About Me

Hi, I am Asha. Welcome to “Try This With Me”

Let me start off by saying that I’m not a chef. I started this little project as a collection of my tried and successful recipes and to share my kitchen experiments. I believe that chefs are made, not born. Along this little journey, maybe I’ll uncover a chef within me. You only get better with every dish you cook, right?.

I never cooked when I was young, not even into my teens because my oh-so-loving mother always used to say that it was the time to celebrate childhood, to study and be carefree about all things in the world. She wanted my sister Achu and I to enjoy life and not to do any chores. She said that at some point in life you will have a need to cook and that is when you’ll learn it yourself and that she will always be with us at that time to guide us. So I’m a self-taught cook who messed up way too many times, got it right at times, but have gotten better(?) every time that I got back at it, and now, eventually got the confidence to start a blog for people like me.

About Me

I am a wife, and mother of a beautiful boy. I was born and raised in Kerala, a strip of land at the southern tip of India also known as God’s Own Country. Growing up I never had any intention of leaving Kerala, let alone India. Then, love happened; I married my first love, Suraj and moved to the States. At the time, he was in grad school in Ohio, USA. Six months after our marriage, I lost my mom to blood cancer and my whole world fell apart. I had never imagined a life without her by my side. To avoid going into a depressed state of mind, I had to find a way to be busy and engaged, and work was not an option at the time because of visa restrictions (it still is, more on that later). I decided to get a Master’s degree and joined grad school with Suraj. I’ve always loved to study. After completing an MBA in Finance, I realized that it’s not easy to find a job in the States as an international student unless you have a STEM [Science.Tech.Engineering.Math] degree. Being someone who loves to work and multitask and be productive, I found myself armed with the right attitude and right qualifications and several job offers, but with no one willing to sponsor a work visa. I once again found myself with nothing to be engaged in.

Thankfully, with God’s blessing, we had a beautiful baby boy. He kept me on my toes for two sleepless years. I gained a lot of weight after pregnancy. I tried all sorts of diets and exercises. Nothing worked….until it did. In the journey of losing weight I learned that a sustained weight and strength goal can only be achieved with a lifestyle change that includes both healthy eating and exercise. It is absolutely okay to indulge in your favorite not-so-healthy meal or dessert every now and then, but for me the key is portion control. After losing all the weight that I gained during pregnancy and in an attempt to be a mom like my mother was to us, I started exploring different recipes for my son who is a [super] picky eater.

I always envied those who got the opportunity to do what they love instead of a corporate job. I never saw myself as a business owner either. Blogging looked like something I’d love. I also realized that my introvert nature never comes to the fore when I’m writing. If you are still reading this and haven’t realized that I am an introvert, that must be true, right?.

About the blog

I am yet another person that you may know, who started blogging during the 2020 quarantine. Now with Suraj working from home, I have a lot more free time and I’m finding myself in the kitchen trying my hand at new recipes. I could never stick with recipes that I found on the internet as they are, and would always add or ignore ingredients to customize to my liking. Some of them led to major disasters but many others turned out really well. Obviously, I’m not going to include any of my failed recipes. Why would I want you to go through the despair that I did?

So, here goes nothing.