As we settled into our crisp onion bhajis, I let out a gasp. I had suddenly remembered my recent brush with international foodie fame and fortune.

I’m in Olive, I declared with a flourish.

Uncle one raised an eyebrow. Uncle two gave me a grunt. Aunt Madge just said: “Who’s Olive?”

Great. Only, like, the best food magazine published by the BBC. Read by a gazillion people, none of whom I actually know.

They asked me about my favourite cheap eat in London - the £6.95 eat as much as you want lunch buffet at Diwana Bhelpuri House in Euston. But if you’re not in London, this information is about as useful to you as your local weather to me.

So here are my top tips for spotting a really good Indian buffet instead:

1. Elderly Indians: No self respecting elderly Indian will pay money to eat poorly cooked version of the food they eat at home
2. Hot chapattis/rotis: There is little point in rotis that have languished on the buffet table, turning rock hard and stone cold
3. Wide selection: Surely, the whole point of the whole exercise is to eat until you can barely move, a huge meal that you would be nuts to cook at home?

But this weekend, some scheming geeks inserted all sorts of unholy, adult website links into my innocent little blog!

An apology is in order if you spotted something odd in your brown basmati pulao in the last few days.

I should also apologise if you quite enjoyed the now deleted links.

Sadly, the only position this blog promotes is the quickie in the kitchen…

I got two bottles of greasy, glutinous tikka masala curry paste. Which my husband promptly appropriated declaring he hadn’t eaten decent curry for years.

Har har.

So I despise the rubbish passed off as curry around the world. And my ultimate goal is to get people cooking real Indian food, quickly and simply. Technically, this means I may have to suffer the odd crap joke or two, right?

Forget it, I tracked down and decked my Secret Santa.

It’s now time to cook real Indian food for the greater good of mankind. Spread the love, feed the world with Menu for Hope, the annual fund raising event from food bloggers everywhere for the UN World Food Program.

It’s a simple idea. Food bloggers like me offer delicious prizes, which our readers can then buy raffle tickets to win.

Up for grabs here is the only Indian cookbook you’ll ever need - the National Indian Association of Women Cookbook:

A seminal tome, this little wonder has been passed down the generations to many a hapless bride, emigrating student and clueless bachelor. It has the most popular classic Indian dishes from around the country, contributed by the women who know them well - aunties, mummyjis, and even the Oberoi Group of Hotels. If you have ever wondered how to cook a real Pork Vindaloo, this book is for you. It is only sold in India, so I will source a special copy for a very lucky person.

This is what first got me cooking Indian food, and I haven’t stopped since!

All you have to do is visit The Passionate Cook, to view the prizes available. Then follow these simple instructions:

1. Go to the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope4 and make a donation
2. Please specify which prize you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code
3. Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02. Please write 2xEU01, 3xEU02
4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.
5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we could contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone
6. Check back on Chez Pim on Wednesday January 9 for the results of the raffle

Go on… tikka look at it now…

Back in India, I spent it mostly hiding under my bed with our German Shepherd. The fireworks petrified the both of us.

The allure of the cash my father distributed after the Ganesh and Lakshmi Puja brought me out briefly. As did the food, of course. Light, swollen pooris or fried flatbreads. Ghee soaked halwa. Sookha kala channa or sauteed little dark chick peas.

You can see why it would have been hard to resist. Even under the circumstances.

This year, for the first time, I got my act together in time to get a group of friends over for dinner. We’re playing cards, eating traditional vegetarian food and setting off some garden fireworks in our unkept communal garden.

But it’s not, I’m afraid, well planned enough to feature the halwa barfi, kala channa and aloo kadhi I have cooked as part of dinner tonight yet.

Recipes to follow. Enjoy Diwali everyone.

I made it to the pandal (marquee) on Friday, only to be told to leave within an hour thanks to a queue of 400 people outside waiting to get in.

Thankfully, I’d made it to the bhog (food offering) table in time to grab some delicious khichuri (khichri), mango chutney and mishti.

Recipes to follow soon. Shubho bijoya dashami to all of you in the meantime…

But until recently, I was more likely to carry a Victorian parasol in the sun for fear of catching colour than bake on a beach for hours a day.

I blame my grandmothers. When I was growing up in India, they considered a sun tan to be the third vice, after alcohol and cigarettes, exclaiming after my Goan holiday: “Look how dark you are. Who will marry you??”

Not like this was ever going to put me off tanning for long (or anything else for that matter).

But two generations later, my sister greets me at home yesterday with: “Oh my God, look how dark you are. Use yogurt and lemon juice right now!”

Scary, that. It would both cool and bleach my skin right back to normal. But I’m not sure I want to steep myself in a chicken tikka marinade just yet…

Actually, I was already basking in a warm glow when I left for Cannes.

