Showing posts with label Recipe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recipe. Show all posts

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Spaghetti Marinara with Chickpea Sweet Potato Balls


These Chickpea and Sweet Potato Balls were actually meant to go into sandwiches as burgers. But the first time round I didn't freeze them enough and made a huge burger out of them which threatened to disintegrate all the time I was trying to fry it. It had to be topped off with melted cheese and sauce to make it stay together. So I decided to fix it with a binding agent- mashed rice and top it off with bread crumbs. The Marinara sauce was an experiment I made earlier this week. This was my first attempt at a homemade pasta sauce. The only other time is when I tried to create my own mushrooms in white sauce dish in the first month that I started cooking. Anyone with the least experience in cooking can tell you that a homemade pasta sauce is definitely not level 1 cooking. So you can imagine that the only reason that mock alfredo sauce tasted good was because of all the cream I put in.

Marinara Sauce is one of those 3-4 ingredient recipes which are a quick fix and a much healthier option to store bought sauces. I flicked this recipe out of the New York Times cooking section and modified it. One piece of warning however is that Indian Tomatoes do not work as well as you want them to in this recipe because they are much more sour than their international counterparts. A good idea maybe to replace them with cherry tomatoes or attempt a re-calibration of the taste with a little sugar or ketchup.  The chickpea and sweet potato balls are my own concoction based on some taste memories of aloo tikkis.

Also spaghetti marinara is not a very traditional combination. The marinara sauce freezes well and can be typically used over pizzas and possibly smaller pastas. In fact after I made this sauce, I tasted it for the first time over fusilli pasta. But bolognese is something I cannot make, so I guess this was my way of making Spaghetti Bolognese with meatballs.

On my Kitchen counter:
Spaghetti
For the marinara sauce:
3 medium sized tomatoes
4-5 garlic cloves
Olive oil- 3 tbsp
Salt
Oregano
Chilli Flakes
Mixed seasoning (Italian)-optional
Ketchup- 2 tsp or Sugar 2 tsp

For the sweet potato balls:
2 sweet potato tubers
Handful of chickpeas
Chaat masala
Salt
Red chilly powder
Garam masala powder
Breadcrumbs
Cooked rice
Vegetable oil to shallow fry

Boil the chickpeas and sweet potatoes each for 13-15 minutes until soft and well done.
Mash together and add salt, add the chaat masala, red chilly powder and garam masala powder.
Add the cooked rice and bring together to a moulding consistency. 
Roll it in breadcrumbs and shallow fry over medium heat in vegetable oil.
Keep turning them so they cook evenly.
Can freeze left overs as burger raw material or as pre-made patties/bullets.

Spaghetti must be placed in a pot of boiling salted water with a few drops of oil.
Cook for 10-12 minutes. 
Drain and shock with cold water.

Mash together the tomatoes with a little water. Keep them slightly whole to ensure a good texture.
Chop up the garlic cloves.
In a pan, heat up the olive oil.
Saute the garlic cloves until they turn slightly brown.
Add the tomatoes and the juice.
Also add the oregano,salt, chilli flakes and the mixed seasoning now.
If you are going to add sugar, do that as well now. But I lean towards the sweetness of ketchup.
Let the water evaporate and the sauce start to thicken.
When the oil and the sauce start to turn red, add the ketchup.
Keep stirring to prevent burning and the sauce will continue to thicken.
Once the sauce comes together and the tomatoes are cooked through and turned a bright red, take off the heat.
Once cooled, the leftover sauce can be placed in the freezer for future use.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Mysorepak- Not bad for a Sweet Novice

When you don't feel like doing anything and are bored of your work, it is best to distract yourself with something that you do not typically do. I do some of my best creative work when I am irritated and at the end of my tether. It is worrying and good at the same time- worrying because it makes me concerned about my  mental make up and good because I at least know how I can shake myself out of a funk quickly and without annoying too many people around me.

So yesterday was one of those days, where everything seemed tasteless and boring. With Diwali around the corner, I decided that the best way to cheer myself up was with some sweet making. This is only the third time ever that I have attempted making any sort of sweet. My first trial was kaju katli with ground cashew paste, it was an unqualified disaster with half cooked cashew paste and oodles of ghee, resembling some sort of halwa. It was a lesson well learnt though and I tried again with powdered cashew, I ended up with very good looking katlis though I chose to slice them super thin (Almost like cracker thin).

Mysorepak was on the cards yesterday owing to readily available ingredients. I made a very small quantity as I only wanted to cheer myself up not worsen my mood with all the slaving over the hot stove. But it came out surprisingly well, causing even a sweet skeptic like me to go back for more.

