The Kukkad Diaries

We are lazy folks and once we have settled into the saturday afternoon stupor, there are barely anything that could get us to venture out. Unless it's food of course. Or if Tom Hiddleston was to invite us for lunch. But then there are days when you've got to apologize to Tommy and refuse (this is harder) the food because the lethargy has hit the roof. So on those days we get our hourly sustenance from home-delivered food or quick pasta in between sessions of Game of Thrones.

This saturday we were feeling lazy as usual but not as much to have refused Tom's invite. But since that never materialized we decided to do something different and get creative with some sphagetti we had lying around and a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in oil by Green Tokri.

Now, Green Tokri, in addition to all the fresh veggies also have a good range of gourmet food products to offer which has been made with their farm-fresh, home-grown produce. It spreads out from mayonnaise to spreads, jams to salad dressings, pickles to sauces. All of these products have no added flavors or preservatives making them a healthy choice for the kitchen.


We have already tried their mayo, spreads and vegetables in the previous recipes. We decided to whip up a quick, healthy and tasty spaghetti this time using the sun-dried tomatoes. Green Tokri has 2 variants of sun-dried tomatoes. One is in oil that you could directly use for your pastas, noodles etc. The other variety comes in a packet and is dried. You can use it to make a great sauce for pastas like we did or simply use it as topping on a pizza or bruschetta or pop it in salads for fun texture.

The Green Tokri products are reasonable and you could acquire most of them at prices below 100 Rupees.

Since we were really hungry we decided to toss in every thing we could find in the fridge in the bowl. So in went some cubed cottage cheese, boiled eggs, carrots, zucchini and spring onion. Of course you can customize your own spread. All you need to do is get the tomato paste handy and boil some spaghetti al-dente. And everything from there is throwing in and mixing.


Well, we aren't actually cooks so we won't give you the measurements (because we don't remember) but we will tell you what we did.

• In a pot, bring water to boil and add the spagetti in. Throw in a teaspoon of salt and a dash of olive oil or refined oil if you are out of olive oil. This makes sure your spaghetti don't clump.
• While the spaghetti cooks, in a pan, heat up some olive oil/refined oil and add garlic and the sun-dried tomato halves. Sautee until the tomatoes go soft and mushy.
• Add some fresh, diced tomatoes and a bit of tomato sauce for a good consistency. Add some salt to taste and a bit of sugar. You can throw in some cheese for the creaminess. We sometimes use the Amul cheese spread for our pasta and it works like a charm.
• Let the sauce simmer a bit and throw in a few basil leaves.

When the spaghetti is done just mix it with the spaghetti. We decided to keep it at the base of the bowl for the benefit of the pictures.
We also added a boiled egg and cottage cheese cubed and sauteed in olive oil. Garnish it with whatever you wish, or don't. It's comfort food and we are not running for masterchef, are we :)


Have fun with the Green Tokri products and try your own recipes. We are still looking into more ways to eat our sun-dried tomatoes. Let us know if you find one!

Mean while check out the Green Tokri store for all the goodness in store.
www.GreenTokri.com | http://Webshop.GreenTokri.com | www.facebook.com/GreenTokri

P.S: Green Tokri also organizes farm tour of their extensive farms in Sasvad. You can visit with your family and enjoy the greenery and natural landscape of their sweeping farms as well as pick produce for yourself. The tour will help you understand the working of Green Tokri and give you a peek into the farm life. The tour is chalked for an entire day and sounds quite fun! Contact GT for more details.

We are not the best cooks in the world but we do whip a mean pasta once in a while. However, kitchen is not our habitual territory. But our haul of fresh Green Tokri products has us putting our thinking caps on trying new and different ways of cooking the goods.
Since we are not the odd Nigella Lawson or Gordon Ramsay of cooking so we decided to stick to recipes that are easy to assemble and didn't take much time. This ensured we played up the freshness of the vegetables to the maximum and hopefully, kitchen novices as us would appreciate fixing their healthy snacks without having to put on a chef's hat.

In the Green Tokri order, we had received a jar of amazing basil-pesto mix that we wanted to play around with. It is a great addition to our kitchen as it makes for great dip when had with bread sticks or nachos, toss it with some boiled pasta and you have delicious basil pesto pasta and simply spread some on toast or bread and voila! you have a snack. We also had an excess of the fresh, red cherry tomatoes, bell peppers and greens lying around. So we decided to make some light, summery dish of bruschetta. It's not as much a dish as an appetizer but we love it because it's not heavy on your palate, it's easy to put together and tastes so damn yummy!


