DIY: Making Jam

I love jam making. It's like everytime I make jam, I'm bottling up a bit of summer, a bit of the season, to be enjoyed for a long long time. If last year, I was the liqueur baroness, this year I am the jam begum.
I made three kinds of orange marmalade, jams, preserves, conserves and so it goes. I'm not sure what I was trying to achieve, but I wanted all kinds of fruit in bottles in my fridge.

While I don't have exact recipes, and I do play around with flavours quite a bit, here are some things to keep in mind while making jam

Deep Chocolate Orange Marmalade Cake

They say if you make three significant changes to a recipe it becomes your own. I haven't gone the stretch, but its still significant enough for me to call it my own I think,



For a while there after the 'Liqueured Peach Cake' I stopped baking. In fact I stopped going into the kitchen other than for warming up stuff, opening takeaway Chinese, and whipping up some awesome milk shakes with super tasty milk from Sarda Farms, more on that later.

Ginger Chicken (Japanese)

Liqueured Peach Cake

This is going to be a long post. Not because of a recipe actually. More because now that I've got a platform to say something, I really want to say something I've got on my mind.


It all started with that Indira Nooyi article. I'm sure you've all read it. Well, if you're Indian and you're on Facebook, you have. After all, she's the most famous Indian female in the corporate world. Someone all girls in the country are supposed to look up to. We don't have too many idols besides movie stars and rubbish politicians. Then she comes out with a story how women can't have it all. I guess we're all caught up in Sheryl Sandberg's 'Lean In'. Frankly I don't have the inclination to listen to either of them. I maybe female, I could belong to the working class, but we all have our battles and no two of them are the same. But none of this matters to me. What mattered most to me in Indira Nooyi's article was the milk incident.

DIY: Salted Caramel Popcorn - an experiment

The story goes, I wanted to make popcorn cake. And that calls for fresh popcorn. Do you know how difficult it is in this day and age to get fresh popcorn? All you get is the microwavable stuff.
I could do with that, but I so did want to do everything from ground up and I wasn't sure the packaged stuff was the best way to go about it.


Chembur market is a treasure trove of fun stuff. After almost 6 years around this place, like Barney, I have a guy for everything, especially when it comes to Chembur market. Surprisingly though, I didn't know where to get popcorn. Even more surprisingly, I really didn't have to go anywhere. Right in front of the local station was this guy popping corn who was happily willing to part with his share of unpopped corn for next to nothing. Though he did warn me as uninitiated as I am to the whole process, popping corn might be a little different than what I expected. Of course it would be different I thought; I'd never popped corn, microwaveable or otherwise. Little did I know, the whole shaking the bowl shebang is a little tiring not to mention that even after all the shaking I didn't end up with a whole lot of popped corn. I had a whole bunch of unpopped buggers at the bottom of the bowl.