What you need on your kitchen counter:
Makes 10-12 pieces
1. Besan (Gram) Flour- 1/4 cup
2. Ghee- 1/2 cup
3. Sugar- 1/2 cup

How to make mysorepak ( Takes a lot less effort than you think, especially if you choose to be lazy like me and make very very little):

1. Line a tray/plate with foil. I used a pie tin for this. We will use this to pour and set the mixture.
2. In a heavy bottomed pan, place the sugar and just enough water to submerge the sugar. Place on low heat and allow to come to a steady boil.
3. On the side, start melting the half cup of ghee. Once melted place on low heat, so you can ladle the hot ghee into your mysorepak.
4. Sift the besan flour to avoid lumps and fry it for a couple of minutes with a couple of tsp of ghee.
5. Once the sugar has dissolved and starts to thicken into syrup, test the syrup between your fingers. You should wait for the syrup to form a string between your fingers (an unbroken string- this is the single strand consistency).
6. Once the sugar syrup reaches this consistency, add the besan flour to the syrup, stirring continuously and breaking up any lumps that might occur.
7. After the besan is completely dissolved in the syrup, start ladling in the ghee little by little, continuously stirring the ghee into the mixture. All this must be done at a low flame and do not stop stirring at any point.
8. Finally once the ghee has all been added, the mixture will start to come away from the sides of the pan, it will still be soft but will start to sort of bubble and have air pockets within.
9. Take it off the heat and pour into the prepared pan.
10. Allow it to cool for a couple of minutes and then slice into it with smooth strokes to avoid breaking up the pieces.
It was therapeutic to write this down considering I am trying to sound like a Mysorepak Maven, the very first time I made it. :P

Try to keep and consume until Diwali, else you could always make another batch if you decide to give in to temptation.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

What better to start a Sunday Morning than Truffles

The chocolates I like the best are Belgian Chocolates and the ones I can eat any number of are chocolate truffles. Truffles are the creamiest and most melt in the mouth chocolates I have ever had. Even when I was a cash strapped student on an exchange trip in Europe, I found money to bring back quite a few boxes of chocolate truffles from Belgium.

So last week when a chocolate craving occurred simultaneously with a cooking bug, I decided to make my own. When I went hunting for chocolate truffle recipes, I found a blog with a bunch of easy to use recipes with clear instructions. It's called ' How to Cook That' and has a bunch of recipes that I would like to try out later. However, the one which I used seemed idiot proof enough for me to follow without any disasters occurring. :). This one was from Simply Recipes.com.

So I went with standard flavoring that's vanilla, you can substitute with a bunch of alcoholic/ non alcoholic extracts or solids like mint and such.  The coating was with cocoa powder and grated nuts (walnuts, pista and almonds).

So you will need:
1/2 cup Cream ( you can use heavy cream if you get it, I just used fresh cream)
226 grams Chocolate chips ( I used the last of my Ghirardelli milk chocolate ones- you can use semi sweet or bitter sweet if you like ) 
1 tsp of vanilla extract 
Cocoa powder
Assorted nuts

How to make it:
Place the cream in a heavy bottomed pan and bring to the boil. 
If you plan to add solid flavoring like cinnamon or mint, add at this point. Once you bring the cream off the stove, strain it and take the cream. Bring to the boil again and proceed with the recipe. If adding extract, do so at the next step.

Place the chocolate chips into another bowl and pour the cream onto the chocolate. Mix gently to melt and combine the chocolate. If it does not melt and combine completely, use the double boiler method to create a smooth ganache.

Add the flavouring now and combine well.

Place the mixture in the refrigerator for 2 hours until it solidifies. 

Spoon out small quantities and roll into balls or other shapes. 

Allow to set again overnight this time in the refrigerator.

The next morning coat the truffles in grated nuts or cocoa powder thoroughly and consume or store up to a week in the fridge for later consumption.

Don't forget to take pictures to show off these deceptively professional looking and tasting yet amazingly easy to make truffles!



Monday, February 9, 2015

Weekenders

This weekend started with a trip to the movies with Yennai Arindhal. Ajith and Trisha look very good and Arun Vijay is brilliant, that's about the best thing I can say about the movie. Also the fact that the sight of some watercolors in the movie, inspired me to learn a new technique of painting yesterday. I figure that Gautam Menon has a serious case of writer's block. While I am with him on the idea of making trilogies and cop movies, I cannot presume to understand why he chooses to tell the same story in the same fashion over and over again. I can only say I am glad that I watched it at a discounted ticket price.

'Single Wife' - I finished reading this book yesterday morning. Thanks to my recent reading habits, Scribd app chose to recommend this book to me. Grace is a creative, intelligent woman who is very satisfied with her lot in life. Things change when her husband walks out of the house one day. Initially she suspects that it is like one of his usual disappearances, when he returns after a few days of being incommunicado. Each time he goes missing, based on his reaction on returning, she keeps whittling down the people she informs about his being MIA. This time, she distances herself from the occurrence and refuses to talk about it to her friends and family, still pretending like he is around. She begins secretly investigating his life, discovering things that she did not expect and does not want to know. On the other hand, she misses all the information about her husband on the media and therefore remains puzzled by certain gifts and surprises that she receives. The novel is about her choices and how she decides to proceed with her life.

