The Weekend Thali Project
Vikram hails originally from the state of Odisha and eats meat while I hail from the state of Andhra Pradesh and I am ova-lacto-genarian (i.e. I eat vegetables, dairy products and eggs). These dietary preferences keep things interesting at our home when it comes to cooking meals. Since both of us have full time jobs and need to also manage our daughter’s busy after school activities, we normally cook enough food in the weekend to last us through the week. The weekend cooking blitz goes on for around 3-4 hours with soulful Hindi movie songs playing in the background while we cook one dish after another together as a family.
Since we have been stuck at home due to the COVID-19 quarantine, we have decided to make our weekend cooking a shade more exciting by starting a Weekend Thali project. Here is what we are planning to do. Every weekend we will cook an entire meal with the dishes from a particular Indian State or a particular cuisine. We will cook a vegetarian version of the Thali and a non-vegetarian version of the Thali. Since I am trying to stick with a low-carb diet, we will focus on dishes that have a lower carb quotient. Even if the photographs may show white rice, I normally replace the rice with cooked quinoa on my plate. We will start with the states that we are either familiar with or the states that we have friends from, so that we can make educated decisions on the menu dishes. We may repeat a state cuisine with a different combination of dishes, since let’s be honest, we all know that each cuisine has enough depth that cannot be captured in one thali! We will skip the sweets in the thali for most weekends since that is an entire genre by itself and it’s not low-carb. And finally we will add our weekly adventure to the blog along with pictures. We will include links to the videos/recipes that we use when cooking the meal so that you can also give it a shot at your end if you may choose to do so. And that’s about it. Simple enough right!!
‘Thali’ is a Hindi word that means plate. It is a full meal with rice and/or bread and a number of vegetable and meat dishes as accompaniments.
