Have been on a break from posting and busy thinking a creating new dishes. Asking three favourite ingredients from people I know, and trying to create a dish where those ingredients are highlighted when one eats it.

Well, this is something that I have come up with to create few interesting dishes, using ingredients that compliment each other or pairing flavours. I hope to continue and come up with some flavourful dishes.

The dish here is Olive Khichdi, Yes you read that right. A friend of mine asked me to prepare something using Olives. When you think of it, Olives are mostly used in Mediterranean cuisine. It is among the oldest known cultivated trees in the world – being grown before the written language was invented.We Indians aren’t much used to using Olives other than in salads and pizzas. So, after much thinking, I zeroed down on Khichdi, a dish that can take any flavour and still doesn’t lose its identity.

After figuring out the dish, it was about the flavours, which was sort of difficult because of Olives. Green Olives are bitter and little sour in taste and its challenging to balance its taste. Enters Pachadi, a dish thats popular in South India, and can be found in almost every household. Here its a Beetroot pachadi, sweet and a bit nutty to balance the bitterness from Olives.

I know many of you might think what weird combination is this, but trust me once you try it, you won’t regret. Olives that have been for around 6,000 years now, aren’t included in Indian cooking, maybe because we were introduced to it much later, and in 2007, we started cultivating it in Rajasthan.