I am Raks anand, author and photographer of this recipe website. My real name is Rajeswari Vijayanand. It has been almost 13 years of blogging and I thought if you want to know more about me, I should introduce myself to you all… I am also like most of the house wives, who learnt cooking only after marriage.When I was left alone in the kitchen when I came here to Singapore,from Chennai, due to my Husband’s ( I mention him as Vj in my posts) job, I was zero in cooking. Zero means really I don’t know ABCs of cooking.
I never ever entered the kitchen before marriage and I wont help my mom even in small small things. My mom and dad, never complained. Even After marriage, I was not cooking until I was with a great cook, my MIL. I am always impressed by her high standard cooking and used to atleast help my MIL in cutting veggies, and she is a perfectionist I should say in cooking skills. She does every thing neatly and perfectly in an organised way which I adore the most.
I have got many appreciations for the way I cut my veggies and of-course for the dishes I prepare. For each and every appreciation I get, I owe to my Mom and MIL who taught me the art of cooking and some treasure-able recipes! I gained my knowledge of south Indian everyday cooking through only them and partly through my experience. After coming here, to Singapore, I used to call my mom and MIL to take down the recipes, be it day to day recipe or on a special occasions like the festive we get every now and then.
Also I made use of the free time, loneliness I got and the technology and started exploring the virtual world of blogging and used to learn a lot in different cuisines, be it regional or international. I should thank Vj for giving me the knowledge that is enough to explore these things.
And then I started cooking and developed interest in cooking. One of my friend Sangeeta encouraged me to start blogging and you can see a lot of recipes that was shared by her in this site. And she is the one, who insisted me to do stepwise pictures, which I believe hooks many of the readers to this site,as it is very useful for them to refer quickly and makes them believe, that its cooked by me LOL!!
I started blogging and thought of recording all my experiments, authentic recipes from my mom and MIL so that it will be easy for me in future. Some times, we try a dish once and it comes out nice. Then forget for a while and if we want to try again, we wont be able to recollect exactly what we did last time. So this blog posts, help me a lot to record exactly what I do.
Its been few years since I started blogging, I started clicking my pictures in a point and shoot digi cam , my man bought me a DSLR, even before I asked him or I even dont know what that mean when he bought that for me. Then its been a learning process till now and I can say I have come a far distance since then and if you are admiring my food, its also because that I picture it as it is, delicious! 🙂 And if you want to know which camera and lens I use, it is Nikon D40X, with 18-55mm lens and some times 55-200mm. Now recently Vj bought me a 50mm lens and a new camera Nikon D7000 as well.
And if you ask if my pictures are processed to look good, I would say not much. But I do edit my pictures to brighten, sharpen and look professional. I use Photoshop Elements for editing and sometimes use Picasa too. I should say food photography gazing sites like Foodgawker and Tastespotting have improved my photography a lot.
I must say a few words about my kid (I mention him as Aj in my posts). He is the best critic for my cooking… And his criticism will mostly be truthful and I agree with him most of the times 🙂 He too knows that I blog here and he will check with me when ever he likes any dish I prepare for him, if it is published here.
And baking is my new venture. As I am a vegetarian, you will be able to see only eggless bakes here. Still I am learning in baking. Just trying out the recipes without any changes, still not into any experimental baking. I use a combination oven for all my baking . Its a built in oven(National Panasonic, Dimension 4) which was here when we moved here to this house. Though it is a combination oven of microwave, convection and grill, I bake in “convection” mode. So do not confuse it with microwave baking. And obviously, the recipes are not suitable for microwave baking!.
Besides cooking and photographing the food I cook, I have lots of love in music (film) , movies- we never miss any movie that gets released in out near by Cathay Ciniplex, even if its a OK kind of movie! 🙂 I love fantasy in movies and never can rate or judge a movie if its good to watch or not, I just want to laugh and enjoy the movie, that’s it. I spend my time in watching some TV shows and very few soaps too, though not regularly.
Comments and feedback are precious to me. Nothing can brighten my day when I hear a positive feedback about the recipes the readers/friends tried. So let me know if you feel I deserve an appreciation through mail. You can contact me at [email protected]. Even if you have any doubts regarding any recipes here, you can ask me through mail, I will be glad to help you.
You can also keep in touch with me through Instagram, Facebook or come and follow my posts on Twitter.
