Look at her lunchbox
CHENNAI: A look at city-based homechef-cum-food blogger Uma Ramanujam’s Instagram handle ‘Indian Curry Trails’ is all that’s needed to make you drool. Posts and recipes of healthy and fresh, tasty and great looking food, packed and presented in humble tiffin boxes and thalis, is what her 31,000 followers get to see every day.
For the IT professional, her culinary journey began when along with her cousins she decided to move out of their hostel in 2008, which served ‘tasteless and boring food’. “During this period, I tried learning many dishes with the help of my mother and grandmother and that is how the journey began,” she narrates.
What started as a hobby, slowly turned into Uma’s passion. “I was interested in cooking new dishes every day. My cousins were my lab rats. But, however good/bad the dish was, they always encouraged me,” she smiles.
Uma grew up in a small town near Theni before she moved to Chennai. “I love trying authentic recipes. A majority of the recipes I cooked and blogged in my initial days are traditional ones, which I learned from my grandmother,” she says.
Her maternal grandmother is her inspiration and Uma says she feels ‘proud and elated’ to have inherited some of her cooking skills. “Some dishes that are special and commonly cooked in my native are black urad dal rice (karuppu ulundhu sadam), ellu thogayal, sweet and spicy tamarind chutney, yellow moong dal puttu, whole wheat sweet pidi kozhukattai, cowpeas and sorghum sundal. Although these dishes are familiar in the south, each region has subtle differences in preparation. I learned it all from my grandmother,” says Uma.
Her transition from a food blogger to an Instagram celebrity has been a surreal journey, she says. “I came across different food blogs which fuelled my passion to start my own and that’s how Uma’s Kitchen Experiments was born. Later, I changed the name to Indian Curry Trail,” she shares.
Uma draws inspiration from ‘Sailu’s Kitchen’ and ‘Srivalli’s Cooking for All Season’. “It amazes me how she balances work, personal life and her passion by doing an event called blogging marathon,” she says.
She has her own share of kitchen goof-ups and laughs as she recalls one. “I planned a surprise dinner for my in-laws. I decided to make idiyappam. This is a dish I knew they liked, but I had never prepared. I was all set to start cooking...when I began pressing the dough, all I got was water out of the holes of the idiyappam press. Later, I found that I had used the wrong flour.”
Her Instagram page is known primarily for Lunchbox ideas. “I have been packing tiffin boxes for almost a decade but, packing interesting lunch box dishes struck me when my kid started going to school. Cooking something unique and simple everyday rejuvenates the body and soul,” she says.
Her go-to comfort food is urad dal rice and a simple tamarind gravy with mangoes, peanuts, bittergourd, red chilli powder and cardamom. “Not all tasty foods are unhealthy. But there are times when I simply choose a dish, replace the main ingredient with a healthier option,” she explains.
She dreams of releasing her own cookbook some day and adds, “From cooking, food styling to food photography, everything happened unexpectedly. So, I am not planning this cookbook, but I know it’ll happen.”
Cooking journey
Uma turned her hobby into passion just by chance. Initially, her cousins were the lab rats for her cooking experiments. She started the blog in 2011 and slowly moved over to becoming an Instagram celebrity. By 2015, she started posting her recipes of healthy and tasting looking food on her Instgram account, Indian Curry Trail. She also dreams of releasing her own cookbook someday.
Ingredients
Dry red chillies: 10 nos ● Fenugreek: 1/2 tsp ● Ground Asafoetida / Compound Asafoetida: a medium size pinch ● Tamarind: a small lemon sized ball ● Pirandai / Adamant Creeper: 2 cups, cleaned ● Salt to taste ● Gingelly oil: 1/4 cup + 1/2 tsp ● Mustard seeds: 1 tsp
Method
● Dry roast dry red chilli, fenugreek seeds on a medium flame and transfer to a plate.
● Add 1/2 teaspoon of oil, and saute asafoetida till it turns in colour.
● Cool down all three ingredients and grind it to a fine powder. Now, pickle spice powder
is ready.
● Pinch tamarind into small pieces and saute for few seconds.
● Wash the pirandai well and add to the pan. Saute till it becomes soft and shrinks.
● Cool down all the ingredients and grind sauted pirandai and tamarind to a paste. Add salt towards the end of the grinding.
● Heat oil in a pan and add mustard seeds when it is hot. When mustard seeds start sputtering, add the ground pirandai, tamarind mixture.
● Add gourd pickle spice powder. Mix well and cook till the oil oozes out from the sides of the pan.
● Transfer the pickle to the clean dry bottle and serve for curd rice.