Tomato Kasundi -- adapted from Leela Majumdar

Tomato kasundi | Tomato Kashundi

This Kasundi is great as a dip for anything or a dressing for your cucumber-carrot salad. It has more of a tangy tomatoe-y taste than a mustard-y taste. Be generous with the mustard oil and you won't be disappointed.

Aam Kashundi

This Tomato Kasundi recipe is adapted from one of my favorite cookbook of all times. It's in Bengali by my favorite author Leela Majumdar. For those who don't know about her, she is a very famous author of Bengali literature and most loved for her writings for the young adults. Her books like "Podipishi'r Bormi Bakso" or "Monimala" are legends in their own times. Her memoir "Paakdondi" still remains in the list of my favorite books. She also happens to be Satyajit Ray's aunt.

I am not a big time cookbook reader. Never was. My recipes are mostly from friends, families and now blogs. My mother too never had a cookbook as far as I can remember. Cookbooks were not the "in thing" in those days. However she used to often copy recipes from magazines like Jugantor or Sananda and write them down in a diary. We both loved reading the recipes in colorful pages of Sananda or Femina those days. And of course the Personal columns :-p

The first cookbook I ever bought was just before I moved to US. It was a bengali cookbook by Bela De, very popular in those times. It had lots of recipes and was very cut and dry but useful. The recipes were written just like my Mother would say if you asked her how she made a particular dish -- a little of ginger and some cumin seeds. It gave you a basic framework and you took it from there.

Along with Bela De, I had bought another book, not because I wanted to learn the recipes (though they are excellent) but because I was a(still am) huge fan of the author Lila Majumdar. By then I had read all of her writings and when I landed one afternoon at the Dasgupta book stores in College Street asking if I had skipped reading any of Lila Majumdar's books, they gave me her "Ranna r Boi".

To be honest, I wasn't too enthusiastic. I had hoped for an unpublished manuscript maybe. But then I started reading it without the intention of cooking and started loving it. Her words in the introduction of that book became my mantra.  She wrote recipes in a conversational tone, again missing out on the measurements, but they were honest. They told you about substituting ingredients and things like "You can use this instead of this but it won't taste as good :-D". I read through that book often when I felt homesick in those early days in a foreign country. I cooked from it too but mostly I just read those recipes for pleasure.

"If you have to eat to survive then why not try to eat well. And eating well  means eating food that looks good, tastes good, is nutritious, inexpensive, easy and takes little time to cook "

I was craving for some Aam Kasundi or Mango kashundi  but did not have any mangoes. So I settled on Tomato Kasundi. I have adapted this Tomato Kasundi recipe from the book. The ingredients are as she suggested. It made for a very delicious dip. This Kasundi has more of a tangy tomatoe-y taste than a mustard-y taste. Be generous with the Mustard Oil and you will not be disappointed.

Homemade Whole Wheat Pasta -- made by Big Sis

Homemade Whole Wheat Pasta

This was the 16 year old's first attempt at making homemade pasta from a recipe following allrecipes. It turned out to be delicious and if we had time, we would not go back to buying boxes of pasta again

Yesterday, someone in my neighborhood came back home, recovered from Covid-19. I didn't know him and so was even unaware that he was in the hospital. We only came to know when yesterday we saw there were balloons in his lawn and signs with "Welcome Home". There were car parades and honking, probably from his friends and colleagues.

Today as a neighborhood community, we all went in our cars with "Welcome Home" signs and drove in front of his house, honking and welcoming him back home.I don't know them but it felt very nice to be part of it. However it was scary too hear his wife's first-hand account of her husband's illness. And here he was a very fit person in his 40s, who had to fight for 3-weeks in the hospital and has to still use a walker when we waved to him today. I cannot imagine what it must be doing to at-risk individuals.
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Sometimes I feel guilty sharing food and what we are cooking at home while a pandemic rages through our state, taking lives, making thousands of people sick.
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Here is the thing, there are 2-sides to this story.
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On one side there are the heroic frontline workers facing the pandemic, their families, the patients and their families.
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On the other side, there are people depressed staying home, some not understanding the importance of social distancing, some not happy with online school, some in fear of losing income, some unable to travel to their loved one, some just wanting to get out and go shopping.

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When I share stories from my kitchen, I hope someone in the second category will read and find some joy in staying home today. Maybe they will find a reason to get up and make a meal for themselves. Someone will see that the schools are doing a lot, that's enough education and it's good that kids have little more time on hand now.
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Ours is not a story about great master-chef style cooking. It's more of finding joy in staying at home and cooking a meal for family. It does not have to be perfect to be delicious.
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Today BigSis made pasta from scratch. She has been wanting to do this for a long time. Homemade Pasta just like the one we had in Tuscany. However her school workload leaves no time for such stuff usually. As a fallout of the pandemic the kids did get a little break and today she could spend cooking one of the things she loves.
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Our first issue was we did not have enough AP Flour or Maida. So she had to look for a whole wheat Pasta recipes and she found one in AllRecipes which she followed.

She made the dough. We don't have a pasta making machine, so she rolled the dough by hand and cut her shapes. It was truly delicious 😋😋 .

She then used some of the dough to make ravioli. It was very impromptu ravioli with cheese+pesto filling. I loved the ravioli a lot. The kids thought the pasta was better than the ravioli.

I am sharing the pasta recipe that we did at home as well as videos. Hope this will help you make your own pasta at home

Vegetable Fried Rice with leftover rice -- By Little Sis

Vegetable Fried Rice | Stir Fried Rice with Vegetables and Egg

Left over rice is stir fried with vegetables and eggs in this easiest one pot-meal to make a delicious fried rice

This Veg fried rice was a staple in our home with left over rice. I don't know how my Mother made the exact amount of rice for each meal but there were some of those rare days when she overestimated or we ate less and there was left over rice. Usually she would eat the left over rice herself the next day and serve us freshly cooked rice, a practice I vehemently protested against.

But then on some days when she had excess left over rice, she stir fried it with eggs and vegetables like carrots and peas to pack a fried rice for school lunch. How I loved that stir fried rice. I think it was one of the best school lunches in my childhood memory.

During this Quarantine, LS, the 11-year old has developed a sudden interest in cooking. It is usually her sister, the 16 year old who is the cook if me or the Dad are MIA and LS is the sous chef helping with chopping vegetables. She is a good vegetable chopper and often chops vegetables for me too.

But in the last few weeks, it is LS who has taken over lunch duties. Her online classes get over earlier than her sister's and so she keeps asking me if she can make lunch. She started with baking, then mac and cheese and today she made this fried rice with the leftover rice that we had. I took a video of her cooking to remember these precious memories.

It was delicious and though she made it for only the two of them, I couldn't stop eating. It is really a very quick, one-pot meal to make if you have leftover rice ready.