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By Nadia Vitari

Mumbai weather is always suited for indulging in an ice cream or sherbet! Be it the crazy rains or the sweltering heat, it’s always a good time for an ice-cold dessert.

What if you could make a tasty sherbet (an icy dessert) at home? Sherbet can be made into a milk-free dessert so if one is avoiding milk-based ice-creams, sherbet is a perfect substitute. And what’s more, it’s simple, tasty and pocket friendly too!

This is why I would like to share with you a very easy recipe to prepare sherbet at home, with no dairy or the need for an ice-cream maker. It is a basic recipe and you can create your own variants of it. It can be effectively used for regular ice cream or frozen yogurt too!

For those of you who like alcohol, adding a tad of vodka to it can also make for a very nice digestive dessert at the end of a meal or in-between meals for a European style. In fact, this is often what happens at weddings in fancy restaurants, especially in Italy.  Isn’t it always nice to have a refreshing break in between indulgent main dishes?!

My homemade sherbet is made using the exact same logic and steps as ice cream recipes. If you don’t mind milk: you need an ingredient (frozen fruit, and thinking of the local produce mango works the best, you can also try with pineapple, watermelon, and guava but mind that those are more liquid and less pulpy so you’ll have to increase the thickening ingredient or mix them with mango or banana) to give you a thick base and add liquid sugar (for example condensed milk) to help it freeze.

Condensed milk is an important ingredient in this case else the sherbet will be just too watery. If you cannot buy it easily or prefer to have it non-dairy or vegan, you can use my very simple recipe with coconut milk, which is also more cost effective. Also, do keep in mind that the only difference in the recipe below is in the kind of milk used. So for your recipe, you could just use any milk – dairy or coconut, and there you have it!

To make condensed milk, just add some sugar to milk and simmer in a heavy bottomed saucepan till sugar dissolves completely and keep it over low/medium heat. What is important is that you don’t stir it until the mix starts to simmer otherwise it can crack and crystallize. Then, let it on for around 30-40 minutes or until milk has darkened to a grayish color and reduced by half. Let it cool and store it in a jar, be careful though, if there are sugary bits around the rim of your pot don’t stir them into your condensed milk, this can also crack your mix and let milk cool completely before putting on the air tight lid. Keep it in the fridge and it will last you for months! Easy right?!

The Recipe

So coming back to our sherbet, for four people use around 400 gm of fruit and 70 gm of condensed milk, put them in a blender/food processor until thick and smooth (adjust milk and fruit quantity accordingly), pour this purée into a freezer-safe bowl, a metal one is preferred but plastic is also fine. Here’s the crucial and the only tricky part: every 30-45 minutes for 4 hours, remove your purée and re-mix everything together, as this prevents the ice crystals from forming and turning your sherbet into a giant fruit ice cube. After this freezing/re-mixing step, let it cool for 8 hours or until hard. Finally here you have it, enjoy it!

Other yummy mixes are banana and chocolate; mint goes very well with cucumber, strawberry, grapefruit; lime is awesome with melon, strawberry and kiwi; orange with basil; passion fruit with mango, and, if available, wild berries are just great too! In Europe we also add plants and petals like rhubarb, rose and elder-flower! If you like frozen yogurt you can also use that instead of condensed milk.  Also, if you like it tangy, you can add some lime zest!

In fact, in case of sherbet, let your imagination surprise your taste buds!

About Nadia Vitari

Passionate traveler and backpacker, Nadia comes from the Lake of Como area in Italy (yes, where George Clooney lives!). She moved to Mumbai to work for an NGO. Being Italian and having lived, worked and studied in different countries, she is passionate about food and other cultures, especially anything Japanese! She also loves reading, football and rock music.

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This post is part of Holachef’s Write Ho! program which is open to Holachef’s fans, critics, customers and their loved ones! To participate, write to [email protected]

By Amita Baheti 

Communication is to any organisation what blood stream is to a human body. If the blood supply stops to any part of the body, it first becomes inefficient and gradually dysfunctional. Organisations have always struggled with the challenge of communicating their vision to the last mile staff in their team. From town halls to traditional team meetings; from chain of emails to newsletters and from flipping magazines to streaming videos; organisations try every channel to communicate with their teams. The question to ask is ‘on scale of 1 to 10, how sure are you that what you wish to communicate is being understood the way you desire it to?’

“The greatest problem with communication is the assumption that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw.

As with most complex situations, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to vision communication. Here, I suggest 3 rules that will help you drill down the larger corporate vision to everyone in your team.

1. Go in this order: What. How. Why.

Once you develop your strategy, you need to direct your team towards making things happen. I suggest an approach which I call: What, How and Why.