For our bruschetta, we first popped into our local bakery for a baguette. Your local bakery might slice it for you if you ask or you can bring them home and slice it yourself, which I must say is somewhat therapeutic (the smell of fresh bread, the crumbly texture on your skin, the crunch of the knife cutting through the crispy outer layer.....oh yes). If you are having trouble getting your hands on a baguette, you may want to pop in to your nearest Nature's Basket. We can spend hours there. (Oh, by the way, you can also pick some Green Tokri stuff up from the Nature's Basket outlet) We have a great time shopping for ingredients, sampling cheeses and salami and buying anything other than what we were looking for. But after shoe shopping, I think browsing through a local deli might be my deal.

I digress, so after we had picked, sliced and readied our bread we got cracking on our veggies. We finely chopped the tomatoes and the colorful bell peppers and lightly tossed them with olive oil. We also grated some cheese because everything was just too healthy so we had to balance it out a bit (also because we are gluttons, a bit more inclined to the healthy but gluttons still). You'd also want some basil to throw on to the mix.


For assembling the bruschettas, we:

• Buttered the baguette slices on both sides, then applied a generous layer of Green Tokri's Basil Pesto mix
• Sprinkled a layer of grated cheese and then topped it with the chopped tomatoes-bell pepper-basil mix.
• Placed the bruschetta slices on a hot pan over the stove and let the buttered bread sizzle and warmed it till the bread slightly browned and the cheese started to bubble.
• Served the bruschetta with a dash of lemon juice for a light, citrus tang to cut in through the cheese and bring out the flavor in the tomatoes.


You can make the mix as per your liking and with your preference of tomato-to-bell pepper ratio. The Kukkad Diaries thinks it'd be rather preposterous to us be giving out cooking instructions to people and we'd rather just mention what exactly we did and you could choose to improve on that or send us tips for the same, because we'd love to improve our master-chef skills.


As far as our bruschetta was concerned, it turned out great and it made for great saturday afternoon snack. The Basil Pesto by Green Tokri tasted really fresh and delicious. Green Tokri ensures that the condiments come with no added flavors or preservatives and are healthier as they get.

We still have a bag of sun-dried tomatoes lying around that we'd like to experiment with. Watch this space for more of our experiments in the TKD kitchen!

You can grab your jar of awesome by visiting the Green Tokri website or contacting them.


You can visit Green Tokri's website and register to go through appealing list of products at www.GreenTokri.com | http://Webshop.GreenTokri.com | www.facebook.com/GreenTokri


P.S: Green Tokri also organizes farm tour of their extensive farms in Sasvad. You can visit with your family and enjoy the greenery and natural landscape of their sweeping farms as well as pick produce for yourself. The tour will help you understand the working of Green Tokri and give you a peek into the farm life. The tour is chalked for an entire day and sounds quite fun! Contact GT for more details.

Most days, when we are eating out, we prefer ordering in our choice of salad. We are big fans of the Chicken Caesar Salad and really particular about how its prepared. The dressing shouldn't be too runny, the bowl shouldn't be too stingy on the lettuce, the chicken pieces should be in a apt amount and croutons are always welcome. It's not everyday that we can get our hands on the perfect bowl of salad and living in an area as Wakad, the options for places with good salad is really low.

Not to mention, The Kukkad Diaries has been championing all things healthy recently, thanks to the Mr. TKD's insistence on fitness and health conscious food choices. This new green wave that we've been riding introduced us to a phenomenal home-grown brand, Green Tokri. And might we say, it's a revelation! If you are a resident of Pune and have heard of Green Tokri, then you are one of the luckier ones. And if you, like us, were/are unaware of what this might be, you are in for a treat!

For the uninitiated, Spear-headed by Dr. Marc Cremer and his wife in partnership with Mr. Zaheer Vakil and Mr. Mohiuddin Mulla, Green Tokri is a brand that brings you fresh produce straight from the farm to your table! Dr. Cremer is an agriculture engineer of profound caliber holding a PhD in his field from Germany. Using his engineering acumen and love for farming he was able to grow lettuce on sweeping Green Tokri farms in Saswad, Pune. Since it's inception in 2001, Green Tokri has grown with leaps and bounds relying mainly on word to mouth publicity. And if it has grown it's because of the unmatchable quality and freshness of the produce and the absolute convenience getting it delivered to your doorsteps.

If you go on to their website, you can register to view all the products on sale. All the canned processed foods are made from the farm grown produce and hence are fresh and tasty. They have listed an extensive range of salad vegetables so that you can go ahead and make your own salad as per your preference. To add to that you can also order dressings, sauces and other condiments that you might require. Everything is extremely reasonably priced considering it's fresh out of the farm and you'll find almost all items priced below 100 Rupees. If you want to make salad just for yourself you can order a pre-cut ready-to-eat salad bowl with dressing for just 75 Rupees! Isn't that a steal?!


