The Botanical Kitchen
Recipes, travel and the occasional rant
So excited to share with you details of my debut cookbook! All about the wonderful world of Gujarati snacking and our culture of sharing and hospitality. It’s full of stories as well as quick and easy vegetarian recipes from beer snacks to bhajia, masala mogo to green chilli margaritas! Have a look!
I love travelling. Especially travelling on holiday. But the problem with holidays is that you have to leave behind important everyday chores. I know what you;re thinking. “That’s the whole point of a holiday!”. I know. I know. But when you are away during quite possibly the hottest couple of weeks in the UK for […]
There is a term we Gujaratis use often and do far too often. It’s called ‘biting’. It means snacking, eating little Polpo-esque portions of something to tide you over to the next biting or meal. When you are visiting relatives the first question you’ll be asked will be if you’ll partake in some ‘biting biting’. […]
Since getting our allotment I have had runner bean envy of my neighbour’s runner beans. They are pristine. not a black fly, white fly or any fly for that matter on them. Each variety could have been entered into countless competitions and won. I was determined to grow my own this year but I wanted […]
Patra is one of my all time favourite Gujarati dishes. My Baa (maternal grandmother) used to make them for breakfast when I was little using fresh colocasia leaves and her own spice mix. I was too little to really appreciate her or her patra which makes me so incredibly sad. However, I wasn’t so little that […]
Nuts are getting a fair amount of media attention recently. Is it to drive seasonal sales in supermarkets? Have you noticed how the shelves are laden? Is it because we are no longer scared of the saturated fat they contain? Or crave the essential fatty acids, B vitamins, fibre, protein, carbohydrate and a host of minerals […]
I wanted to share with you the story of Draupadi. She’s a mum like me. She’s also a grandmother that I aspire to be one day. She lives in a remote village in Uttarkhand in Northern India. She’s part of a unique, tribal community that sadly suffers from discrimination, violence and exploitation because of this […]
This is my first blog post! I’ve been blogging at for a few months now and while I’ve been out and about lots of people have asked me about my background which is Gujarati. To be specific, my father is from Rajkot and from a ‘community’ of ‘Suthar’ which literally translated means ‘carpenter’. This is rather […]