Did some baking experiments over the weekend. Baked 4 cookies a batch to get a feel for my oven as they call it. Ended up with some burnt, some crisp, some perfect and some soft. I made nan khathai biscuits this Saturday.  Nan Khathais are considered an Afghani/ Iranian invention- nan obviously meaning bread like the butter naans we eat. Khathai is debatable, some people believe it stands for Cathay- meaning China. The best thing about this cookie is its unique taste and texture. Unique taste- because of the cardamom, ghee and yoghurt and texture because it is crunchy out and melty inside.

To make these Indian Shortbreads as Jamie Oliver calls them you will need:
1/2 cup ghee or 1/2 cup soft butter- I used ghee
3/4 cup  powdered sugar
1.5 cups maida
1/4 cup gram flour
1/4 tsp cardamom powder & 1/4 tsp nutmeg powder or 1/2 tsp cardamom powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp of yoghurt
1-2 tsp of milk/water
chopped pista nuts (optional)

The method:
Cream together the sugar and ghee to a smooth paste.
Once it is mixed thoroughly and the sugar has dissolved, add maida, gram flour, cardamom powder and baking soda and knead together.
Add the yoghurt to bring together.
Add water/milk only if the dough appears too dry.
Refrigerate for a couple of hours to make rolling easy.
Roll medium sized balls of dough between your palms
Arrange at a decent distance from each other on an ungreased baking tray. Decent distance because we will press them down and they will expand when baked. Ungreased because we don't want it to burn from the bottom.
Press down criss cross patterns with a fork and slightly flatten the balls.
Top with some chopped pista nuts.
Bake in a pre heated oven at 190 degrees celsius for abt 10-15 minutes. They shouldn't brown on top. Just allow them to brown along the edges. I had to watch these like a hawk.
When you take them out of the oven, they will be soft. Leave them to cool on the tray for a couple of minutes before transferring them to the rack.
They will eventually cool and harden completely.

I spent the first part of Sunday lazing in Om Made Cafe eating their yummy brunch- I really liked their spaghetti and their roasted corn spread. Actually, all the tapenades and bruschettas were really tasty and refreshing as was my blueberry lemonade. They allow you to lounge there from 12 pm -4 pm. It's a good spread and a relaxing place to hang out. The latter part of the day was  used for my watercolor and charcoal experiments mentioned in the first paragraph. I finally figured how to use my watercolors instead of going over them with a heavy hand, I never knew that you had to do a coat of plain water before putting in the colors until yesterday.

Here are some of the results:

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Odds and Ends

This is a brain clean up exercise, there are a lot of half page or one paragraph blog entries in my head that do not justify a whole post to themselves. It's also a blog clean up exercise, to get rid of some of the headers that will haunt me some day later because I would be unable to recollect what I wished to write about them. This happens to me very often especially with short stories, where I forget the story that I meant to write and write a whole new one altogether.

On my bookshelf this week, my obsession with food related books continues. This week has seen me reading three novels all of which have a strong vein of food and food related activities associated with them. The other recurring vein in all of them is that of loss. Probably, these two are so interwoven as we associate food with comfort, it is a source of consolation that people turn to in times of depression, sadness, separation and any other form of trauma. It is quite interesting also that there are specific traditions relating food to death, in cultures all over the world. From the way the cooking is done, to the dishes that can and cannot be served and feeding one's ancestors souls, food and death have a quirky association, albeit a tad melancholic.

The Kitchen Daughter starts off in a funeral. The heroine might or might not have Asperger's syndrome. She exhibits poor social skills and has a dysfunctional relationship with her sister. Her parents' sudden death in an accident and the subsequent disagreements with her sister about the disposal of their assets, sends her to the safe refuge of her kitchen. There she cooks her Nonna's favourite Ribolita ( Bread soup) which in the wake of its enticing flavoursome smell, conjures up Nonna as well. The rest of the book is about the new people she meets, how she associates with them as well as the shadowy remains of people she summons from their recipes. This book seriously debates the question of whether the label of syndrome associated with mental challenges limits a person and prevents them from achieving their potential or aids them in getting timely help. A well structured book that is enjoyable to read.

Aftertaste- One of the heroines I was able to relate to the most. She is a chef and has her own Italian restaurant and a newborn. Little does she know that one bout of anger and a fight with her husband's paramour will lead to her world collapsing around her ears. This is a story of losing everything and then attempting to build everything up from scratch. It's quite interesting how she goes about it and the realizations she has along the way.

Bread Alone- This was an average book according to me. I did not like Wynter at all. I found her a very indecisive wishy washy heroine. It was supposed to be a story about finding oneself. I felt that she was the same one dimensional character she was when the book began. All of the heroes were lackadaisical. No one person really sticks in your mind except maybe for Linda, the bread maker. She is so rude and angry, but at least she's something, so you remember her. Bread Alone felt like a poor man's chick flick. 

