Hungry? Food's just a click away. Since virtual calories are not as bad as real ones, here's to a great meal. Online.

Food blogs are now as hot as cookery shows and recipe books. Sunday MiD DAY looks at some lip-smacking writing put up by passionate Indian foodie bloggersu00a0


Simon Majumdar tucks into a classic Bengali meal at Kewpie's Kitchen in Kolkata

Blogger: Simon Majumdar
Blogger's location: London
Blog specialty: Travelling around the globe and sampling food from all over
Blog link: http://www.doshermanos.co.uk/
Must read if you are a carnivore
Going everywhere is, of course, all very well, but 'eating everything' is kind of scary, right? We mean, it could include pretty inedible things too, especially of animal origin and not exactly your mainstream varieties either. But it's a rare flavour that Majumdar would balk at."My love of food comes directly from my parents, my Bengali father and Welsh mother.
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It was a unique combination which provided me with a rich choice.u00a0 From there, I began to develop my own tastes and spent most of my student days in London looking for good things to eat," says Majumdar, who has also written the acclaimed book, Eat My Globe.

His search for good things to eat drives his blog. "Thankfully my budget now allows me to travel the world and eat everything," says the card-carrying carnivore with a sharp tongue fitted with super-sensitive tastebuds. His blog makes for entertaining reading, complete with sensuous prose and brilliantly evocative descriptions of food at eateries across the globe. Served with deliciously irreverent comments on the side.

Majumdar's blog gives a close enough feel of real food at real places across the globe. That's about as much as the virtual world can do for you, anyway.

Blogger: Sassy Fork. She prefers to remain anonymous
Blogger's location: Mumbai
Blog specialty: Restaurants and traditional home food
Blog link: http://www.doshermanos.co.uk/
Must read if you are looking for quality while eating out
The Neer Dosa at a Mumbai eatery is like a lace doily. The kakori kebab at another gently releases an explosion of well-coordinated spices to tingle the senses. Here's a blogger who trawls through the lanes and by-lanes of her city in search of good food and writes about them with feeling.

She does not limit herself to restaurants alone, nor does she rely only on words to do the talking. For instance, her post on the Versova Koli Seafood Festival, held by Mumbai's oldest fishing community, is a feast of the senses.

Photographs of seafood, skewered, roasted, grilled or cooked over slow heat to assume brilliant colours and glistening exteriors, is a virtual experience not too far from the real.

"My obsession with food comes from my half-Bengali, half-Maharashtrian family which has over a hundred relatives, none of whom can hold a single conversation without, in some way, mentioning food! My focus is to explore different cultures and present them," says Sassy Fork, who prefers to remain anonymous and pursues food blogging as a hobby, committed to never writing about a restaurant that is not up to the mark.

Blogger: Kalyan Karmakar
Blogger's location: Mumbai
Blog speciality: Food. Period
Blog link:u00a0 FinelyChopped-k.blogspot.com
Must read if you have an appetite for strong opinions
Here's a blog that calls a bad job a bad job. Without worrying about how many bridges are burnt in the process. Brought up on memories and stories about his father's cooking, Karmakar felt at home in Mumbai (afteru00a0 he had relocated here from Kolkata) when he "moved out of a PG into a rented house, bought a fish head from Pali Market and made a Machher Mudo Diye Moong Daal (lentils with fish head) with it." No sooner had he set up his own kitchen than its interiors began to sizzle and crackle with rare intensity.

"I have always had a strong point of view on food. The often staid, contrived, paid-for stuff dished out on Indian TV channels and print left me cold. Then I saw Anthony Bourdain on Discovery Travel & Living (now TLC). I felt like someone seeing his first EPL match after being brought up on a diet of East Bengal Mohun Bagan Derbies. This is when my wife, Kainaz, told me about this thing called 'blogging'. She launched Finely Chopped about three years ago," says Karmakar.

Envisaged as no more than a crib blog about bad food and indifferent service, it gave itself up to the wonderful world of food. And the cooking and eating thereof.

Blogger: Mallika Basu
Blogger's location: London
Blog specialty: Indian cooking made easy
Blog link: http://www.quickindiancooking.com/
Must read if you are a super busy female professional

A kitchen goddess is allowed her little vanities, Mallika Basu seems to be screaming on her blog Quick Indian Cooking. And then proceeds to tell us exactly how. Singing praises of the food processor as a substitute for the unwieldy, manicure-demolishing hand grinder, she goes about writing her Indian-cooking-made-easy blog in a breezy, devil-may-care way. Who says Indian cooking's complicated and time-consuming? Well, we all did, till Basu showed us otherwise in her blog, and her book Miss Masala.

"I started cooking only when I came to England as a student and wanted home food as an escape from supermarket pizzas. But the recipes I could lay my hands on said mysterious things like 'cook till done'. I mean, how does a novice know when a dish is 'done'," says Basu, who inherited her cooking skills from her father.

She started experimenting, cooking and keeping the drawing room free of garlicky odours even when she was dousing her lamb in garlic. The recipes on her blog are a lip-smacking good read, simple to follow and great to cook (first-hand experience there), complete with practical tips on what substitute to use when an ingredient is unavailable.