The Hindi Bindi Club Book Review

Sprouted whole Moong Usal
And how to sprout moong beans?One hot, humid day, I forgot to grind my soaked moong dal rice mix and it sat on the counter the whole day. The next day I found my whole moong was sprouting tiny buds. So, I grinded the mix for my dosa and then proceeded to soak some more sprouted moong dal for my usal (not to be confused with usual). The process of sprouting beans/ legumes is easy but does take time so planning a day or two ahead is necessary. Here is the easy 1-2-3 step to sprouting beans (okay, so there are more than three s

Plugging Wagle on World Toilet Day
The title is not a pun. It is World Toilet Day (I am not kidding you!) and I am plugging a blogger friend, Dinesh Wagle (no relation) who blogs at Wagle Street Journal.  Dinesh is currently the bureau chief of Nepal's Kathmandu Post and is stationed in Delhi. He blogs and posts photos of happenings in Delhi and the country from the eyes of a Nepali. Frankly, I never thought of Nepal as another country (I knew it was), just a friendly neighbor separated by a border.It is always interesting t

Moong dosa/ adai inspired by Holy Cow
I have to admit that till I started reading Vaishali’s blog, Holy Cow, my conception of vegan was vague. Not so any more. Eating a vegetarian Indian diet gets you as close to being a vegan as possible with the exception of daiy, fat and meat. Nevertheless, I try to check up Vaishali’s recipes as fast as she posts them. Trying them out at the same speed is another matter. In the past I have made her baghare baingan and loved them. This is saying a lot from someone not fond of baingan (eggplant).Her

Vermicelli Kheer (milk pudding)/ Sevainya/ Shevayachi kheer
As promised in my previous post here’s the recipe for Vermicelli Kheer with pistachios and golden raisins and delicately flavored with cardamom pods. In Marathi vermicelli or sevainya is pronounced with an ‘H’ in front of the ‘S’. The taste remains the same.Let me correct myself. The taste of the vermicelli stays the same but depending on how much elbow grease you are willing to put in boiling the milk, the taste of the kheer changes from good to delicious to decadently rich. On the few occasions that I make it, I like to take the time and effort to cook

Hindi Bindi Club and delayed kheer
Towards the end of Monica Pradhan’s The Hindi-Bindi Club, Meenal Deshpande shows her daughter Kiran her list of ‘Things I want to do before I die’. One of the things on the list is her wish to write a novel. Her daughter requests her not to write a “Life’s-a-Bitch-and-Then-You-Die” novel. Meenal assures her daughter she will write a story that’s ultimately uplifting, about survivors of hardships and of resilience of the human spirit. Pradhan attempts to write just such a novel and it is easy to see where she draws her inspiration from -- The Joy Luck Club and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. But it is fair to say these