Interesting products I discovered thanks to the wonders of advertising:
Zip SIP brought to you by Aditya Birla My Universe. This is a GUI aided dummy's guide to investment. You answer a bunch of questions, assess your risk profile and then it offers you a portfolio of funds (ABG among others) to invest in.
Hotstar live- Star content hosted on the web, happy to see a netflix like site in India, limited content right now, but hopefully it will ultimately become an option for binge watching

Italian Hot Chocolate is my favorite hot chocolate in the whole world. The first time I had it was at a small railway cafe in Italy. It was on a cold evening while waiting for a train. Italian Hot Chocolate is pretty much melted chocolate. It literally coats your insides as you consume it and fills you with warmth and happiness.
Recipe goes as follows:
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate 70% or higher
1 1/2 cups whole milk
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons corn starch
Vanilla Essence- 1 tsp 

Place a small quantity of milk along with chopped chocolate/ chocolate chips on really low heat in a heavy bottomed saucepan.
Allow to start melting, once the chocolate has melted completely, add milk, sugar and vanilla essence. Whisk corn starch into it.


Another experiment this week was butterscotch ice-cream. It was simpler than I thought reducing down condensed milk along with milk powder and sugar. The powdered butterscotch was then added after taking it off the heat and allowing it to cook in the residual heat. It's then frozen and blended until creamy and then frozen again before consumption.
The measure of ingredients:
- 2 1/2 cups or 500 ml of full fat milk.
- 1/2 cup condensed milk
- 1/4 cup powdered sugar
- 1/4 cup milk powder
- 3 heaped tsp butterscotch (or 1/2 tsp butterscotch essence)
- Yellow food colour (optional) - See more at: http://www.loveisinmytummy.com/2013/03/butterscotch-ice-cream.html#sthash.bMbrNygp.dpuf
2.5 cups milk
0.5 cup condensed milk
0.25 cup sugar
0.25 cup milk powder
3 heaped Tbsp Butterscotch chips (powdered)


- 2 1/2 cups or 500 ml of full fat milk.
- 1/2 cup condensed milk
- 1/4 cup powdered sugar
- 1/4 cup milk powder
- 3 heaped tsp butterscotch (or 1/2 tsp butterscotch essence)
- Yellow food colour (optional) - See more at: http://www.loveisinmytummy.com/2013/03/butterscotch-ice-cream.html#sthash.bMbrNygp.dpuf

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Food Rhapsodies- All things food this week

2015 Reading Challenge: I'd Sooner Starve
I enjoy books about food, restaurants and the cooking experience. In fact one of the books I have written about at length on this blog is As Always Julia- a series of letters written by Julia Child to Avis de Voto. I read Julie and Julia at a stretch like it was an un-putdown-able mystery novel. I am not the biggest fan of Madhur Jaffrey's anglicized Indian recipes, but I love her book ' Climbing the Mango Trees'. As it promises, it conjures up those memories of childhood memories in India, of the endless summers, the long vacations and stolen fruit. But most important of all the great homemade meals that cooks, aunts, grandmothers and mothers rustled up to feed the huge hoards in the joint families of those days.

Anyway, I'm more of a personal memoir reader rather than a restaurant experience reader. Case in point, it took me some effort to get through Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain and this other book Cooking Dirty: a story of life, sex, love and death in the kitchen. They are both written in a wry dry fashion which is generally my style. But when it comes to cooking memoirs I would always pick a fat round jolly chef than a cynical one. :)  So anyway, the book that I read now was neither here nor there.

I'd Sooner Starve is a book written by a man who owns a restaurant after years of working in a PR firm. He also doubles up as one of the chefs and a "floorwalker". This is a rollicking read of all the experiences he has with his stubborn diners and crazy deli customers. He encounters people who want to get broken olive oil bottles replaced for free, pensioners who think free Wifi is a biscuit and who frustrate him with their attempts to get into fully booked restaurants with the promise of buying a lot of wine.

It is a hilarious book filled with funny incidents with the author admitting his own culpability in several of them. There are some which are downright disgusting, filled with patronizing cliches from the customer. The chronicles of the food wasters, the single coffee orders and the annoyances of scaling up your business and ending up with disillusionment finally. The book is probably a great guide as to how not to behave in a restaurant, it ends on a sober note but is chock a block with laugh out loud cases.

Starting Salads:
Armed with a packet of cherry tomatoes, that were finally stocked at the hypermart near my house, and a strong new year resolution to go on a diet and eat healthier, I started inventing and eating salads this week. I have discovered a whole new appreciation for my taste tolerance. I have managed to incorporate fruits, seeds, sour, sweet and spicy, raw and cooked all in the same salad and still end up eating it.

