TIFFIN 

The Achaar Queen THE COOKBOOK WRITER AND PICKLE MAVEN ON FRESH, SEASONAL INDIAN FOOD Story and Photograph: Rohan Kamicheril hitra Agrawal is on a mission to get achaar into American kitchens. Her Indian pickles, which she gives their Hindi name, and sells under her Brooklyn Delhi label, grew out of her penchant for preserving CSA windfalls using her family’s traditional recipes. Her products (which have won acclaim from places like Food and Wine and the New York Times) includ

This wonderful Kannadiga flatbread is a breeze to make, once you get the hang of it, and it makes a lovely alternative to wheat-based chapattis. You can make plain akki roti—the name literally just means “rice bread”—which are a great staple to have in your repertoire, but I absolutely love the addition of grated vegetables, herbs, and coconut, which add fantastic texture and flavor. And I particularly love all the little bits of vegetable that peek out of the pressed-out rot

This dish is essentially a variation on the popular tamarind-rice dish called puliyogare that is made in many parts of the south of India. I got this particular recipe from Gayathri Kongovi, a friend’s mother, who lives in Bangalore. She and her longtime cook Kamlamma were kind enough to prepare a number of traditional Kannadiga dishes with me one cool Bangalore morning many months ago. This recipe is distinctive both for the particular blend of spices it uses and for the fa

I wanted to start our Dhal of the Month series with this recipe for Huli Tovve not because it’s the dhal I’m most familiar with, but, rather, because, despite using many of the same ingredients and techniques as the dhal I ate growing up, its flavor is so distinctive and different from anything I ate as a child. The name "huli tovve" just means “sour dhal” in Kannada, and that’s really what stands out about this dish, which is typical of Kannadiga Brahmin cooking with its int

I got this recipe from Parinitha Manudeva who, along with her husband, run the Devangi Athithya, a bed and breakfast in Thirthahalli, a small town along the Tunga river in the forested mountainside near Shimoga, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. The cuisine of the area is robust and full of flavor, making liberal use of spices, fruit from the nearby forest, game meat, and river fish. A local specialty of especial pride are the kaadu koli, or forest fowl, that you can

Lakshmi Sudhakar (L) and Sudha Venkataraman (R) An ongoing column that explores the wide, wonderful world of home cooking. Every cuisine has its version of “home food.” The term has inexplicably gained a shade of derision through constant misuse. The common implication is that the food that people cook at home is not quite special enough for public consumption. There are too many Indian dishes that too easily get relegated to the realm of “home food.” As a result, awareness

An abecedary of Indian food, in no particular order. Ajwain--or as it's variously known,omum, om beeja, ajowan, bishop's weed, or carom seed--is one of the lesser-known Indian spices. Lesser-known in the West, anyway. In appearance, it looks uncannily like cumin (or any number of other seed spices, for that matter). In fact, though, ajwain isn't a seed at all, but the fruit of an annual herb that belongs to the Apiaceae or Umbelliferae family (the latter classification gets i

A poem should be written on the uses of leftover rice. There’s something wonderful about how something so humdrum can get turned into such a variety of delicious things. While there are endless varieties of rice, each with their own distinctive taste and texture, for most cooks plain white rice presents a convenient blank canvas on which to experiment with a variety of flavors and textures. Indians, and south Indians in particular, consume a great deal of rice, and, consequen