Monica Bhide learned to cook from her Indian parents and grandmothers while growing up in Bahrain. This month, the Northern Virginia writer releases her third Indian cookbook, Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen. In it, she takes an innovative approach to a cuisine often thought of as laborious and inaccessible.

Bhide relies on traditional Indian flavors to create 123 time-efficient recipes—everything from a guava bellini to a paneer-and-fig pizza to saffron-cardamom macaroons. She sat down to answer questions about Washington’s Indian-food scene.

Is that Salisbury steak I see?

Michael Landrum’s flagship restaurant, Ray’s the Steaks, just relocated from the cozy Arlington storefront where diners waited patiently every evening—glasses of free wine in hand—for their fix of Châteaubriand or hanger steak. The new, bigger digs up the street will take some reservations, and you can expect a crush now that the self-taught chef has a $19-and-under menu of recession-friendly steak dinners.

Foodies may associate Landrum’s name with all things beef—he also owns the steak-focused Ray’s the Classics in Silver Spring and Ray’s Hell-Burger in Arlington—but back when he was scouting locations for his first restaurant, the original plan was to open a straightforward seafood grill. Thus, the Boston-born Landrum is hanging onto the old Ray’s the Steaks space and will soon transform it into Ray’s the Catch, a seafood spot with both New England and Chesapeake influences.

Amid all the changes, Landrum sat down to chat about some of his food favorites. 

The season is here for one of our favorite gooey Easter candies: Peeps. But you’ll no longer be restricted to marshmallow chicks and bunnies. Here, Restaurant 3’s Brian Robinson and Sean Mooney show you how to make your own so you can put brightly sugared flamingos, pigs, and even tie-dyed sharks in your Easter basket. Watch the video to find out how.

→ Easter Brunch Guide
→ Easter Egg Hunts in Washington
→ Easter Fashion
→ Brunches With Bottomless Drinks

No music is playing, but there’s a rhythm in the kitchen at Ravi Kabob House.

Saberlike skewers of halal lamb, chicken, and beef smeared with spicy marinades hiss as they hit the charcoal-fired grill at this Pakistani restaurant. They’re rotated every few minutes to achieve just the right amount of char. Meanwhile, bread dough is stretched over a pillow and slapped into the clay tandoor, where it turns puffy and golden. In between the rotating and slapping, pans bubbling with Peshawar-style karahi kebab are given a stir.

If you’re still mourning local girl Carla Hall’s loss on Top Chef, we have some good news for you: There’s a new culinary reality-TV show with not one but many Washington contestants to root for. The Chopping Block, which airs Wednesdays on NBC, features two-person teams competing for a $250,000 prize, which they’d use to open their own restaurant. The show stars Marco Pierre White, a screaming, pot-throwing, foul-mouthed British chef who trained the famously short-tempered Gordon Ramsay.

Washington contestants include Mikey Torres, executive chef at Gifford’s Ice Cream, and partner Chad Phillips as well as Alex McCoy, head chef and bar manager at Rugby Food and Spirits, and his brother, Nate McCoy. And then there's Vidalia events coordinator Khoa Nguyen, 29, and his cousin Denise, 22. We admit we had high hopes for the pair, but in a surprise twist they closed out the first episode by standing up to White and walking off the show. 

We recently hung out with the cousins, who talked about their restaurant dreams and just how scary White can be.

Is Carla Hall the next Top Chef?

In part one of Top Chef’s New Orleans finale, which aired on Bravo last week, local gal Carla Hall impressed Emeril Lagasse with her oyster stew and savory beignets, earning a place among the final three contestants. Loyal hometown fans loved Hall even before her quirky yet adorable “hootie-hoo!” call through the supermarket, but over the past few episodes, she’s proven herself to be a serious contender for the Top Chef title (and lifetime supply of Glad products).

The Takoma Park resident is originally from Nashville but came to DC to attend Howard University in the ’80s. Postcollege, she explored a few career paths—accounting for Price Waterhouse, modeling in Europe—and eventually followed her love of cooking to Bethesda’s L’Academie de Cuisine in 1995. She founded her own boutique catering company, Alchemy Caterers, in 2001.

If you need a reason to eat chocolate—but really, who does?—Jason Andelman gives you this one: to celebrate the inauguration. His chocolate boutique in Arlington, Artisan Confections, started churning out inauguration-themed bonbons yesterday.

The chocolate morsels come in “change” and “hope” motifs, with the words screened on top in ten different languages. William Knight, artist and co-owner of DC’s Biagio Fine Chocolate, came up with the design just last week.

“We’d been talking about doing something for the inauguration since December, but the holidays got in the way,” Andelman says. The pair resurrected the idea a week ago and had the design etched on transfer paper over the weekend; they started dipping the chocolates yesterday. When we talked to Andelman this morning, he’d already sold a box of his new confections.