Place of Origin – An Answer to Your Snack Cravings

If you are fond of local dishes from all over the country, you would always be on the lookout for people who go on trips to various places to bring you some. During my college days, students used to wait for the Keralites to arrive with their Banana chips and  the Tapioca chips, the Telugites to open their pickles and Nippattus, the Gujarati Theplas, the Nepali Titoras and Wai–wais and so on.

“I am going to Ooty next week. What do you want from there?”

“Homemade chocolates!”, comes the spontaneous reply. Ooty has been always associated with the cold and the home made chocolates.

Gone are the days when you had to either go on a trip or wait for someone to go on a trip to a certain place to savor their local dishes. E-commerce has made life easier not only with respect to buying clothes but now your favorite local snacks, savories and sweets are available online too. Place Of Origin is India’s first and largest platform for famous local foods. With over 4000 varieties of sweets, snacks, biscuits, and pickles from around 400 brands across India, the platform is the answer for all your local food cravings.

Snacks are an inseparable part of Indian households. We always have a wide range of snacks stored up like treasures in a huge dabba in our houses and when visitors arrive, we daintily lay them before the guests and let them have their fill. With time, we have experimented various types of snacks from Jammu & Kashmir to Kanyakumari and we know quite a lot of the local flavors and their origins. Place of Origin brings all those snacks under one name and you could order them from the convenience of your home. I have seldom found Karela/ Bitter Gourd Chips in my locality and so, I always purchase a packet when I visit Coimbatore. Now, these could be bought from the site and while you wait, they come to your doorstep.

Gujarat is famous for their Khatarnaak dishes – as referred to by Kareena Kapoor in 3 Idiots – such as Dhokla, Thepla etc. We in Kochi, sometimes crave for these delicacies and with a tiny request, our Gujarati friends would satiate our cravings.

Place of Origin has all these and much more. The listings are endless and you are bound to get confused seeing the spread they have displayed. For the foodies who love experimenting and learning the culinary cultural variances in our country, this site gives you most of it.  Their iconic local specialties include Shrewsbury Biscuits from Pune, Dharwad Peda, Sandesh from Kolkata and Pachranga from Panipat as well as unique local specialties such as the Chanachur of Bengal, Thokku from Andhra Pradesh, Pinni from Amritsar and so on.

Here are a few more Snack items available on Place of Origin to give your salivary glands some exercise:

Anjeer (Figs)

Jam Biscuits

Husked Green Gram Crackers

Food has no language, region or cultural differences. Food knows only hunger and hunger knows only food. Place of Origin has taken a brilliant step uniting food items from all over the country so that we could indulge in them forgetting all cultural differences. Ventures like these inspire us to love Gujaratis for their amazing Dhoklas and Telugites for their tangy Gonguras.

7 Ready to make & eat ideas

Hi all foodies out there! I have come up with this for you all! 🙂 3 situations helped me come up with this post:

1. I had my CA exams a month back. I used to study for around 10-12 hours and I must say, every two hours I felt hungry. But being a choosy person, I wanted to eat something different every third day.

2. I have stayed in hostels where our rooms never had plug points. Hunger never asked if our rooms had plug points. And so, we had to be equipped with some or the other magic potion.

3. I have felt bored, due to which I felt hungry :P, and I didn’t want any rice or noodles but wanted something different. The difficult part is, I was lazy to cook, but desperate to eat.

These things led me into being innovative or some of my friends helped me put certain things together and I ate different type of goodies when I was hungry. Here are some of them I can recollect. You all may not approve of everything I put up here. But some of them may come in handy at times. Let me warn you in advance that there are some really weird combinations down there. 😉 (I am sure many of you may know all these already.)

1. Jam biscuit:
Ingredients – Marie biscuit & Jam (any flavor)
Method – Our homemade cream biscuits. Just spread some jam on your Marie biscuit and make a ‘jam biscuit’ of your own. All the sweet lovers would love this for sure. Easy to make & ready to eat! 🙂

Jam biscuit

2. Choco pie:
Ingredients – Marie biscuit, chocolate syrup or nutella or chocolate bar
Method – This wouldn’t taste like the real choco pies available in the market. But it will definitely caress your taste buds. Just use the same Marie biscuits. Spread them on a plate. Melt some chocolate and pour over the biscuits. Keep another biscuit on top of the soak biscuit & pour the chocolate syrup again. Wait for half an hour. Eat when it gets soggy. The chocolate flavour & the biscuit make a great combo! 🙂

Choco pie at home 🙂

3. Bread & Bournvita:
Ingredients – Bread & Bournvita
Method – Many of my friends were revolted when I said this combo. But frankly, it isn’t as you think. It is as great as bread and Nutella. It tastes the same. Give it a try next time you are in short of nutella. Spread some bournvita on your bread and take a bite.

4. Bread and cheese-spread:
Ingredients – Bread, cheese-spread, tomato sauce, Aloo-bhujia/Oregano/Spaghetti mix
Method – I just try new stuff. So even you can. Buy Amul cheese spread. They have pepper flakes in it which makes it all the more yum. Spread this on bread, and top it with tomato sauce. It is perfect. I once tried aloo bhujia on this mixture. I don’t like the mint taste of aloo bhujia and so, I did not like it. But you could try. Here is the picture of the same.

Bread-cheese spread-sauce-aloo bhujia

If you have some oregano available, it would add great taste to the cheese and sauce. Always go for it, if you have it. It is way better than aloo bhujia.
Additional tip: Don’t tell mummy 😉 the spaghetti mix powder too adds a great taste instead of oregano. 😛

5. Banana chips & chammanthi podi (Coconut chutney powder):
Ingredients – The powder, banana chips, coconut oil
Method – This is particularly directed at Keralites since these are the 2 things we get in abundance here. But if you happen to lay your hands on them, try it. Break the banana chips into smaller crumbs and put lots of chammanthi podi on it. Lots means as per your taste buds ;). Also pour some coconut oil and mash the mixture well with your hands. I loved it. Let me know if you did. 😛

6. Fruits & milkmaid:
Ingredients – Cut fruits, milkmaid, mango juice
Method – This was my friend’s innovation at college. So all credits go to her. Take a bowl, pour 100 ml milkmaid, pour some mango juice (Maa or frooty as per the amount of mango essence you need), add some cut fruits to this mixture. A yummy fruit salad is at your disposal! 😀 The best part of this is the mango juice. Since the mango essence completely mixes with the milkmaid, it adds an extra zing to the recipe.

7. Cooked cabbage:
Ingredients – A full cabbage (uncut), ghee, salt, pepper
Method – Cut the cabbage into four. But not fully. Just until the end. Leave the tips joined. Cook it as it is in a pressure cooker. Pour ghee through the center and around. Sprinkle salt and pepper too. The ghee can be replaced with cheese if you want. My sister and I never used to like cabbage. But now we do. And making this is easy for our mom. 🙂

Hope you all will try these little handy recipes. If there is anything you want me to clarify about or give any suggestions, more ideas, your feedback etc, feel free to leave me a comment below. 🙂 I’ll definitely reply!

Photo courtesy: http://www.cakechooser.com/
http://www.thasneen.com/
http://www.rituscooking.com/