Thanks to Suhas Diwakar Zele and his mail on the Finely Chopped Facebook page I got to know of another piece of good news yesterday.
The Maharashtra Times had featured Finely Chopped and the walks yesterday. The other blogger covered was Chowder Singh who write about street food and ethnic food in India.
I was quite thrilled to hear about this feature in a Marathi paper that too on the day when Ganpathis were being brought home here as Maharashtra’s biggest festival, Ganesh Chaturthi began.
Here’s the link to the feature
I later requested our friend Harshad to translate the parts on Finely Chopped in English. I could read a part of it as the script is the Devnagari script but now am feeling inspired to try to read Marathi.
Here’s Harshad’s translation on the part on Finely Chopped. Felt great to read this. Thanks to him and the author of course for this pleasant Ganpathi surprise gift. And, of course, thanks a ton Suhas for telling me about this.
Here’s wishing you all a happy Ganesh Chaturthi
Foodwalks (Anna Yaatra)
‘Finely Chopped’ is a blog about cooking and eating out started by Kalyan Karmakar, a market research professional.
‘As a kid I was told stories so that I’d eat. Now I tell stories about food’. Kalyan loves to cook, but rather than rely on read-up recipes, he likes to rely on his own sense of improvisation. He often relies on tastes that linger on in his memories.
Kalyan writes informatively on various restaurants and eateries through his blog posts. But the story that I was personally fascinated with on his blog was the one on ‘Food walks’ (Anna Yaatra). These food walks are usually woven around a theme. For example, ‘Parsi Fort Food walk’, ‘Bohri Mohalla Ramazan Walk’, ‘Dadar Maharashtrian Brunch Walk’, etc. In the actual walk, the entire participating group walks between various restaurants to taste the food, or to various shops to buy their food preparations. Eg. In the ‘Dadar Maharashtrian Brunch Walk’, they started off with Shivaji Park’s ‘Aaswaad’. From there on, after paying visits to ‘Santosh Masalas’ and ‘Konkan Bazaar’, they went on to Panshikar and Gadgil, which are shops known for their Marathi sweets. Afterwards, the group went to ‘Prakash’ for Misal, and then for the afternoon lunch to ‘Sachin’. And after lunch, the sweet-dish was in the form of ‘Aamras’ at ‘Gypsy’.
For each of these walks, the technicalities of the walk, approximate duration and the route are announced beforehand by Kalyan on his blog. And interested people are asked to register for the same. While picking stops along each walk, Kalyan chooses places that might not be known beyond the immediate neighbourhood, but are sure to have something really distinct that they offer.
I am absolutely ‘fidaa’ over the concept itself, and have decided to take up one of these food walks along with my friends.
This blog is technically the most advanced. Its arrangement is not static like other blogs, and visitors can modify it. But due to which, it can at times be a little confusing.