Lavanya Suresh.

I started cooking properly in my twenties, in a rented flat where the gas cylinder was a shared thing and the kadai was inherited from the tenant before me. My mother would read recipes to me over the phone in Tamil while I translated them into my own broken Tamil-English shorthand. I lost that notebook years ago. This site is the second draft.

Everything here is vegetarian — not because I am making a statement, but because it is simply what we eat. North, south, sweet, savoury, sometimes borrowed from a friend’s grandmother, sometimes from a Bangkok street cart. I test each recipe at least twice before it goes up. Often more. The air-fryer versions have their own debugging history.

Tiffintales is written slowly, in both English and Tamil where it matters. I hope it finds you on a weekend afternoon with nothing urgent to do.