About Oishii-Rasoi

Hello, I’m Samar. Welcome to “oishii rasoi”, a blog chronicling my culinary adventures. I decided to build this site as a way to catalog and share what I cook and eat, an outlet, if you will, for my primary obsession: food.

I live in New York, and my culinary interests tend to reflect the diversity of that city. This is embodied in the title of this blog (in case you were wondering what it means): “Oishii” (美味しい) is tasty or delicious in Japanese, and “rasoi” (રસોય) means cooking in Gujarati (and other Indian languages). At risk of sounding presumptuous (not everything I cook/eat is oishii!), it combines words from the two cuisines/cultures I have a connection to, and it highlights the eclectic nature of ‘my’ food. That said, I gravitate toward “Asian”  and “Mediterranean” flavors so this blog will be somewhat biased in favor of those parts of the world (e.g., Korean, Indian, Italian and such).

What you will and won’t find here.

I am obsessed by food, but I also have a day job (in academia) as they say. Which means that while I would love to spend my days making tasty, interesting, and (generally) healthy food, as a practical matter cooking is also about putting food on the table. Every day. (Yes, not everyone in New York subsists on takeout.)  What you will find here, then, are the recipes I most often turn to to make that happen. Some are inspired by what I’ve eaten in restaurants, some from friends and relatives, many are taken or adapted from cookbooks and blogs, and a few are even original to the extent that anything in the food world can be considered as such. What you won’t find here (as yet) are pictures of professionally-styled and photographed food (not that I have the equipment or skill to do it). What you see is what I ate!