About Cooking and Me

Hi! I'm Manju Nair and welcome to my food space. 

A little about me:
Mommy to 6yr old Manav (Appu) and 1yr old Mihika (Mihi) and married to my best friend Manish. We also have a fun little pet bird, a cockateil named Spiky and we reside in the Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina. 

I'm a south-Indian from the beautiful state of Kerala. I grew up in the Middle-East, Saudi Arabia and Dubai to be exact and love Mediterranean cuisine just as much as Indian. Manish and I love  dining out on weekends and trying new dishes and cuisines.

I have a full time job as a Quality Analyst with one of the major banks in Minnesota and in my spare time I cook, I blog, we eat and we hang out like a bunch of crazy happy kids. 
I love my family, enjoy walking and swimming, can literally watch cooking/baking shows all day and love to travel and try new cuisines! And yes, any new new 'blog-worthy' dish cooked by me will first get photographed before it can be eaten...Lol!

A little about my cooking and baking spree:

I have always appreciated good food and flavors. Cooking for Manish after our marriage gave me wings to try different dishes and I wanted a space where I could save the recipes that were successful and thus we started this blog in Oct 2011. Manish has helped me a great deal in setting up this blog  and is the co-editor of all my blog posts ;-)

My greatest gift is a collection of my mom's simple everyday recipes for everyday cooking which she wrote for me and gave me after our wedding. So I treasure her handwritten Keralite recipes and those are the staple dishes in my home. 
But I love to experiment with all kinds of dishes as long as the ingredients are easily available and suites my family's palette. Whatever you see here on the blog are dishes cooked by me ofcourse and I still have plenty more to share.

Manish is a very good critic and is not a fussy eater at all, so it really helps motivate me when I want to try something new or different. My son Manav is also appreciative of the dishes I make. He loves to help out in the kitchen and as his teachers say, 'he's a good eater' :-)

Apart from trying new dishes, I love baking! From savory goodies to sweet treats. Homemade breads, simple tea time snacks, cookies, layered cakes and still plenty more to experiment and I enjoy every minute of time spent in my kitchen baking.

But my favorite thing to do is decorating Cakes. I've always been an admirer of beautifully decorated cakes and when I got a chance to make a baby shower cake for a friend, I decided to think out of the box and did my first ever theme cake, a 'Baby Crib' shaped cake. That was my first ever theme cake and I have never looked back. 
I have since then baked and decorated for so many of my friend's special occasions be it birthdays, weddings, baby showers etc and even for my own family. Everyone encourages me whole heartedly and I love the look on the person's face when they see the cake! I haven't taken any formal training in Cake decorating but would love to attend some classes from some of the masters in this field.

I love to try different techniques in frosting like Fondant, Buttercream, Whipped Cream etc and also try different cake and frosting flavors. I want to try various techniques like sugar flowrers and figurines and so much more.

As far as my photography is concerned, I like to keep it simple. When we started this blog I used a regular point-n-shoot camera and after seeing my craze for taking pics of everything we eat, Manish decided to buy me a DSLR, a Cannon Rebel T3i. 
I keep my food styling simple mostly focusing on the main dish. I use my DSLR and sometimes my Iphone to shoot most of my pics that you see here on the blog. I take almost all of my pics in broad daylight. There's still a lot more to learn about the technicalities of photography but so far I'm quite happy with what I've learnt and shared here.

My recipes are simple and if I could cook the dishes shared here, then you can too. Hope you will enjoy the time spent here and cook along! Do share your thoughts and feedback.

For more information regarding any recipe on the blog, or if you have any food related questions please feel free to email me and I'll do my best to reply :-)

Email: manjuseatingdelights@gmail.com

Apart from the blog I am also active on social media and you can find and follow me on:
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/Manjus-Eating-Delights-273157692772414/
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/manju_nair/
Twitter : https://twitter.com/ManjusDelights
Pinterest : https://www.pinterest.com/manjumanish1/


-Manju