Three Nearly-Instant Recipes, and a Book Meme

It really is the most wonderful time of the year, the season of parties and reunions, of noshing with abandon and of sighing over the passage of yet another year in the blink of an eye. My longing to spend long hours cooking and baking always peaks at this time of year. Here are three recipes I made recently that resulted in near-instant gratification. Two of them rely on store-bought puff pastry

Hot Chocolate Mix: A Quick Holiday Gift

It has been a whole month since my parents went back home to India and three weeks since I went back to work full time. I has steeled myself for a chaotic and stressful phase as we settled into life on our own- Lila and Dalu and V and me, but happily things have been going so much better than I expected. Weekday evenings are devoted to Lila's care, a routine of oil massage and bath and story time

Cherry Pie and Other Sweetness

When Lila was just 3 weeks old, my mother and I decided to take an afternoon off from the 24/7 care that a newborn needs. Both of us love to cook and bake, and we both are lifelong students who enjoy learning new things. Fighting our sleep deprivation and exhaustion, we left the babe in her dad's expert care along with a bottle of expressed breast milk and spent a lovely Sunday afternoon taking a

Green Bean- Potato Bake

Thank you for saying hello to my little girl- I so appreciate all the good wishes and blessings. We read every comment with a grateful heart. Life with Miss Baby has been wonderful and incredibly busy; my mother has been making many quick and delicious meals to keep us well nourished.

One of our family's favorite recipes is green bean patties that I have shared nearly 5 years ago. A spicy green

Birth announcement

There's a new addition to the cast of characters on One Hot Stove. This weekend V and I welcomed our precious daughter into the world. Her name is Lila (rhymes with vanilla). She is incredibly tiny and adorable and we are just so in love with our wee babe. She has already demonstrated an inborn ability to throw world class hissy fits when things don't go her way. The nurses at the hospital

An Ice Cream Social, and Cassata Slices

Several weeks ago, my BFF Neighbor Girl began to say that she wanted to throw me a baby shower. I cringed and changed the subject as soon as possible. I hate being the center of attention, I don't like big gatherings and the idea of inviting people to bring over gifts is so awkward. We argued and she persisted and to make a long story short, I agreed to it so long as we could keep it simple.

Peanut Sesame Vegetable Curry

Today's recipe has been on my meal rotation for a year or two and I'm finally getting around to posting it. It is certainly blog-worthy, taking only 10-15 minutes of hands on time, with rich and flavorful results.

The inspiration for this recipe comes from this stuffed eggplant recipe on Mahanandi. The original recipe is exquisite. Over time, I've used it as inspiration for a vegetable curry

Paneer Makhani

I have quite a long "bucket list" as far as recipes go, things that I love to eat and that I want to learn to cook properly in my lifetime. This past weekend was an unusually productive one, because I learned how to make not one, but two of them.

One of the recipes was for idli- steamed pillows of frothy lentil and rice batter. There are decent idlis, which I can make, and then there are the

Quick Zucchini Dosas

In Spring this year, V and I became the proud custodians of a 12 feet by 5 feet garden plot in our local community garden. We were hoping for beginner's luck and dreaming of bumper crops of eggplant and methi but let's just say that I am thankful we have the option of buying our food. Between our rookie mistakes and the voracious squirrels, the poor plants did not stand a chance. There were

Banana Vanilla Pudding

Hello again! July started with a sizzle in St. Louis. We alternate between sunny scorching days and storms with torrential downpours. After a particularly spectacular storm a couple of weeks ago, we woke up to find that a tree in our backyard had split in half- with the half that crashed leaning on our back porch! 

On the food front, we're sticking to simple meals and old favorites- yogurt rice

Eggless Golden Vanilla Cake

The last month went by at warp speed- it seemed that mere minutes after my sister arrived, her visit was over and she's winging her way back to India. We packed much crafting, cooking, eating, shopping, walks and movies into a few short weeks and made a lifetime's worth of memories.

One of the highlights of the trip was the Sunday when we rented kayaks and went on a float trip on the Meramac

Mushroom Pulao

A few weeks ago, I fell in love all over again. With a cast iron pan this time. During a spring cleaning frenzy during which I critically appraised every single piece of kitchen ware and got rid of a lot of extra pots and pans and whittled down my collection to the basics.

