Sailu's Kitchen

Sometimes we get carried away with a particular seasonal food or ingredient and end up preparing different varieties or variations of it more often than usual. During the summer season, I am obsessed with mangoes – both, raw and ripe and can never get tired of them. Today, I’m sharing with you an unforgettable summer [...]

Our Ugadi festive meal was simple and not elaborate. I prepared mamidikaya pulihora, carrot kothimira pachadi, mokka jonna garelu (corn vadas), pesarappu payasam, white rice, rasam, vadiyalu, fried dried green chillis and curd. On Ugadi we celebrate the season’s fresh produce of mangoes by preparing Mamidikaya Annam (green mango rice), a South Indian rice delicacy, [...]

To us South Indians, our everyday traditional food is incomplete with a podi (spice pwd) and its an an essential food item on the dining table, be it for breakfast or lunch. When one is hard pressed for time and you need fix a quick lunch, all you need to prepare is some steamed rice, [...]

Mango season is almost through and the mangoes that are available now are thotapuri (called collector kaya in andhra) and bainganapalli varieties which don’t have much of a sour flavor. They are best suited to prepare curries which have a predominately sweet flavor. It would be a whole year before I prepare Mamidikaya kura again, [...]

A chutney I often prepare is tomato chutney, a South Indian style chutney, I learnt from a Tamilian friend’s mother, Revati Aunty who usually prepares it with idlis, dosas and ven pongal (South Indian style lentil-rice preparation). Its easy to prepare with very less cooking time. Today I prepared it as an accompaniment with dosas [...]

The podi (spice powder), pachadi (type of chutney) and the pickle form an integral part of Andhra cuisine and no Andhra vegetarian meal is complete without them. Other than the famous traditional Andhra Avakai (Mango Pickle), Andhra cuisine also boasts of an assortment of pachadis, one of them being Pachi Mamidikaya – Kobbari Pachadi. Raw [...]

Today we are celebrating Ugadi, the Telugu New Year Day, which is the first festival of our Telugu calendar and the first big festival that comes after Sankranti. Our Andhra festival is known by different names in different states of India like “Gudi Padwa” in Maharastra and “Ugadi” in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Whatever the [...]