Cooking like my mother

My mother belonged to the generation of cooks that cooked with ingredients they had. If a recipe called for something that was not on hand or not available or was too expensive, she could easily find a good substitute. Since moving out of India, I am trying to apply same principle to my cooking. There is definitely a huge variety of fruits, vegetables and spices available here, but every now and then I am reminded of a fruit or vegetable that is just not available here. 'Karonda' is one such berry that I have not found in US. Here  is a wikipedia page describing this berry. At my house, Karonda was used to provide tartness to chutneys and also cooked with green chilies in a quick 'karonda-hari mirch' pickle. In the tradition of cooking with ingredients one has, I have found cranberry to be a good substitute for Karonda. During Thanksgiving time, when it is hard to miss cranberry in the store, I cant resist making this cranberry relish the way my mother made kar

If you read my previous post here , you know the basic steps to make dhokla - mix chickpea flour with yogurt, let it sit and ferment, add minced ginger, chillies, cilantro, and then steam the batter. You also know that adding Eno means you dont have to wait for the fermentation process. Since eno is used to add air bubbles to the batter, you no longer need to rely on sour yogurt to ferment the batter. Prior to eno days, we always added yogurt to the batter but eno made it possible to eliminate yogurt and just make the batter with water. I started to make dhoklas both ways - sometimes with yogurt, sometimes without. But I was never sure of the difference in the taste in the two methods. Last weekend we had some friends visiting us in the evening and I decided to make two batches- one with yourt and another one without. This gave me opportunity to taste them one after another... while I have still not picked a favorite in terms of taste, I definitely liked the one without yogurt! Ing