So my first invention went something like this:
1. 3/4 of a green apple chopped up
2. 7-8 halved cherry tomatoes sauted in olive oil and italian dried herbs
3. 2 slices of chopped bread- also sauted with 2 if u wish
4. 3-4 pieces of roast garlic
5. Fistful of sunflower seeds
6. A drizzle of olive oil 
7. Salt and pepper ground onto the mixture
8. 1/2 tbsp of apple cider vinegar

Second one involved store bought ingredients:
1. A fistful of shelled pista nuts
2. A fistful of cranberries
3. 2 Tbsp of Italian Dressing
4. A drizzle of olive oil
5. 5-6 halved cherry tomatoes 
6. one boiled egg chopped up

Tomorrow, I am thinking chickpeas. I never thought my interest in cooking would turn into mad scientististry with me grabbing random things from the refrigerator. But let us see how long this fad of mine lasts. Probably until my salads get too crazy and start tasting weird.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

How the Year Started or my Veg Kofta Saga

This year started quietly for me like most years. I have hardly been one for new year parties so it's not unusual for me to have a quiet start to the year. I did make a resolution which is not a resolution- to not change anything about myself which destroys the aim of a New Year resolution.

Anyway, that aside, I started this year with some cooking. That basically ensured that I did not even chop up an onion for the rest of the week. Cooking is either appetite based or mood based for me. I would never cook for the rest of my life if food was put in front of me everyday and if it was interesting food. It is always the latter that inspires me to cook and bake, to make food interesting.I started off with an old recipe with a new twist. Vegetable Koftas were something I tried about a year ago when my mother was out of town. I made a huge box of Vegetable Kofta Curry which was promptly devoured at lunch by the rest of my team. I have been subjected to empty flattery ever since requesting a repeat of the dish. I being lazy me did not want to make it. But finally the other day, I bought a packet of paneer and decided to try making deep fried koftas. Yes, I was a wuss last time and did not dare to deep fry anything. So anyway, with a great deal of help from my mother and my refrigerator I ended up with great looking koftas ( mostly) and mom even recycled the leftovers as vegetable cutlets the next day.

On my kitchen counter:
Handful of peas
7-8 cauliflower florets- par boiled and grated
One carrot- grated
About 100g of paneer grated
2 potatoes boiled
Bread crumbs
Salt
Green Chillies- 2 chopped
Red Chilli Powder
Turmeric
Jeera Powder
Amchur
Coriander Powder
Kitchen King Masala
2 Onions
3 Tomatoes 
Ginger Garlic Paste
Garam Masala
Corn Flour
Bread Crumbs
Coriander leaves- chopped
1-2 Cloves
A small piece of cinnamon
A small piece of bayleaf
Jeera

How to make this curry:
1. Start with some oil in a pan, add green chillies and saute them for couple of minutes. Add peas and some water and cook until the peas are boiled.
2. Grate the parboiled cauliflower and add to the pan along with the grated carrots. Add turmeric powder, salt, chilly powder, jeera powder, coriander powder, amchur  and a pinch of garam masala and mix well.
3.  Saute until all the vegetables are cooked and do not retain too much water. This is to make the forming of the koftas easier.
4. Combine the grated paneer, mash of the boiled potatoes and the bread crumbs and corn flour along with coriander leaves. Take the mixture in step 3 and allow it to cool before kneading it together with the above mixture.
5. Shape into small spheres between your hands and deep fry the Koftas in oil and drain excess oil on a tissue and allow to rest.
If koftas begin to break when you are frying them, give them an additional coating of bread crumbs and place in fridge to set before frying again. If your oil has crumbly bits, filter it before continuing with your frying. Try to make it homogenous on the outer layer by mashing up the peas or pushing them to the center of the kofta, else you might have a case of exploding peas.

6. The curry is quite straight forward. Add jeera and allow it to splutter. Add cloves, bayleaf and cinnamon.
7. Add ginger garlic paste and chopped/pureed onions and fry until it is well cooked.
8. Place tomatoes in boiling water and allow them to cook. Remove the skin and puree.
9. Add puree to step 7. Add turmeric, jeera powder, coriander powder, kitchen king masala, chilli powder and salt. Mix well.
10. When the tomato starts to exude oil, add water and oil to bubble and boil.
11. When the curry boils and reduces add a dollop of cream and mix well.

Just about 1/2 hr before you eat, remember to add the koftas to the curry and mix carefully without mashing them. Also avoid soaking them for too long as they will break apart and make a mess of your gravy.
This hot dish can be enjoyed with steaming phulkas or rice, whichever way you like it.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Pav Bhaji Reloaded

So this is pretty much old wine in a new bottle. A recycled post on Pav Bhaji, since I already waxed eloquent about this dish in an older post about couple of months ago. I had all the vegetables to make Pav Bhaji yesterday, thanks to my mother and I picked up some minuscule pav buns when I was out shopping for other stuff. I had one of my closest friends over yesterday for dinner on a very very hurried visit. So it is a funny story why her visit was as short as it was. She was heading down from her hotel on Richmond Road and had booked a cab with Ola. About 10 minutes past the time of arrival, she was frantically calling the cab driver to find out why he wasn't still there. Imagine her surprise when she discovered that he had already left with another passenger who had also booked an Ola. To put it in her words, the girl who took the cab also shamelessly spoke to her and said she had taken the cab and was half way to her destination. The only saving grace was that she hadn't recharged her Ola account and didn't end up paying for a trip they did not take.

