Swapna Rakesh wanted to polish her cooking skills to impress her husband, Rakesh Rajakumar, a diehard foodie. She became so proficient in culinary skills that she decided to share her skills with foodies and cookery addicts in a food blog, Swadcuisine, and a Facebook page, Swapna’s Kitchen Magic, which is garnering likes by the day.
“To fine tune my cooking, I turned to my mother, my ammamma (grandmother) and mother-in-law who are amazing cooks,” says Swapna with a chuckle. She adds: “I was working in a bank and when my second child was born I decided to give up my job to be a stay-at-home mum. But I was on the lookout for an avenue to earn an income. Eventually I turned to my passion, cooking. I loved experimenting in the kitchen. I cooked whenever we had get-togethers at home and often the guests would ask me for my recipes. When I found that my food had so many fans and the recipes were getting shared, I hit upon the idea of a food blog,” says Swapna, a resident of PTP Nagar.
Her one-year-old blog is all “about celebrating good food”. Over 250 recipes have been divided into different categories. New recipes are posted every day on her Facebook page.
Along with recipes of traditional and popular dishes, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian, Swapna also posts her own ‘creations’ on her blog, especially dishes for kids – snacks, frankies, rolls and wraps. She has also posted her own versions of recipes of eats and curries that are usually found at toddy shops, tea shops and roadside eateries (thattukada). Seafood delicacies are another speciality.
“There are tweaked versions of dishes I learnt from my family. For instance, we make omelettes with shallots, green chillies and curry leaves. But my grandma used to add scraped coconut to it and my mother added tomatoes to it. So I have posted an omelette recipe with both coconut and tomatoes. Then there is my mother’s recipe of making super soft and fluffy idlis with a batter made in a mixie. While grinding in a mixie, the jar gets heated up soon and so I use ice cold water to make the batter. Adding cooked rice or aval (rice flakes) makes the idli very soft,” she says. All the recipes come with photographs of each step of preparation.
Now that there are umpteen cookery shows on television and cyber space is also flooded with food blogs, Swapna says that it is quite a competitive field. “Sometimes I find new versions of my own recipes. Also, some people call up seeking guidance to start a website/blog. It is not easy to make a mark. But I try to bring in variety and that is important to stand out,” she says.
