Foodie trail from Mumbai to Pune

A Mumbai gal, Maria D’Souza is now a Pune foodie. It’s endearing to read her journey in cooking and her fun-loving approach to life and food. She is truly a bindaas babe, not afraid to experiment and constantly learning and dishing out fantastic food.  It’s been an interesting journey for this corporate girl who found her true calling and took the plunge. You Should experience Maria’s Creative Blog Space, www.flavorsofmumbai.com which is a collection of much-loved recipes from Mumbai and Goa.

Her recipes are easy to make and use easily available ingredients. Also, an amateur photographer, she illustrates her recipes with beautiful pictures. Whether it is healthy or sinfully indulgent, she does not discriminate. She brings her joie de vivre to exploring the best of her culinary legacy of Goa and Mumbai in particular. Her recipes are neatly catalogued and easy to access. With Easter around the corner, you might want to check her Easter recipes here http://www.flavorsofmumbai.com/category/easter-recipes/

Image courtesy: flavorsofmumbai.com

Watch this space for more on foodies. Ciao until the next post.

Want us to feature a foodie you know, write in to us at care@mealnut.com

Most of us in Pune are familiar with Karve Road. This busy street is named after Maharshi Karve, a social reformer responsible for bringing about change especially with regards to the emancipation of women. Today’s foodie, Vikram Karve is the great grandson of Maharshi Karve and a very interesting man.

A retired naval officer and professor, this gentleman is now a prolific blogger and creative writer. He has been a professor for 15 years and is a guest lecturer right here in Pune. He lives with his family and his pet muse ‘Sherry’, his companion on rambles through the neighbourhood.

This self-proclaimed foodie puts food in perspective.He has traveled across the country since his youth and his blog posts transport you to his memories of various trips and the gastronomic experiences along the way. All his destinations were simply adventures to savour the culinary treats native to the place. He believes in mindful eating, being aware of the entire experience, right from the ingredients to the tastes and visual presentation.

All in all, an exciting and rich life and I guess that’s where a lot of thoughts spring from. “Appetite for a stroll’ a foodie book based upon his food trail was published in 2008 followed by ‘Cocktail’ a collection of short stories about relationships in 2011. A man of many interests, a flair for the written word and a die-hard foodie, this is one blogger you want to follow. You could catch his blog on  http://karvediat.blogspot.in or connect on facebook at https://www.facebook.com /vikramkarve

Image courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151079869210982&set=a.10151079869205982.475963.657825981&type=3&theater

Here is what she ordered:

1. Black Current

She wanted to send a cake in pune itself and she zeroed on this gorgeous cake.

2. Dark Fantasy

This one she ordered for her Mom.

3. Angry Bird Cake

And the latest one, angry bird cake!

So next time you want to order a cake in pune for birthday, anniversaries or any special occasion, you gotta try out us. You can even send a cake to pune to you loved ones, we do it even at sharp 12am in midnight .

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Join us this summer as
we start the gang of foodies, right here on www.mealnut.com, a space dedicated to all the foodies out there. Anyone can be a foodie; all you need is a passion for food.

Most of the foodies we’ve met or interviewed are also great chefs in their kitchens and enjoy feeding their friends and family. The secret ingredient in their delicious meals is love, be it in the selective choice of quality ingredients or in the techniques employed. A lot of them are expressive not just in their cooking but  also in writing about their culinary adventures. Their blogs are little web spaces where you can follow their kitchen capers. Hope you enjoy reading about them as much as we have writing about them.

Vini and Mr. ‘V’

Vinita is a foodie with a skill that makes vegetarian food come alive. Her blog http://vinicooksveg.wordpress.com is a visual treat in addition to being a recipe storehouse. Vinita’s family hails from Andhra Pradesh but she spent her childhood in Gujarat, a part of her growing up years in Karnataka and Maharashtra and finally decided to stay in Pune. Her cooking is inspired from the diverse culinary culture of all the places she has lived in along with traditional recipes from her mother’s and mother-in-law’s kitchen. She blogs about what she cooks; healthy, easy to cook and delicious vegetarian fare. She is candid about her experiences with cooking and is constantly experimenting with traditional recipes. Her husband “Mr. V.” is her biggest critic and he is the man behind this talented lady. She writes beautifully about her preparations and makes it seem easy even for a novice to give cooking a swirl. An easy to browse recipe index and some fantastic pictures make this blog a place to check out if you’re looking for some fun, vegetarian dishes.

Peanut
and sesame stuffed chilly pepper- one of Vini’s personal favourites

Spinach
in sesame and yogurt gravy- another one of her special dishes

It’s the season of raw mangoes and Vini’s got a delicious looking salad on her blog. Check it out on https://vinicooksveg.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/sweet-potato-and-raw-mango-salad/

Until the next post, bon appetit.

All images courtesy http://vinicooksveg.wordpress.com/

P.S.: Help us get this Mealnut’s Gang of Foodies morph into a movement. We are looking at uniting all the foodies out there, send us your recommendations about foodies you know and maybe we could feature them on our blog. Email us at care@mealnut.com

Her culinary and writing skills have wonderfully combined to create her website www.Tesathome.com. This site is a mirror to Tess and her creativity as she shares about food, travel, health and beauty, family and everything else that makes life more interesting. “Cozy and happy” is how she likes to describe her blog which is akin to “a living room in her home”. A people’s person, she chats with visitors to
her site and gives freely of whatever she has learned along the way. Her life is a fusion of scents and flavours from all the places she has been to and her blog actually makes the food come alive.