So anyway, getting back to Pav Bhaji, I had a recipe which I tried the last time I blogged about it. But I wanted to do more research to oomph up the recipe. A few articles were read and a few videos were watched. The recipe I tried yesterday had a smack of authenticity because it was a video of a beach-side stall in Juhu, Mumbai. So here goes another yummy version of Pav Bhaji.

On my kitchen counter:
5 Tomatoes
3 medium sized potatoes 
Quarter of a cabbage- Finely chopped
Beans- 3/4 chopped
Carrot-1 chopped ( Too much will make it sweet)
Peas- A handful and a half
Pav Bhaji Masala
Hing
Salt
Chilli Powder
Turmeric Powder
Green Chillies-3
Ginger Garlic Paste
Oil
Butter
1 chopped onion

What you need to do:
1. Puree the tomatoes and keep aside.
2. Boil all vegetables except potatoes with some water and run through a blender to get a coarse paste.
3. Boil potatoes and mash well.
4. Chop up 3/4 green chillies. Add a mix of oil and butter in a tava and add the chillies and fry well. If you have capsicum you can add at this point and roast it until light brown.
5. Add 1 tsp of ginger garlic paste and saute well. Add the tomato puree and some more butter if needed. Allow the tomato puree to cook until it starts releasing oil. Add salt and turmeric powder at this point. Add chilli powder according to taste as well.
6. Now combine the vegetable paste and add about 2 Tbsp of Pav Bhaji Powder. Mix well and add some water. Allow to boil and cook well. Taste and add more chilli powder or salt at this point.
7. Once the vegetables are well combined and the mixture is bubbling, add the mashed potatoes and some more Pav Bhaji powder if needed and mash further to combine.
8. On another tava, heat up a Tbsp of butter. Add a tsp of ginger garlic paste, some chilli powder, salt and the chopped onions. Saute until light brown and combine with the mixture in step 7.
9. Your bowl emptyingly yummy Bhaji is ready to be enjoyed with buttered pavs.

Friday, November 21, 2014

A Headstart on Weekend Baking

It is Friday morning and the hours in the morning stretch pleasantly when you decide to work from home. So I utilized my hour long commute time better today getting ahead on my weekend baking. I made an eggless cake and a cookie. The eggless cake is a repeat recipe, it is the mawa cake I attempted soon after Diwali. I generally have a strict non repetition policy so that I learn new cake and cookie recipes and so I don't get bored of my new found hobby as well. But the mawa cake had to be made primarily so I could finish up all the yummy things which could go into it, which have been sitting in my fridge for ages now. If anything, it turned out even better than the last time I tried to make it, none the worse for my abuse of the ingredients.
But the real star of my culinary chronicle today is a cookie. After a long time, I got a cookie perfectly right. I guess, I just had to try enough number of times to get it right. So when I started off, I was intimidated by cakes and made only cookies. So I made cookies very well. Then I stopped and made only cakes. When I got back and tried making any sort of exotic cookies which involved egg, like shrewsbury biscuits ( rock hard and had to be broken with excessive force), zebra cookies ( had to miraculously transformed into cupcakes) and my most basic cookie failure, rice cookies (enough said). So baking has me believing in Malcolm Gladwell's tenet that enough practice can make you an expert in anything. 

So I was happy to get into the cookie baking groove again with these awesome melting moments cookies.  They are so pretty to look at and the prettification doesn't really take too much effort. I found this recipe at Bakeclub.com.au. They had a very good video trailer of the recipe and very very detailed instructions. So this is not the only recipe I am going to be trying from this site, I have already book marked a bunch for future reference. Possibly, they have made their instructions so fool proof that even I cannot go wrong.

Now without any further ado, presenting melting moments cookies with orange icing.

On my kitchen counter: ( To make 18 or 36 halves)
250 g butter (softened and cubed)
110 g icing sugar
11/2 tsp vanilla extract
250 g flour
60 g corn flour

For the orange icing:
60 g butter softened
125 g icing sugar sifted
rind of an orange scraped
a drop of food colouring (optional)

How to make them:
1. Cream together sugar, butter and vanilla, until they mix well. The butter goes pale and creamy and sort of streaky as well, this is when you stop.
2. Scrape the mixture from sides of the bowl and mix thoroughly with sifted flour and corn flour.
3. Once you have combined it using a spoon, you can use your hands to bring the dough together.
4. Grease and line a cookie tray. Preheat oven to 160 degrees celsius.
5. Take heap teaspoons of the dough between your hands and form into equal sized balls. Place them on the cookie sheet about 4-5 cm apart.
6. Press down on each ball with a fork, very gently, to create a pattern and sort of flatten the cookie a little bit.
7. Place in the oven and bake for about 18 minutes, the lower side of the cookie turns golden brown while the top half remains sort of beige in colour.
8. Remove from cookie tray and allow to cool before icing.