Green Tokri spoiled us silly with such amazingly fresh and healthy products. We were only too happy to receive our big bag of super fresh veggies and goodies. Our bulging bag had every vegetable that you'd want to be in your salad ranging from sweet succulent iceberg lettuce to ruby red cherry tomatoes.We got to taste jars of mayonnaise and sauces and dressings. We spent the weekends trying different salads, using the vegetables for new recipes and trying to incorporate the condiments in our everyday food. Green Tokri has amazed us. We absolutely loved everything we got our hands on.


We spend the entire week trying new ways to use the products and at the end of the week, the iceberg lettuce were still fresh in their zip lock bags. It was extremely easy to simply tear off the fresh, crumbly leaves into a box, throw in some veggies and a drizzle of the dressing and pack it off to work. And since, we tried so many ways to eat our vegetables we will sharing it with you too! Right now, however we will start off with our favorite salad that uses the Green Tokri products.

The ingredients we used were:

A bag of Ice Berg leaves: Though this bag of salad leaves had 250gms of produce, yet we were able to use it for almost 4-5 helpings of salads. We stored it to almost a little more than a week and it still tasted as crunchy and sweet as before.


Red Cabbage: It came in whole pieces and it lasted us more than 5 bowls of salad. We used it for sandwiches later. Rupees 50 per piece.


English Carrots: Priced at 29 Rupees for 500gms.


European Cucumbers: We love cucumbers and we totally love it on our salad. These cucumbers were juicy and sweet. The bag of 500gms contained 3 large cucumbers for 25 Rupees. It was so tender we didn't even bother peeling it.


Cherry Tomatoes: These tiny tomatoes instantly pepped up a bowl of greens. It was as fresh as they come and 2 weeks on, we still have a couple lying around in the fridge. It came in a bag of 200 gms and priced at just 29 Rupees!


Pickled Gherkins: We love love love this pickle. It can be used in sandwiches or pizzas and salads or eaten as it is. We loved snacking on the sweet and sour gherkins. Priced at 79 Rupees for 350Gms, we can't wait to stock up on this already!


Roasted Seeds: These are great addition to the salad and adds a crunchy texture. It came in a tiny packet but had enough to out-last all the salad making fervour.

Roasted Chicken: Now, this ingredient is optional if you want. We picked up a packet of pre-cut portions of smoked chicken from Nature's Basket. You can try them too if you are a chicken lover and like adding protein to your salad. It tastes great and stores well.


Mayonnaise and Belgian Samurai Mayonnaise: Even though Mr.TKD avoids mayo like plague yet he gave in to these ones this time because they tasted so good. The Belgian Samurai Mayo is like a spicier version of the regular mayo and it has a great punch. However, Vegetarian friends, be warned, these goodness has eggs in them. 89 Rupees for a jar of 180Gms.

Garlic Dressing: This is a bottle of wonder. It immediately uplifts the entire bowl of salad and makes it taste gazillion times better. This paired with mayo is our favorite dressing. Don't over-use it though, you don't want to overwhelm your bowl with a garlicky flavor. 79 rupees for 250 ml.


Making of the salad was the easiest part. The only thing that takes up a bit of the time is the prepping. Make sure to wash your lettuce before you toss them to your salad bowl. Once you wash them you can just wring it with your hands to break it into bite-sized pieces and then keep tossing the veggies you love into your salad bowl. Sprinkle the dressing on the salad and spoon out some mayo into it too. Toss the salad and enjoy a guilt-free, healthy and delicious meal.


Watch this space for more as we try our hands at Bruschetta with the Green Tokri Basil Pesto! Meanwhile go visit Green Tokri's website and register to go through appealing list of products at www.GreenTokri.com | http://Webshop.GreenTokri.com | www.facebook.com/GreenTokri

P.S: Green Tokri also organizes farm tour of their extensive farms in Sasvad. You can visit with your family and enjoy the greenery and natural landscape of their sweeping farms as well as pick produce for yourself. The tour will help you understand the working of Green Tokri and give you a peek into the farm life. The tour is chalked for an entire day and sounds quite fun! Contact GT for more details.

We know it's been ages since we put out a blog post but the schedule has been rather hectic lately. TKD has been away visiting the home city, running errands,getting work done, wrapping up photo-shoots and being a super-hero in general. We've hardly had time to check our social media too. We are very cave-people that way. However, while we have been away we have also unearthed great treats for all you fellow health nuts out there.

