While in the West, summer is the ideal time to take the barbecues out, in India it’s the opposite.

While throwing a party, it is absolutely imperative that you have the finger food or snacks, down pat.

Addressing a 50,000-strong gathering here on Saturday, Congress president Sonia Gandhi spoke at length about how her party was sensitive towards Goa’s environment — something which the local Congress has been repeatedly criticised about, given the illegal mining scam.

Whenever we think of pudding, visions of gooey chocolate sauce, golden custard and bread dotted with raisins come to the mind. For most of us, puddings are always associated with desserts. There are however, savoury puddings that are as popular as the sweet ones, especially in England.

By some weird quirk of fate, when my phone beeped on Sunday morning with the message, “Noted cartoonist Mario Miranda expires at 85”, I was flipping through his latest book containing a collection of

India is going through a sushi revolution of sorts.

Welcome to the world of savoury jams. All of us have grown up on sweet jams and jellies and most households have their own recipes for orange marmalades, guava jellies etc.

As kids, whenever we felt under the weather there were two staples, chicken soup and stew.

Most Indians when asked to describe a soufflé will say that it is a dessert and they will only be partially right. A soufflé can be a sweet or savoury.

A couple of decades back, there were hardly any places where one could get Western desserts like puddings and pies other than posh restaurants or clubs or, for the lucky ones, at some aunts who had be