Despite missing every single food blog event, posting intermittently and blogging only when time permits, I have been deemed worthy of not one but two blog awards! A real honour if I can spot one!

So I am now a thoughtful blogger thanks to Sandeepa of Bong Mom’s Cookbook.

And then I got a Rockin’ Girl Blogger award from Sra of When My Soup Came Alive.

Thanks ladies. It certainly makes it all the more worthwhile. As do all the lovely comments, sometimes fraught, about this, that and the other in recipes.

I’ll be back to blogging about food tomorrow. But here are my nominations for the awards:

Meena of Hooked on Heat, Sam of Becks & Posh, Nandita of Saffron Trail and Michelle of The Maltese Bacon are my Rockin’ Girl Bloggers.

Kathryn of Limes and Lycopene, Coffee of The Spice Cafe, Bee of Jugalbandi and Wendy at A Wee Bit of Cooking are my Thoughtful bloggers. 

I could nominate Asha of Foodie’s Hope for both, but then she has already received the award 100 times over as she well deserves it.

And a special mention for Mangs, who diligently tries almost all the vegetarian recipes on this site and is on the verge of pissing off her Halal Indian cornershop with her queries. Hang in there buddy…

The boozy Saturday night in before she left, we decided to have a mid-week party. My two Indian girlfriends would bring a dish each, mother would cook two dishes and hubby and his French best mate would eat for England.

Theoretically the easiest dinner party I’ve ever thrown. But this being the Basu household, things quickly unravelled.

Mother’s one kilo of prawns were not the shelled variety. On returning from work, I was handed a stainless steel bowl and strict peeling instructions.

Then one girlfriend arrived sans food. Too drunk on Saturday to remember the dinner party involved pot luck, she hastily made a beeline to buy the ingredients for her speciality anda raita.

While I sampled the other friend’s potato curry (aloo dum), hubby’s Irish, Indian food hating best mate called to say he was locked out and needed somewhere to go.

Before I knew it, he arrived, the group had collectively smashed two glasses, my dining table vase and overcooked the dal. 

We calmed down as my Russian friend arrived and soon eight people were sitting squashed around a table for four talking food, epilators, love and life and devouring anda raita, aloo dum, lentils cooked with oranges, mustard prawn curry and basmati rice straight out of pots and pans.

My top tips for a perfectly simple dinner party?

• Cook the food beforehand and leave them in their pots
• Reheat the pots and serve the food in them
• Make large portions of a few dishes - it’s always easier to make bigger portions rather than new dishes
• Use fancy ingredients not complicated recipes to impress

I would say get others to cook the food, but that wouldn’t quite work as a regular thing. Very sad to say goodbye to mother, but what an exit…

If, like me, you are always the last one to wake up to good things - sign up now!

The bad news is that my email mallika@quickindiancooking.com isn’t working. It’s down to the rather odd domain name of spunkymail, which gets blocked by the hotmail account emails get forwarded to.

All rather complicated for me. I’m usually quite happy to manually delete emails asking me to enlarge body parts I don’t posess or offering vitality boosters I don’t need.

Anyway, if you are trying to email me please bear with me while I get the funk back into spunkymail.

That does sound rude…

The simplest version of a roti is called a phulka, because of the way it swells with air when cooked. It is topped with a dollop of butter or ghee before being torn into little pieces and eaten. When we were kids my mother used to make us rub some of the warm, melted butter on our lips as a natural lip balm.

It never occurred to me to make a roti from scratch. These flatbreads are best enjoyed piping hot and soft, cooked and delivered to the dining table by someone else. A cook, your mother, or if you’re lucky enough, a good Indian wife.

My husband couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw this in action. He said ruefully: “I married the wrong Indian woman!”

For I am more likely to throw a frozen chappati at his head than painstakingly knead, roll, pan cook and serve a fresh one to him.

Anyway, I decided to bite the bullet and teach myself how to make rotis. Don’t get me wrong, rotis/chappattis are really easy to make. They just require more effort to make from scratch than rice and are also easily available in ready-to-cook frozen packs.

Sadly, I didn’t have a tawa. But thankfully, I did have a rolling pin used last to make mojitos at our Cuban-themed party. As I got stuck in kneading, three thoughts came to my mind:

• What have I done to my freshly manicured fingernails
• There is flour everywhere
• I am a loser if these don’t shape into perfect rounds and puff up

I was pleasantly surprised with the shape and started screaming “check me out, check me out” to the bemused hubby. As he left the house to play tennis with a friend, I insisted they both came back for a lunch of fresh rotis and lamb shakuti.

I left the rotis rolled out and ready for their return. Big mistake.

The rotis came out, as I texted my mum, hard as rocks and flat as pancakes. Poor hubby and friend ate in silence.

But I am still unfazed. Practice makes perfect, right? I have a 1.5 kg bag of atta and frozen chappatis as fallback. Try 2 to follow.