Then I decided to buy one cast iron pan to replace a lot of the other kitchenware. I have been using this pan practically

Tangy Salsa

One of the things I love about St. Louis is how incredibly lush and green this city is and how accessible the parks are. For instance, you drive onto a busy road lined with every big box store you can think of, bustling with malls and car dealerships and your usual urban chaos. Then you turn into a side street and exactly 5 minutes later you are in Castlewood state park which looks like this.

Tamarind Poha

My sister is a very good cook and has been critically appraising my cooking skills ever since she has come to visit. In the usual course of things, I am accustomed to V and Neighbor Girl boosting my ego regularly by saying things like "Everything you touch tastes wonderful"- they know that flattery will get you a hot meal every evening if nothing else.

My sister is not that easy to impress.

Fried Masala Peanuts

Among the favorite goodies that my sister got from India were my mother's batter-fried peanuts. I've eaten them a hundred times but have never made them myself. My mother makes them often, always to include in care packages for family and friends in India and abroad and in response to requests. They are addictive little treats and they showcase an important agricultural product of Southern

Sew Gorgeous: Kala Koyree

Note: Blogger has had a multitude of problems this week. I had written this post earlier this week and it inexplicably vanished into cyberspace. Blogger reports that posts that vanished have been restored, complete with comments. But alas, this post appeared half-edited in my drafts, and the comments seem to be lost forever. But here it is, reposted the best I could manage. I am sad that of all

Freezer Cutlets, and Goodies from India

A few more weeks have slipped through my fingers- weeks filled with unwanted excitement like tornadoes roaring through our city and colds and coughs making their rounds. But here we are- my sister landed in St. Louis yesterday, I have the day off, the sun is shining and all is well with the world. I hope to capture many of her vacation moments on the blog so I hope you'll see frequent updates on

Pressure Cooker Risotto

My sister is flying in for a vacation from Bangalore, India in just three weeks and I am giddy with excitement. My head is spinning with mental lists of all the things I want to cook for her and all the places I want to take her- we will be meeting after 5 whole years. By the way, for those familiar with food stores in Bangalore, are there any foodie must-haves I should request her to bring along

Recyled Rice

It is 5 AM this Saturday morning and V is busy watching the India- Sri Lanka cricket world cup finals. I am glancing every now and then at the score as I sip my tea, but I thought I would quickly share a very humble recipe that I made this week- a stir fry of vegetables and leftover rice.

A version of this recipe made a frequent appearance on the family table when I was growing up, called

Portable Chaat and Doctored Ice Cream

Hello again! What started as a brief blog break somehow turned into several weeks of hibernation. We've had the kind of wet, cold, miserable weather that made me want to snuggle on the couch with a pile of good books, and I gave in and did exactly that.

Then yesterday the sun came out and I could feel the warmth soaking into me and infusing me with a burst of energy, so here I am with a couple

Dinner in 20 Minutes, and a Blog Birthday

I make dinner in 20 minutes- that is what I claimed in this post. I got several comments and e-mails asking me- Really? How? Is it true or am I exaggerating?

Dinner prep in my home starts at 6 PM and we eat at 7 PM. 20 minutes is my average hands-on time in the kitchen when the burners are turned on and there is a hum of chopping and stirring; by 6:20 I am out of the kitchen, flipping through

Cookbook Review: One Big Table

Like many cooking enthusiasts, I read cookbooks the way other people read novels. Some cookbooks are really fun to read this way, and one I especially remember was the New York Cookbook by Molly O'Neill which provided me with hours of entertainment back when I lived in NYC, although I never did cook anything from it.

When someone from the publishers Simon & Schuster e-mailed me a couple of

On Freezing Indian Food

A reader e-mailed me with this question,
"Do you know how to freeze homemade Indian food for future use? Till now, I have been making fresh meals but now at times I feel the need to have something ready and hate to go to restaurants." To freeze or not to freeze?
I don't have much experience with freezing Indian meals. It is because my weeknight meals take barely 20 minutes of hands-on time to