Gorgeous and Fun

Creamy cauliflower soup .....

Wow, it has been long since I popped in here! I have been doing some thinking about what I want to blog about. If you go back in my archives you will see my first year was about interiors, clothes, art.

And since then I have evolved. Blogging made me want to take better photographs. I have rubber stamped, I have painted silk scarves, painted watercolors and all kinds of things in between. 

In the last year the themes that have emerged for me are photography (and Photoshop), jewelry, collage. And of late -  cooking! 

This blog is not going to turn into a food blog but images of food are very likely to appear. I am going to keep sharing photographs of whatever I shoot. I am going to share images of magazine inspiration collections/collages. And about jewelry, I am upto something but can't reveal yet.

This is the direction my heart is going in. Beautiful images and stories. And in this part of the world where the winters are long and snowy indoor images of food and such things are easier to create.

Today's image is of a creamy cauliflower soup.

Ingredients:

Oil

3 -5 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 onions, diced

2 heads of cauliflower

3 cups of stock (whatever kind of stock you like)

1/2 cup Dry white wine

Salt to taste

Pepper to taste

Cilantro for garnish

 

Recipe:

1. Heat up some oil in a stock pot.

2. Saute the onion and garlic till the onion turns transparent.

3. Toss in the cauliflower.

4. Put in the stock and the white wine.

5. Cover the stock pot and let this boil until the cauliflower softens.

6. Take the stock pot of the stove, let the soup cool a little.

7. Now blend the soup in the blender in batches.

8. Put the blended soup back in the stock pot and back on the stove.

9. Let the soup simmer on the stove, put in salt and pepper.

10. Stop simmering after a few minutes.

11. Garnish with cilantro when serving.

Soups and soft food

Hello, hello! The extraction is over. Lost all my wisdom :-) since the wisdom teeth are gone. It went as well as it could. Now I am just waiting for my jaw to feel normal again, right now the jaw feels tuggy and tingly.

So it's a week of soft food and ice cream! Today I made a tomato soup and oven fries. Here is the recipe for the soup.

Ingredients:

2 tsps olive oil

3 medium sized onions

6 large tomatoes

3 bouillon cubes (I use the non-salted Rapunzel brand found in Whole Foods)

Pepper

Salt to taste

 

Preparation:

1. Dice the onions and quarter the tomatoes

2. Warm the oil in a stock pot

3. Saute the onions in the heated oil

4. When the onions are translucent toss in the tomatoes

5. Saute this mix for a couple of minutes

6. Add a 1.5 cups of water

7. Cover the stock pot and cook till the  tomatoes go soft

8. Remove from heat when the tomatoes are soft. Add the  3 bouillon cubes, pepper and salt to taste and use an immersion mixer to puree this mixture.

9. Put the stock pot back on the stove, add a cup of water and let this come to boil.

Done!

It's pretty easy and I cheat. Instead of using the stock pot I use a pressure cooker to soften the onions and tomatoes.

You can garnish with croutons, or a sprig of mint or rosemary or a dollop of sour cream. I keep mine plain.

 

 

 

 

It's been long!

I know, I know I haven't been blogging much. But you will definitely find me on Instagram @gorgeousfun and if you aren't on Instagram you can see the pics at at Gorgeous and Fun tumblr blog.  I have been incredibly busy so blogging pics directly from my iPhone seems to happen much more easily than typing out words.

I will be back with a more regular posting schedule after I get a few things out of my way. One of them being getting my wisdom teeth extracted, something I have been avoiding for a year. I am absolutely terrified about it but now it must be done! But I am also working on some fun things and will reveal more in September.

I have been giving myself a holiday from creative activity, some times a girl needs to recharge her creative batteries, no? I am reading loads of books and ogling beautiful creative books as a part of the recharge process. So my creative kicks have been mainly coming from cooking. Yep, you read that right. Somewhere in India my best pal and my mom are pinching themselves when they read this. 10 years back you wouldn't have caught me saying that.

So I share with you the photo of an Indian dish called "Masoor Masala", absolutely delicious and healthy!

Cookbooks, Food and Indian Recipes

A long time back I avoided cooking. My mom is such a phenomenal cook and I yes, I admit it, I didn't like to cook. And then I moved countries and kinda had to cook. I knew the basics, fortunately mom had convinced me to learn that much! But would I have rather read a book than cook? Yes. 