For the icing:
Combine butter, sugar and rind and also a drop of food colouring ( use orange instead of lemon yellow like stupid ol' me). Cream together and spread evenly on one cookie and sandwich with another.

So thanks to my brilliance, I have executed one of Heston Blumenthal's Masterchef tasks quite unwittingly. When you look at it, you expect to taste lemon cream and what you get is orange cream (looks are deceptive).

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Sweet Treats and Great Conversation

This weekend was all about nostalgia for me. I met up with my old gang of friends. We have managed to stay in touch with each other post engineering college, through ups and downs and everything in between. With everyone getting busier by the day, we only now manage to meet on special occasions. Our special occasion this weekend was J having a baby. We congregated at J's house for lunch and a pre- baby meetup. We had a wonderful time, reminiscing, laughing at remembered inside jokes and feeling like we were young, hopeful and back in college again for a time.

So, since I was visiting for a special occasion, I wanted to carry something interesting for dessert. I found this on an acquaintance's blog. So recipe credits to loveisinmytummy.com. These cinnamon cakes were perfect for dessert, not too sweet, soft and crumbly inside and a little crispy on the outside. So the idea is that they are baked like muffins but the batter has a lot of similarities with donut batter. Of course, cinnamon can only make things taste better, even diet food like awful oatmeal porridge. So I used lashings and lashings of it in this dessert, especially since I didn't have to grind it, used the great tasting Keya Cinnamon Powder. This dessert with a name like Cinnamon Donut Muffins, it sounds particularly Enid Blytonish. The other reason I like this dessert is because it uses melted better (yes! no pre planning needed) and granulated sugar, perfect for last minute or in my case late night baking.

So these muffins are quite attractive after you roll them in the cinnamon flavored sugar because they shine like burnished golden brown. But when you finish baking them, they look almost like an off white. Anyway, here goes the recipe without any more ado, brought to you in a hopefully? attractive fashion, thanks to the pic monkey recipe card tutorial.

All done and ready to go!

Friday, September 26, 2014

Birthdays- Reine de Saba/Queen of Sheba cake

Predictably, as the title goes, this post is about birthdays. Birthdays were the most special days when you were a kid. Diwali and Fancy Dress competitions aside, it was the day you could wear color dress to school and hopefully given probability was on your side and there were no other birthdays in your class, you would be the only one. Everyone at school outdid themselves trying to think of what chocolate they would bring that year and all those with birthdays outside the school year bemoaned their loss. As we grew older, chocolates were replaced by small gifts like pencils and erasers. I remember myself giving away a glittery eraser ball which I bought in Bhutan, which did less of its job and did more of looking pretty.  There were also those times when you could celebrate your birthday in school, get your parents to bring your cake and cut it in class with all your friends, it was always awesome to get a free period in addition to cake.

At home, I had a birthday party every year all the way from year one until I think I was 12 years old. I had a bunch of friends over and games and cake and snacks. The highlight of my evening was always the bread balls that my mom made. I made them myself twice- once when I was in France and once when I was in Delhi, they are in my head very close to soul food, because it is comfort food closely associated with happy memories for me. I always tried to grab a few before the guests came in.

Anyway, all snacks aside, coming to the most important part of birthdays- cakes, I don't remember too many of my childhood cakes. I remember one Bugs Bunny Cake, the resemblance was too obvious to ignore. I had cake less frequently for my birthday and more frequently for fun. So, this birthday, I decided to put my new found interest in baking to test and make myself a birthday cake. 

That is the story of how I came to make Julia Child's Reine de Saba  or "Queen of Sheba cake". It was apparently the first French cake that she tasted and fell in love with. I was feeling particularly brave when I embarked on this bake. It helped that a lot of home cooks all over the world had tried this recipe and had a lot of advice and warnings. It was a bit of a longish process to make this cake. There was a lot of mise en place involved. But the final product is so totally worth it. It of course followed the original Julia Child recipe, which was helpfully posted at http://theculinarytravelguide.com/2012/06/13/the-jc100-reine-de-saba/

On my kitchen counter:
113 g baking chocolate- I used dark
2 Tbsp of fresh brewed coffee decoction
113g butter (softened at room temperature)
2/3 cup + 1 tbsp granulated sugar 
3 eggs- yolk and white separated
Pinch of salt
1/3 cup ground almonds
1/2 tsp almond extract- I replaced with vanilla as I didn't read the recipe properly
1/2 cup cake flour- involves substituting a Tbsp of all purpose flour with corn starch (sift it)

How you go about making it:
1. Grease 8 inch cake pan and line with parchment paper.
2. Place chocolate and 2 tbsp of coffee in a small pan and cover it. Place over a larger pan with simmering water until the chocolate just starts to melt. If you leave it too long, it will burn, so take it off and allow it to melt gradually.
3. Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy and beat with egg yolks.
4. Beat egg whites and salt to a soft peak and add sugar and beat to stiff peaks ( culinary trivia- this is a french method of baking, which leavens the cake without use of baking powder or baking soda)
5. Add chocolate which is now melted to a smooth consistency to mixture in step 3. Add the ground almonds and extract and mix well. Fold in egg white and cake flour alternately one fourth by one fourth.
6. Preheat oven to 180 degree celsius. Place batter in cake pan and push up along the circumference. Bake for 25 minutes until circumference hardens and cake is still a little oily when tested in the middle with a needle.

