Drum roll…….. :-) By now, most Food bloggers are aware of the Arusuvai Friendship chain. The brainchild of Latha Mami (as she is fondly called) and Lakshmi (her lovely daughter) of the The Yum Blog – the Arusuvai Friendship chain in Latha Mami’s own words

“is about sending along a surprise ingredient as a gift to your friends for them to prepare something tasty with it, share the recipe, and pass on other surprise ingredients to more people. Arusuvai means six tastes (aru=six, suvai=taste) in Tamizh and is used to refer for Tasty preparation with six tastes - inippu/ thithippu (sweet), orappu/ karam (hot), kassappu (bitter) , pulippu (sour), uppu(salt), tuvarpu (tastes that one gets in raw leaves).”

arusuvai
Arusuvai Logo - Courtesy “The Yum Blog”

Read more about her post on that here.

With her permission, I would like to start a chain here in the US. Why you ask, when we already have the Amish Friendship bread starter doing its rounds…My reasons J are here:

  1. I love this concept – so Indian and brilliant! Powders are the essence of Indian cooking – be it basic Red chilli powder, turmeric powder, garam masala powder or something more complicated like the Goda masala powder, Vangi Bhaat powder, Sambar Powder, Rasam Powder etc.
  2. Love the fact that there’s no time constraint with these Powders… no worries about spoilage etc. Dearest Linda of Out of the Garden sent me the Amish Bread Starter a couple months back. It took a little over a week to get here and was totally rancid when I opened it! Had to throw it away! I felt really bad! Poor Linda tried it again a few weeks after that! This time it arrived on time and was wonderful. I fed the starter and followed the instructions! I even baked an Orange Bread (that I’m yet to post about… that will come soon). I made 3 batches – gave two batches of the starter to friends here and promised Deepa of Recipes N Moreone more batch… the snow storm hit us that weekend and I could not get it out in the mail. So I fed it again in an effort to salvage the starter…. This time I’m not sure what I did wrong – the starter went bad – it turned brown and smelt weird! I had to get rid of it again! I felt horrible – what with having promised Deepa too! I wondered if I could make a batch of the starter myself – no secret recipe here - its all over the Internet! But I’m so tired of getting it to work right! That’s when I thought of Latha mami’s friendship chain! And the rest is history :-)

So of this goes to 3 wonderful blogger friends –

  1. Bee and Jai of Jugalbandi – I’m partial – I love these guys :-)
  2. Deepa of Recipes N More - Sorry about the starter Deepa!
  3. And Nupur of One Hot Stove – just because she was so thoughtful enough to even want to part with her precious homemade masala… I hope Nupur enjoys my homemade Masala :-)

A couple of rules to the game - Latha Mami’s rules that is :-)

When you receive a package with a “surprise ingredient” as a part of Arusuvai here are the basic rules you need to follow:

  1. Prepare something tasty with it and post recipe with a picture if you are a blogger with the logo, a link to person who passed it to you and to this post if you like for reference.
  2. If you don’t blog, do share the recipe with the friend who gave it to you or post it as a guest post on someone you know who blogs.
  3. Pass on a “surprise ingredient” to two or more friends, one of whom must preferably blog. We all want to have some fun together right? D

If you want to be a part of this - please make yourself known here - and the baton will get passed on to you :-) Please wait for Bee, Nupur or Deepa to pass it on to you :-)

Update: Thanks to Bharathy and Bhags for helping with coming up with this Friendship chain! When i wrote up this note initially, i had know idea there was so much history and effort behind it! Thank you dear blogger friends from India - for giving us this opportunity to share and participate in this Friendship chain!

I’m so excited. Hope you guys enjoy the recipes that are going to come out of this Friendship chain!

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)