Goodbye 2021

One of my new year resolutions last year was to write 12 blog posts. One post a month seemed like an eminently achievable yet somewhat ambitious goal. Even though I've been writing on and off here, I've only averaged a half dozen posts or so in the last few years, and I wanted to do a little better than that. I envisioned a more disciplined pen, and a steady trickle of writing. Instead, there's been a very dry summer on this blog, followed by a torrential December (much like San Francisco weather) because I've been trying to make up for lost time in the last month of the year. So here's my 12th post of the year and my fourth post in as many weeks. Even though it's just by a whisker, at least I can claim to have kept this one resolution!

I thought I'd end the year on a sweet note with a picture of one of the nicest things I baked this year. It's a Mango, Cardamom, and Coconut Cake. It's like eating a mango lassi with a hint of coconut. I only intended to cut a dainty slice before taking a picture of the cake, but once we started, we couldn't stop, and we ended up demolishing a third of the cake before I whipped out my phone. This really is a lovely cake, and I can see myself baking this again for a gathering. 

The best cookbook I read this year was Dishoom, authored by the founders of the eponymous Indian restaurant in London. It is a love letter to Bombay and is, in equal parts, a cookbook, a coffee table book and a history book. It's been just over a decade since I last visited London, which has a special place in my heart. It's the city in which I started my career. And it was in London that I came up with the idea of writing a food blog, and this mouthful of a title for it. Dishoom was a young restaurant in those days. The ambience was memorable but I vaguely recall the food being somewhat inconsistent. I decided to give a few recipes from the book a try when I came across it recently. This time, my socks were properly knocked off. 

Like many British cookbooks, Dishoom offers very precise ingredient measurements (e.g. 2 grams salt, 5 grams kashmiri chili powder etc.) . This is the sort of thing that would ordinarily put me off, but I decided to play along, and bust out my kitchen scale. I'm so glad I did! The seekh kabab, paneer tikka achari, and gunpowder potato recipes were all home runs. The book has an impressive set of recipes on cocktails and desserts which I'm really looking forward to trying out in the new year. 

Firecrackers just went out here in San Francisco to ring in 2022. Happy new year!