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Adventures in the kitchen

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...

World’s Largest School Lunch Program

On any given school day, one industrial kitchen in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, is astir well before dawn. In this food factory run by the Akshaya Patra Foundation, workers prepare hot lunches for over one hundred thousand children in the city's state-aided schools. Inside the...

Tibetan New Year nears, bearing a sweet dish

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...

Bombay cafe makes a bang in London

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...

Of Math & The Monkey God

Centum is Latin for hundred. I don’t know if Italians use the word anymore, but some people in India still do. To them, centum is what a smart kid would score on a math test. In the middle class neighborhood where I grew up,...

A tranquil space for lunch or tea

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...