Good food is magical. It can lift your moods high, create ever lasting memories, transport your imagination onto far way locations, bond with enthusiasm, tastefully merge art and science and provide never ending themes and variations to explore throughout ones life. It makes cultures and nations proud and prod its explorers to stretch the boundaries of knowledge and wisdom. It allows you to confirm and rebel at the same time. It transcends eating – a mundane necessity for survival – to higher planes of meaning and pleasure. To see the world in a spoonful of the best that one can dish out…

Good food has been an overriding passion for me and the group of our friends that I have blessed with by my food God. Nothing else comes close to the ability of food to evoke the undistracted engagement, drooling passion and the unfettered imaginations.  As a group we are constantly striving to relive our great food experiences by recreating the experience through diligent and passionate cooking escapades.; we call them escapades since even the most classic of recipes get transformed through the imagination and deep rooted belief in the tastes that are enjoyed most by the group. One feels that over the years, we are evolving an additional element of a taste that the group shares over and above the individual preferences of the individuals.

Coming out of India we have been blessed with a storehouse of tastes that need more than a lifetime to experience all of it. Every part of India has its own great food, tastes that linger for ever and stories about food that attain folklore status. Add to this the combined experiences of our group. Throw in our travels and food experiences and stories from around the world; we have enough to enthrall each other with never ending food experiences. The vivid and vibrant language that we use to describe the colours, ambience, the rich aromas, the varied textures, the context, the persona of the cook, the service experience all combine to make each description so rich that others can almost relive the experience through the narration.

Within the group our cooking skills range from childish playfulness to meditative professionalism. I sincerely believe cooking takes me back to the raw thrills of my child hood when you could mix a few leaves and some colored stones and fantasize a plate of the tastiest dish one could imagine. They say reading allows you to travel and see the world without physically leaving your chair. Cooking and good food has allowed us to live in far away places momentarily and experience a culture. The world is transforming into a global village and it is indeed exciting times we live in for a foodie dedicated to enjoying as much of the gastronomic pleasures of life as is allowed before one kicks the bucket.

Eating with friends and a carrying on a great conversation transforms any dish that we are experiencing. Good food, which lingers in your memory is often a combination of leading themes as far the taste goes but combined with various subtle nuances which evoke varying experiences for different taste buds. Eating in our group ensures that there is a running commentary as the tastes are picked up, helping others to seek and enriching the overall experience. Needless to say as the tongue gets saturated with the tastes on the table, the mind wanders off to the next taste variations and the conversation shifts to the promises of the next wave of pleasures for our foodie genes.

In this blog we recreate our great experiences with eating, sourcing exotic food ingredients, cooking, presenting and devouring exciting food. Great food to us can be a morsel or a buffet. As modern physics attempts to see an universe replicated in the smallest of atoms we believe that one can experience an entire culture through a spoonful of its best food. Of course we never restrict our explorations to one spoonful. Sigh!