For over a decade, during the Independent Activities Period between semesters, MIT has offered a non-credit class on “old food’’ from the region around the Mediterranean Sea. The idea came from conversations history department chair Anne McCants, who teaches the class, had with a colleague about how little their students knew about daily life in the past,’’ she says. “Both of us liked to cook and I was especially interested as well in nutrition and health of past populations, as well as the productive capacity [...]

Swati Banerjee barely knew how to cook when she came to this country five years ago from India. Now the Boston University biochemistry doctoral student always cooks dinner after she gets home from the lab. Leftovers are for the next day’s lunch. All of this and her other kitchen adventures are recorded on her blog, The Whistling Pressure Cooker. Read the article here. html. pdf.

SOMERVILLE — Losar, the Tibetan New Year, begins with a spoonful of dessert. Dresyl, also known as deysee, is a warm dish of sweetened rice that women make for their families on the morning of this festive day. “In Tibet, we would add droma, which tastes like a chewy sweet potato. But here raisins work as a good substitute,’’ says Yeshi Lokyitsang, owner of the House of Tibet Kitchen. She pulls out a Ziploc stash of the miniature root vegetable with traces of Tibetan soil [...]

LONDON — Dishoom, which opened last summer and calls itself “A Bombay Cafe in London,’’ takes its name from the Indian comic book equivalent of “Pow!’’ and “Wham!’’ In some Bollywood films, “dishoom’’ is, at times, said out loud in fight scenes when someone throws a punch. Mumbai, once called Bombay, is the home of studios where these films are made. Started by three Londoners who spent childhood summers in Mumbai, Dishoom pays homage to old-fashioned spots there. At one point, there were a few [...]

On that busy stretch of Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Central squares, a sidewalk vent lets out a sudden gust from below. The Red Line rumbles underfoot. A few doors away, inside the Greater Boston Buddhist Cultural Center, everything is peaceful and quiet. A large golden Buddha in the far corner of the adjacent meditation hall adds to the tranquility. But you don’t have to be a practicing Buddhist to enter. You can stop by for lunch, tea, or dinner and a lecture. “This place [...]

The exterior looks like a dry-erase board, but it’s an essential feature of the truck. On the white surface, Ayr Muir, the 31-year-old proprietor of Clover Food Lab and an MIT alum, writes out the day’s menu as soon as he gets the ovens going every morning. The truck’s handwritten name and matching logo, which is doodled in marker pen, don’t exactly draw attention, but the food has its devotees. Food trucks are a longstanding MIT tradition and the outfits tend to reflect the ethnic [...]

SINGAPORE –The bustling streets of Little India, an ethnic quarter in this city, seem removed from the other orderly neighborhoods. Here, hit Tamil tunes spill out of record stores, which makes passersby want to dance, and sidewalk flower sellers weave ropy garlands of jasmine and orchids. The quarter is also home to many Indian eateries. In the midst of all this activity, the newly opened Spice Queen – with its burnt-orange glass-and-chrome front – stands out. Chef and owner Devagi Sanmugam is an established figure [...]

Four years ago, Guru the Caterer set up shop on Broadway here. The sign read “divine Indian food for brilliant minds” and listed the contact information, but the shutters remained closed most of the time. Meanwhile, a minivan with the same intriguing tagline was zipping around Cambridge making deliveries. Read the rest of the story here. html. pdf.

In the hands of an Indian cook, lentils – also called dals or pulses – might be made into spinach dal or sambar. Whatever dish they go into, they feature prominently on the daily menu of most Indian-American families. Open a kitchen cabinet in a typical home and you can probably find a dozen dals of myriad shapes and hues: red masoor dal, green moong beans, or yellow toor dal. The pulses are so integral to the cooking, and such an important source of protein, [...]