How many times has it happened to you that you get a pang of guilt every time you snack on the cookies kept oh-so-conveniently close at hand or cursed yourself for munching on the packet of chips offered to you by your friend (and no one can have just one,can they?) because it's been more than a couple of hours post lunch and you are hungry with no options for anything but these sinful eats? Well, we have been through these guilt ridden phases every-day; hogging on junk while promising ourselves that we'd work extra hard later that week.

Mr. TKD is usually strict with his diet: no mayo, no cheese, no sugary-drinks, no fried food, no sweets, that is until he starts feeling hungry. Once he is starving he hogs on to pizzas and pasta, gobbles down cans of Pringles and finish off fries like it's nobody else's business. He spends the next two days wracked with guilt and running extra laps trying to burn down the calories he might have strapped on. It was then that we heard of Snackible, a brand that creates and delivers healthy and tasty snacks and we tried a monthly box. Mr. TKD was impressed and we decided that we had to share this piece of information with you.

Snackible was kind enough to curate us another box for pictures and review. The best part about this brand, apart from all the hard-to-find, delectable nibbles, is that you can assemble your snacks in your subscription box as per your preference. Snackible currently has 16 variety of snacks to choose from and we're sure you'll find your favorites too. There's something for everyone!

The snacks come in ziplock pouches which are great for storage and a boon for people on the move. Each pouch has a description of the snack inside and a table of nutrition facts, which might be handy for some of you who count their calories before they eat. As per Snackible, the snacks have no added preservatives, MSG, artificial color or flavoring, transfat or cholestrol (can we get a yay!). The snacks also have a good shelf life as they are nitrogen packed. The snacks are all conceptualized and created by Snackible team in collaboration with nutritionists and food technologists and they source the freshest and healthiest ingredients to manufacture these amazing snacks.

Our favorites have been the Wholewheat Belgian Chocochip Waffles (oh the joy of devouring something with choco-chips without feeling guilty), Dark Chocolate Ragi cookies, Jalapeno Peanuts, Cream and Onion Wholewheat Thins and Seedy Crunchers. However, we really loved the box that Snackible created for us. It had:

Roasted Mexican Chickpeas: 100gms/Rs50
The crunchy chickpeas coated in spices makes for a great tea-time guilt-free snacking. We love munching on this while we work, on the way to work, on the way back, basically anywhere.



Cream and Onion Wholewheat Thins: 100gms/Rs50
As it proclaims 'Crackers with a twists' and it is. The wholewheat crackers are flavored with cream and onion seasoning and tastes so good we haven't really missed the packaged chips since.



Maple Honey Granola Crunchers: 70gms/Rs65
This has lately been a great breakfast option for us. It has a great mix of oats, chia seeds, sunflower seeds and almonds formed into chunks and can be had as it is or with some cold milk, It's really filling and deliciously healthy.


Jalapeno Peanuts: 75gms/Rs65
The peanuts has always been a favorite between the meal nibble for most unless you are a allergic to peanuts, which is unfortunate because these roasted peanuts coated with spicy jalapeno flavors is addictive. The unique jalapeno flavor reminds you of pizza and the peanuts may not taste like a slice of pizza but are definitely healthier.



Seedy Crunchers: 75gms/Rs80
These are mildly sweet amalgamation of crunchy seeds loaded with dates, raisins and dates and very filling for when you are hankering for something to chew. But chewy they are and hard to get off of your teeth, hence they might not be our most favorite snacks of the lot.


As they put it about themselves " Snackible is a healthy snacking startup, bidding to revolutionise the snacking industry by providing healthy, delicious and unique snacks, delivered all over the country, that too right to your doorstep" and boy are they right. Our experience has been smooth so far. The website is convenient for choosing the snacks and ordering it and getting it delivered to you. Apart from that you can whatsapp them for orders too. The customer support provided is incredible. The one time our order was late, we were constantly updated on whatsapp about the progress of our orders. The prices of the snacks are very reasonable and all under 100 rupees. Subscription boxes start from Rs 1140/- and are great value for money but you could always try out a trial box before you commit to a subscription. The weekly trial box is dirt cheap at Rs. 299/- and the monthly box (with larger packs) is priced Rs.850/-

As I sit here writing this blog post, I'm munching rather busily on my pack of the roasted chickpeas and hoping you find a happy ending to your snacking problem with Snackible as well. And if you try out their chocolate and ragi cookies and think it's awesome, thanks us later :D

P.S: Keep an eye trained on our Instagram page for a special giveaway featuring Snackible! Follow us for more info @thekukkaddiaries

For more information about Snackible check their website out (www.snackible.com) or Whatsapp them at 9930871199.