WHAT: Communicating specific benchmarks and deadlines is important. Tell the team WHAT is that you intend to communicate in a very crisp and direct way. Telling WHAT first, prevents audience to mentally reach to conclusions that you may not even intend them to reach.

HOW: After you communicate what to achieve, give team the direction to reach the benchmark. Direction has to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Accurate, Relevant and Timed. Setting a benchmark but not breaking it down into understandable chunks of information for the team in a ‘to – do’ format may lead to great intentions but clueless actions.

WHY: Focusing on the big picture enables buy-in of your vision and supports processing in the idea. The WHY brings in the much required assertiveness and confidence to set the team in action. It is important to give them a compelling reason to believe in your vision and also for that do let them know what’s in it for them.

This will ensure that the bigger company vision is now a combined vision of its people that they can clearly see and contribute towards. 

2. Visualize

Whether communication is written or verbal, retaining it becomes a challenge. Visualising and summarising your ideas in the form of a picture or video helps in making it more effective and memorable. The more visual it is, the better is the retention of the message! Desktop wallpapers, posters and meetings are traditional ways, having a great impact. Infographics and colourful flow charts are a few more interesting and crisp ways to summarize and support your ideas. A good method to make any visual communication is to order the ideas in a logical manner. It can be a cause – effect relationship or a timeline or a graphic representation. Simple videos, sticky notes, constant reminders never fail.

3. Brand your vision!

Branding your vision statement can be an effective way to crystallise your ideas and amplify the message to everyone in the team. Just as you give an interesting name to all your marketing campaigns, give an equally nice name and branding to your internal campaigns too. The nomenclature should be such that it directly arouses the core idea in minds of the audience. Branding the vision conveys a sense of new beginning and builds an emphasis on the criticality of the whole idea.

While communication cannot be a substitute for actual performance, it definitely is the first step towards giving a direction to the entire team. A thoughtful approach to communicating with teams can help build the much needed momentum to bring everyone together for value creation.

About Amita Baheti 

Amita is a potato-lover and works at Holachef. You can follow her on Twitter at @AmitaBaheti

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This post is part of Holachef’s Write Ho! program which is open to Holachef’s fans, critics, customers and their loved ones! To participate, write to [email protected].

Read more reviews at: http://blog.holachef.com/holachef-reviews-customers/

In one of my previous blogposts, I described my experience with local restaurants. In this post, I would like to share some more interesting (and often hilarious) experiences with Indian food!

Potatoes

I think the funniest thing happened just a few weeks after my arrival. I was coming back from a day-long workshop and was very tired and hungry. I did not have anything ready at home and hadn’t had the time to go grocery shopping either. So I thought of buying some potatoes on my way home. What’s better than a potato-dinner when one is ravenously hungry, I thought! It was already quite dark and I found one vendor selling potatoes. I wanted to rush home very quickly so I bought half a kg and quickly walked towards my house.

When I reached my house and was ready to cook them… there was a suprise! The stuff that I had just bought only looked like potatoes (at least in the dark) but were instead some kind of fruits that I had never seen before… and you can imagine my major disappointment! I mean, looking forward to an all-potato meal and then not getting it can be extremely frustrating. However, being a fruit and vegetable lover, I thought I might give it a go anyways, and not like I had much choice at that point! To my bedazzlement, those ‘fruits’ were very woody and weird, and only after an internet search I realized I had, in fact, just bought wood apples! To open them, I had to use a pestle, only to discover a sticky, fibrous pulp, speckled with hundreds of edible seeds. I didn’t even like the taste, they seemed quite acidic. Only later, while talking to my tenant and laughing about my experience I found out that they are usually served with jaggery or made into jams, drinks or chutneys!

Needless to say, I went to bed hungry that night, dreaming of potatoes!

Pani Puri

The second incident was more of a ‘pani puri’ crisis! I had heard about this unique Indian street-food favorite from my friends and was eager to try it out at Juhu beach, as was recommended. I decided to finally eat them one afternoon after I spent a few hours lazing around at Juhu beach. Since I was soaked in sand, I thought it’s best if I took a parcel instead of having it at the beach itself.

Now that I eat pani-puri very often, I realize what a silly thing that was  to do – parceling pani-puri. First off, I had no clue how to eat a pani-puri at all (it was my first time, remember?), hence the packet with green water, some boiled peas and the puris that looked like beignets totally puzzled me. After ‘struggling’ with my imagination for a while, I ended up eating it like ‘chapatis’ – taking each puri and drenching it in green water and trying to scoop the peas onto it!

I liked it, since it tasted like a salad but didn’t quite get what the fuss was about, because all my friends seemed to swear by the dish! Only later did I find out the best (and only) way to enjoy pani-puris is to fill each puri like a water balloon that goes straight into the mouth!

