mango curry. Traditionally it’s made using ripe, small mangos cooked in their own juice. The main ingredients are small mango fruit, turmeric powder, red chili, grated coconut, green chili, cumin seeds, coconut oil and curd. Continue reading
From Plate 205: Limon Caietanus by Giovanni Battista Ferrari (1584-1665)
Helena Attlee
THE LAND WHERE LEMONS GROW
The story of Italy and its citrus fruit
272pp. Particular Books. £20.
978 1 84614 430 2
The views, not to mention recent temperatures, lead most guests to sit outdoors with the breeze on the deck, on either the ground level or mezzanine, watching the fishermen haul in their catches, or the tug boats, or the ferries. 51 is alive with citrus in these sea level summer days and evenings, starting with a tall glass of iced minted-lime cooler, continuing with a chilled avgolemono soup; and so on. Clarissa Hyman, a freelance food and travel writer, catches our attention with this book review in the Times Literary Supplement:
A paradox pervades the Sicilian citrus groves and gardens. The scent is intoxicating but too often the fruit lies rotten on the ground, unwanted and worthless. In this maddening, singular island, where they say the sun drives you crazy and the moon makes you sad, the irony is your breakfast orange juice will most likely be diluted, long-life concentrate from oranges grown in Brazil. Continue reading
Photo Credit: Renjith
Pesaha Appam is a traditional food made by Kerala Christians only during Maundy Thursday, the Thursday of holy week. The eldest member of the family blesses and cuts the Appam and distributes it to the rest of the family members. Continue reading
51-spiced vegetables, wrapped in chickpea crepe, with summer tomato coulis
It is good to sit by the water at lunchtime, on occasion, and read while tasting something new (thanks, kitchen!). Here, an incidental passage from a book review that fit yesterday’s midday meal at 51:
…When my grandmother taught me to make banana pancakes, which we did every Wednesday night through much of my childhood, she would counsel “Hold the bowl” as I stirred, which became, in our letters to each other, code for “I love you.” At the beginning of Nigel Slater’s memoir “Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger,” the author puts it this way: “It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.”
Surely none of this was on my mind on April 5, 2013, when I purchased “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,” by Deborah Madison. I had, exactly a month previously, met a swell fellow, who happened to be vegetarian… Continue reading
Photograph by Brian Ach/Getty
The kitchen team at 51 has gone from concept and recipe development, to food trials, to opening and ongoing operations, to continued taste tests, rather nonstop for months. They have risen to the challenge–Malabar cuisine showing off its Eastern Mediterranean multicultural influences–and surprised our palates pleasurably. But now a quick break with a fun story, for the team at 51.
Everyone loves a well-planned and meticulously executed surprise when the outcome is a big smile. Why not chefs, too? Chef stories are on our radar lately and this one, if it is to be believed in all details, has a surprise within a surprise in that these culinary artists who have all “made it” still deem to sleep in modest accommodation in the interest of pulling off the party of a lifetime, in secret, for someone they care about:
For forty-eight hours this week, some of the world’s most acclaimed chefs, who hold twenty Michelin stars and myriad awards between them, were living in hiding in New York City. The twenty non-New Yorkers were sequestered together deep in Williamsburg, in dingy rental apartments with thin mattresses on wooden slats, horrible lighting, and half-eaten bags of Doritos strewn about. Continue reading
Awesome people get invited places. Awesome people who cook well, probably even more so. We think Flynn, who we first learned about when he was 13 years old, and who we were reminded about more recently in his 15th year of awesomeness, qualifies:
At the age of ten, Flynn McGarry wanted to cook. He began practicing his knife skills afterschool, and then soon after started creating dishes, simple at first, for a few of his mother’s friends. At eleven, came the purchase of Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry cookbook, then Grant Achatz’s Alinea. The influence was immediate…
As noted more than once recently, development of 51 and Spice Harbour have sensitized us to the intersection between food, art, and design so Flynn’s story continues to thrill us. Continue reading
Photo credits: Sachin
Both delicious and easy to prepare, Mango Pickle is an important condiment addition to most Kerala meals. The main ingredients of this spicy and tangy condiment are raw mango, salt, red chili powder, turmeric powder, fenugreek seeds, fennel seeds, mustard oil and vinegar.
Chefs are rapidly turning vegetables into the cash cow of the cookbook trade. Illustration by Serge Bloch.
If you are a New Yorker subscriber and a foodie, you look forward to the Food issue, which comes out in November each year, and anything written, at any time, by Jane Kramer. For good reason, the latter. Case in point:
Three years ago, I retired the chili party that I used to give in Italy at the end of August. This was a shame, because I liked my party, and thought that the chili made a nice reprieve from the ubiquitous barbecues of summer. Two of the twenty-four regulars at my party were vegetarians—one reluctantly, under a doctor’s orders. A doable number, it seemed to me: for years, I put out a bowl of pasta al pesto just for them. Then, from one chili party to the next, everything changed. Continue reading
Organikos 