Blog Bites #1: The Round Up

All this month, until March 25, 2010, the first Blog Bites challenge is to use your pressure cooker or rice cooker or slow cooker and try a recipe from another food blog.

Watch this space to see the entries, as they come trickling in. Newest entries are listed first so everyone gets their turn at the top of the post.

March 25. Sayantani made Bread N Butter Pudding from her mother's recipe.

Blog Bites #1: Cookers

Monthly Blog Patrol, fondly known as MBP, was one of my favorite blog events. The idea was to choose a theme each month and make a recipe using another food blog as the inspiration. Coffee of The Spice Cafe started this event, and there were many fun rounds, including One Pot Wonders, Say Cheese and Street Food. I myself hosted one edition here, Less is More, for recipes using 5 or fewer

A Home-style Punjabi Dal

In all seasons and every kind of weather, I need my dal-chawal (lentils-rice) fix every few days. The particular hunger for dal-chawal is just not satiated by any other kind of comfort food. Luckily, between the various regional cuisines of India, there are enough types of dal to keep me happy and well-fed for several more decades.

For last night's dinner, I dusted off a long-bookmarked dal

I Dream of Summer: Pistachio Kulfi

By the time mid-February rolls around, people around here get very fidgety. And by people, I mean me. It feels like winter has been around for years, and I am eager to bypass the next few weeks on the calendar and head straight for April or May, when the fresh produce finally hits the markets and when I can go for a walk without 10 minutes of coat-buttoning and scarf-wrapping.

When friends

Feeding a Crowd: Wraps, Indian Style

To someone like me who usually cooks small portions for my family of two, cooking for a crowd needs a little bit of planning and some simple math to scale up the recipes. Today, I made a tray of wraps for a potluck, and I wanted to jot down the proportions for future reference.

These wraps have some Indian flair, stuffed with a crunchy salad and either a paneer pepper filling or a vegan chickpea

Mushroom Soup with Potstickers

You've probably noticed that One Hot Stove has a new look. On Friday, I was in a mood to do some long-overdue renovation in this space, so I cleared out the clutter and painted the walls in pure white for the cleanest look possible. Now I think the look of the blog better reflects the way I want my life to be- uncluttered and simple. The biggest change is that I now have pages (like the recipe

Making Yogurt at Home

Before I begin this post, I have a question for you all. A reader sent me this description and asked if I could identify this fruit/vegetable. I am stumped and have no idea at all. The reader asked,

" I was hoping you could help me identify a fruit that I ate in India. It looked like an edamame/soybean pod with prominent bulges. If you peeled away the green part, the insides were several pods

Egg Salad, Indian Style

Many weekends, you will find V and me sitting huddled at a table with 6 other people, in a school gym or church meeting hall or some such venue, trying to answer really random questions in a trivia fundraiser. It is a very St. Louis thing, apparently.

Trivia games are fueled by the steady consumption of soda and popcorn (free! from the sponsors!) and whatever snacks the competitors bring to the

Vegetable Bread Soup

Today's recipe is a Friday night fridge-cleaning special. I had several dried shriveled crusts and end-chunks of bread sitting in the fridge for a week. For a moment there, I was tempted to sigh and toss them out. But truthfully, food waste is the most regretful and avoidable thing of all, and stale bread, no matter how dried out, has infinite potential to be recycled into good food.

As a kid,

One Hot Stove Turns 5!

After V recovered from his seasonal cough and cold, it was my turn to have a bout of sickness and that's why I disappeared from this space for a while, spending quality time hacking away on the couch.

But enough about that. This is an exciting day for me, because this wee blog celebrates her fifth birthday today! And to celebrate the day, I wrote a suitably long-winded post.

How time flies...