Welcome to The Veggie Pad. As a single guy with a major like for food, this site is a way for me to share my experiments with cooking (and photography) with the world.
First off, let me give a brief intro about myself. I grew up in Chennai, India and now live in Silicon Valley, California. Having grown up in a South Indian Brahmin household, it was only natural that my cooking skills are all with South Indian vegetarian cuisine. When I moved to the United States a few years ago, I lived in a house with a few roommates, and I was the only vegetarian in the group. Suffice to say, I had a tough time.
After I moved to Silicon Valley, I found myself wanting to try new flavours and became lazy to keep cooking Indian food, and so I ate out more often than I should have. However, this did have an unexpected advantage. I got introduced to other wonderful flavours provided by different cuisines, and the advantage of living in California was that there were always quite a few vegetarian options.
Soon I started developing a like for cooking shows. Bobby Flay, Alton Brown, Giada de Laurentiis, and several more were inspirational, though I did note that they didn’t have too many vegetarian dishes. Scouring the web, I found a few sites that offered various recipes and adapted them to go veggie all the way.
After a while, I found myself wanting to share my creations. This was an ideal way to combine my enthusiasm for photography and my love of food, so I started photographing my dishes and uploading them to Facebook. As I started posting more and more, I found people asking me for the recipes, and I realized that it would be easier to resurrect my defunct blog and reopen it as a cooking site, not only to show off my creations, but to also share the recipes with the world.
So if you’re like me and love to eat, but the thought of cooking gives you shivers, fear not young padawan. Open your eyes to the wonderful world of cooking and the joy of eating your own food.