But now I see cooking as creative work. And I did inherit the good cook gene from mom. And now I even make up my own recipes or modify existing recipes - successfully. My mom is reeling in shock as she reads this. She is able to taste food and reverse engineer food. I am not so great at the reverse engineering but I do have the sense of what flavors and textures will work well together. And, of course, the hubby is a great sounding board - he is a fantastic food maker and loves to cook. And so is the mom-in-law. So I have been lucky.

Anyways, recently I had been craving a present and asked the hubby for cookbooks. I keep a very small number of cook books because like I said before I can improvise and with the internet so much can be discovered online. But I was craving these couple of cook books and the hubby got me both!

I am sharing the first one today. "India - cookbook", 1000 recipes from India by Pushpesh Pant. Yes, I am from India but India is vast with so many regions. Each region has vastly different food, multiple languages and even distinct cultures!

So tonight the plan is to leaf through every page of this giant tome and salivate over every recipe.

 

The gorgeous food pictures.....

 

See the size of the book? It is really as heavy as it claims.

And it came in this fun bag, which you would see in India as a container for grain.....

The Minimal Space of the "Minimalist"

Remember, how we were talking about space a couple of weeks back? How much space does it take one to create?

I found this picture of Mark Bittman's kitchen in his NYC apartment. If you don't know Mark Bittman he writes a food column for the New York Times and has written several cookbooks and has hosted TV series.

And here is what Mr. Bittman has to say about his kitchen. I don't think I am ever going to complain about my kitchen which is about the same size as his!

An Almost Stormy Birthday

So today was a certain someone's b'day (moi). And there was a snow storm on the way. So what's a girl to do? Cuddle up with a book and make a great dinner at home!

There was a surprise box of presents from Anthropologie.......

And there was time to make a trip to the library and load up on great books. The book being read today was......

This book rips on a certain fairy tale, more on that once the book is finished. And then there was the making of a risotto......

The risotto was made with white wine and a vegetable broth, served with a two-mushroom and rosemary sauce, freshly grated Asiago cheese and drizzled with truffle oil.....

And since I was more keen on celebration than photography, the lighting is the normal yellow lamp light instead of white lighting that should be used for photography.

There was candle light, some bubbly and really not that much snow, for the celebration! So maybe we could have gone out but hey instead we got to relax indoors. I promise to share the recipe this weekend but right now I am going back to celebrating!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! These Christmas images are from the Crate and Barrel catalogs:

 

Spicy!

Do you feel like some spice trade ? Follow me.

We are in Charleston and we wander into the Spice and Tea Exchange. Now, I do know my spices (my hubby is a foodie and I do cook.... a lot) but there are spices here that I haven't heard of.

Do you want to guess what these jars contain? 

 

Salt!!! More than 20 varieties of salt!

And they had a whole wall of spice mixes that they have mixed. Now if you are craving some spice and can't really go into this store, this store has a website.

 

Beet Root Salad with Goat Cheese

A beet root salad with goat cheese is on the menu for the dinner tomorrow. The recipe and the picture is from the book "Tea Party" by Tracy Stern. 

Maybe there is an eternal attraction to tea parties wired into the female genetics but I've never had a tea party and I am likely to never have one. But it was the beautiful sandwiches on the cover of this book that got my attention. There are 20 tea party themes in the book, but really the recipes are good for any time. The recipes are about tea, accompaniments with tea and things in which tea can be an ingredient. There are recipes for  things like tea martinis, black tea brownies, cakes, sandwiches and, of course, teas. And there are decor and music suggestions to boot!

All in all a very fun and handy book.

Chickpea Soup

Hello, hello! I am back. Feeling better, friend's visit is over and yes, I've seen New Moon. A big thank you to the people who stopped by and left me their good wishes. And now my mind is on food, not that I don't think of it otherwise, but with Thanksgiving  coming up this Thursday I have been plotting the concoctions for that day. 

The chickpea soup above, has made it to the list. Doesn't the photograph make you hungry? The recipe for this fall soup is from the book "Sunday Soup" by Betsy Rosbottom. The recipe is titled "About 30 minutes Chickpea and Pasta Soup with Rosemary". Don't recipe books with lovely pictures just make you salivate? I love recipe books with great pictures, the pictures sell me on the recipe. And this book is gorgeous with soup recipe sections for each season.

And speaking of food, I can never resist mentioning Erin's fresh365 blog food blog. I only go when I have just had food, otherwise the pictures on her blog make me hungry and then I can't think of anything but food.

Image above is from the book.