My Arusuvai "surprise" ingredient is here!

The Arusuvai Friendship Chain has been going across India for sometime now, the brain child of the Yum blog, Bhags and Bharathy . It's funny that this chain was inspired by the Amish Bread Friendship starter which was going across the US - and then the Arusuvai chain has in in turn inspired another Arusuvai journey across the US!

Latha of Yum Blog says the Arusuvai Frienship Chain 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 to a 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)."

I must also mention here the efforts of Srivalli from Cooking 4 All Seasons who got in touch with me and patiently waited for me to come back from my trip and mail her so that she could start looking for the next link in the chain to get in touch with me - thanks so much Srivalli!

But coincidences abound and it was from Deeba from Passionate About Baking that I got my "surprise" package. And what a beautiful package it was!!


A bottle of orange extract (which very coincidentally I was looking for just the previous week) was the "surprise" ingredient; I'm going to have a fun time deciding what to do with it!

And there was also a tiny notepad and pencil attached to a board in my favourite colour Purple :), accompanied by a lovely handwritten note.Thanks a lot Deeba! Can't wait to get crackin' on this.