Family comes first for this talented lady and she talks straight from the heart. Reading what she has written about her family, one cannot help but admire the love that they share. She’s published a book, “Lavender Blood” in addition to painting some beautiful pictures for her walls. Her recipe collection is like having an online TV food show, one you can view anytime. Definitely a must see at http://tesathome.com/recipe-collection-2/

As someone rightly questioned on one of her blogs, “is there anything she cannot do?” Truly, nothing seems to be impossible for this cheerful lady who makes it seem so effortless.

All images courtesy: www.tesathome.com

Know a foodie you would like to see here? Send us a mail at care@mealnut.com

Recently one of very passionate Bengali home-chef, Twinkle Bhattacharya joined Mealnut. She told us one very interesting thing she do. She has certain customers each one of them have shared important birth dates, anniversary dates & special dates of their friends & relatives with her along with their addresses. So whenever any friend’ birthday or anniversary is nearby, she send respective friend a gift (chocolates, sweets, chocolate paintings etc) on behalf of customer. Cool, isn’t it? This way, customer doesn’t have to remember all the dates and he saves himself from the guilt of not able to send gift though he wanted to.

Mealnut gonna bring this to our 500+ customers to make sure that each one of them and new ones never forget to send gift. We gonna call this, Mealnut Gifts.

Here is how it works?

1. Register for the Mealnut Gift Program by sending an email to gifts@mealnut.com

2. Give us the birth / anniversary / special dates & name of your friends to whom you want to send the gift & your budget.

3. 7-days before any date, we will convey you the gift we gonna send with some options

4. Finalize the gift and make the payment

5. We deliver the gift to your friend on your behalf.

Easy, isn’t it? We are sure it will remove the hassles of sending gifts and make your loved ones feel little more special.

FAQs

1. What kind of Gifts?

Cakes, Exquisite chocolates, Cupcakes, Sweets, Gourmet Food, Healthy food etc. We will add even more varieties. You can even add gift items like flowers, cards etc.

2. What will be the price?

You can set the budget anywhere above 500/-

3. Where i can send the gifts?

Almost anywhere in India & all over World.

You remember during our college days, we were sitting in library and the topic went on to what we plan to do after college. And you said you want to do MS. My reaction was, why you want to go for MS. There are other options as well like Starting up and you freaked out. I somehow managed to keep you calm that day.

After some days i was able to convince you that starting up can be better idea and you agreed overtime. Planning to start after 2 years , we took up the jobs. But they turned out to be utterly boring and i quit in 10 months. So we thought of couple of ideas including Juice Bar chain (Yeah, i am not that smart at ideas). Then really cool idea stuck to us, creating platform to connect imminent personalities to their fans so they can share their real-time updates directly. And then we stumbled upon Twitter and we gave up the thought. In meantime you left your handsomely paid job to work full time with me.

You put all of your savings in startup. Something which i  was never able to do, i never had any. You never cribbed about it. Probably those were the days you could have spent enjoying just like any other girl but you joined me in visiting colleges, convincing people, searching office space and what not.

Since in all those small small things which never made money, we learned a lesson to create something which people really want. And we started Mealnut, in its previous avatar, customized meal service.

You were not comfortable with the idea but you still had hunger to create something meaningful. Your parents opposed it fiercely but you didn’t budge. You again joined me in scorching summer of Mumbai in search of the things we needed from packaging to equipments. We started Mealnut but worst was to yet to come. You did cooking when the cook ran away though you never ever tried it before. You handled the frantic customer calls while i tried making sure the deliveries happen on time. You stayed composed when i screamed on employees and also made sure not to let any string loose in case of complacency. And how can i forget the days when you did couple of deliveries when i was hospitalized. You are truly a rockstar.

2.5 yrs from starting up, your hopes again dashed when we decided to shutdown the current service & focus on one thing out of production, delivery & tech. It was funny time, our investors wanted us to shut down & take a break. But you knew the best of us is yet to come, so we continued.

Now, here we are building a new Mealnut- a marketplace for home-chefs to showcase & sell home cooked delicacies they are really good at. All credit goes to you for coming up with this idea. I wished i would have listened to you more often in those last 3 years. And here too, you happily took the responsibility of building the tech platform though you were cut off from the coding for 3 years. It is just 2 months and you have already done amazing job.

Making you my-cofounder in a startup journey is the best decision i have ever taken in last 3yrs. Thank you!

-Jit

A ‘vivacious and enthusiastic Bhakti’ as she describes herself is pretty much how you see her too. She is a qualified HR professional with a Master’s degree in the subject and a prolific blogger. A dynamic and creative foodie, this lady loves DIY craft, shopping and cooking.

As with most creative people,she is interested in different things, sometimes all at once and there seems to be no end to her capacity and energy to create. Her blog is aptly titled lifestylerr.com as it is all about the lifestyle today, be it food, fashion, gadgets, careers, etc. Her web space is tuned into the pulse of the contemporary audience and she puts up posts that are relevant to all of us on the go, homemaker or professional. Check out her blog on http://lifestylerr.com/category/food/

Her blog conjures up vibrant colours and flavours as they explore different facets of living a good life. She’s a foodie and experiments with dishes that catch her fancy, be it an exotic dessert or a regular meal. Food is a vital part of daily living and Bhakti brings her  trademark touch to spicing up the menu with easy to cook delicacies that look like you’ve laboured on for hours.

Rasmalai is her signature dish, one she uses to finish off a meal. Her Rasmalai recipe is up for grabs for anyone who would like to whip up this traditional Indian dessert. She’s an eager cook in the kitchen and also a conscious one. She’s a strong advocate of healthy food habits and balances sinful indulgence with sensible maintenance.

Signing off, I would like to close with Chef Gusteau’s motto in the movie, “Anyone can cook”. Here’s to all the home chefs who believe in the magic of soul sustaining food.

All pictures courtesy http://lifestylerr.com/

P.S.  Watch this space for more on foodies. Interested in being featured, send us an email at care@mealnut.com