This made me realize that something as intrinsic as pani-puris to the Indian palate can be so confusing for someone who hasn’t had them before.  I find such peculiarities very fascinating and that’s why food plays an important role when I am travelling and discovering a new place.

Pickles

Once, I was enjoying a shared thali of Indian food with my colleagues during a business lunch and ate a mouthful of pickles; thinking they were a regular curry. In my attempt to be polite at the table, I had to use all my energy (and cool) to not spit them out; they were extremely salty and spicy! I pretended that I was just fine, with everybody looking at me expecting my reaction!

Buttermilk

I risked losing my face once when tasting butter milk, thinking that I was about to have something similar to lassi, sweet but enhanced with Indian spices! It was so sour for me (and even now I find it challenging to drink) that I really didn’t know how to hide my disappointment and swallowed it without blinking!

Jain food

It was also a great Indian food discovery for me when I finally learned the difference between Jain food and vegetarian food. Before that I could not have imagined any aversion to vegetables of any kind due to religious beliefs. To my understanding, you either ate meat / animal derivate or you didn’t. So it was nothing short of a fascinating discovery that Jain food meant no potatoes, garlic, onions, or any roots for that matter. There’s so much to learn and experiment when it comes to food!

Jaggery

I also didn’t know about the extensive use of jaggery in Indian cuisine nor had I ever heard of its existence before I got to India. Would you believe it that I have a sweet tooth and yet jaggery is too sweet for my palate? In fact, since moving to India, I don’t crave for desserts as much. However, Dudhi Halwa was an excellent find for me. I had never imagined that something as dull as bottle gourd could be made into such a nice dessert!

Thank you, Mumbai, for teaching me so much about Indian food and I know there is still a lot more to learn and discover!

About Nadia Vitari

Passionate traveler and backpacker, Nadia comes from the Lake of Como area in Italy (yes, where George Clooney lives!). She moved to Mumbai to work for an NGO. Being Italian and having lived, worked and studied in different countries, she is passionate about food and other cultures, especially anything Japanese! She also loves reading, football and rock music.

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This post is part of Holachef’s Write Ho! program which is open to Holachef’s fans, critics, customers and their loved ones! To participate, write to [email protected]

By Deepak Ananth

Food! Nothing brings back the memories of good old days as vividly as a plate of hot piping portion of a dish that you grew up on.

Remember the days when the entire family would gather around the table and eat mom’s creations together, the chatter, and the tingling taste buds after eating simple yet deceptively complex flavors, the love that is served along with the day’s menu.

As you grow up, the mind yearns for the same taste. We roam the world tasting one plate of food after another, one cuisine after another but still return home to the familiar taste that often forms the premise of our very personalities.

Farm to Table

I grew up in a south Indian family that prides itself in feeding its members and guests till they are more than stuffed. From the Palakkad region of Kerala, our food is predominantly vegetarian and has ingredients that are often not considered as food in other parts of the country. In some cases, multiple ingredients (and delicacies) came from the same natural source.

Take the banana plant for instance; my grandmother and mother would make curries from the raw plantain, use the flower to make a side dish, the stem to serve up a scrumptious and healthy “kootu” and the fruit to make sweet delicacies that are worth craving for!

Another delicacy in our home was the small jackfruit or the “idichakkai”. It is an acquired taste but one that our family swears by. Or consider lotus roots, which used to be dried and fried to a crispy brown and eaten along with rice. There are various other such dehydrated fruits that I can’t even hope to find the English names for! Most of these dishes took time and effort to prepare, and therein lies the problem today.

In our day and age, where the 10 minute meal is a luxury, where tastes are made-to-order through emulsified liquids and reagents, we have lost the freshness and tastiness of the organically grown produce, often in our very own backyard!

It is therefore very heartening to see that more and more cuisines are now going back to the ‘organic’ culture. In fact, if a restaurant uses ‘organic’ ingredients, that becomes the biggest USP of the eatery. The concept of farm-to-table is catching up again, although it’s ironical that ‘farm-to-table’ used to be India’s very culture. It used to be the norm, not an exception. The ‘effort’ in cooking is what makes it complete. Putting ‘heart and soul’ into the food is what makes it good.

The hope is that when a child beseeches to her mother and says, “mummy bhookh lagi hai,”, the mother does not reply, “beta 2 minutes” and that will be the triumph of taste over convenience!

About Deepak Ananth

Over the past decade and half, Deepak has taken himself to the various nooks and crannies of India through road travel, interacting with the people, eating the local cuisine, creating memories through pictures and just plain roaming the country side. His Enfield, Theia and his car, Lucifer, vie equally for his attention. His ideal holiday would involve rains, nature, long winding roads, mouthwatering food and absolute strangers to share a drink and story with!

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This post is part of Holachef’s Write Ho! program which is open to Holachef’s fans, critics, customers and their loved ones! To participate, write to [email protected]