This is the best part of the recipe- Glacage au Chocolat ( Chocolate butter Icing)
- 57 g baking chocolate- again dark
- 2 tbsp fresh brewed coffee
- 5 tbsp unsalted butter
- Bowl filled with ice cubes and water covering them

Use same procedure mentioned in step 2 to melt chocolate to a smooth mixture. Add butter tbsp by tbsp and beat to mix well. Beat over ice and water until it cools to spreading consistency. Spread over the cake with a spatula. 

Now your cake is all shiny and ready to eat. Makes for a perfect birthday cake.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Dum Aloo- Saturday Special

Over the weekend, we had guests at home. So of course, in anticipation of this, my dormant cooking cells decided to get enthusiastic about cooking. My mother made a safe bet with mutter paneer, so I opted to get a little experimental and make a recipe that I have been reading about often- Dum Aloo Punjabi. There are so many variations of this dish, so I went through a million recipes before I hybridized the following one and then anyway veered away from what I decided. I had help too from an expert cook who was one of the guests, so she tasted my in progress dish and gave me some ideas about what I should do to make it taste better. So finally, I was happy to make a tasty dish out of it. It tasted better with dosas according to most of us than with rotis for some reason.

Start with the masala powder. Powder together 2 tbsp of coriander seeds, 1 tsp of jeera, one clove, a little cardamom and cinammon until it is a fine powder.

Soak and slightly cook about 10 cashew nuts in hot water. Grind to a fine paste. Chop up two onions finely. Puree 3 tomatoes which have been boiled in hot water and peeled. Cook the potatoes in a pressure cooker for about 2 whistles of the cooker or until boiled firmly. Then saute potatoes in oil until light brown all over the surface.

In a flat bottomed pan, add about 3 tbsp of oil and saute bay leaf+onion+ginger garlic paste, until  the onion turns completely brown. Add tomatoes and saute until the soften. Add cashew paste, above ground masala powder. Add turmeric and chilly powder depending on how spicy you want it. Also add salt and a pinch of kitchen king masala if you have some. Add two spoons of curd (Some dum aloo recipes are based completely on curd and have no tomatoes at all. But I didn't like the idea so much considering I don't like curd so much. But this curd was added as a fix to make the dish a little sour and bring balance to the additional spice it needed. and some water to combine. Allow it to boil until the raw smell goes away and the masala combines well. Add potatoes to the mixture and allow to soak on low flame for sometime. Take it off the heat and serve hot.

In other food related news, I finished reading the book, As Always Julia. It's a tome of a book, that I happily bought for a buck in the discount shelves outside the Strand Book Store in New York. It is a compilation of letters between Avis De Voto and Julia Child. It feels like when you are reading this book, that you are going through the whole experience of publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking with them. It's a great book also to understand the then political and social environment albeit from a Democratic point of view. Also both of them were excellent at French and tended to lapse into it in the written form quite often. So it was good practice to read and understand French as well.


Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Mushroom Kurma and Ghee Rice

My mom is very suspicious of Mushrooms. She does not like buying them, but I pain her so much that she gives in and gets me for them anyway. She does not cleaning or cutting them. She just about likes eating them. So if there are mushrooms in the house, I am the nominated cook, cleaner, chief bottle washer.

I love ghee rice and mushroom kurma because the acidity and sourness of the kurma sets off the bland base of the ghee rice. However, the coconut in both of these dishes can make it quite a heavy dish. A siesta becomes inevitable once you have this combo for lunch.


Mushroom Kurma-

Ingredients: 
Onion-1
Tomato-1
Ginger Garlic Paste- 1 1/2 tsp
Oil- 4-5 tsp
Salt
Chilli Powder- 2 tsp
Garam Masala-1/2 tsp
Jeera Powder- 1/2 tsp
Coriander Powder-1/2 tsp
Turmeric- a pinch
Coconut milk- 50 ml
Lemon juice-2 tsp

Seasoning-
Bay Leaf
Saunf
Cinnamon

Method:
1. Dice/ grate onion and tomato to fine pieces
2. Take a kadai/wok and pour oil into it
3. After the oil heats up, add onions and fry till golden
4. Add ginger garlic paste to the mixture and fry till raw smell goes away
5. Add tomatoes and saute till soft
6. Add all the masala powders except salt and cook until the moisture is removed
7. Add finely chopped mushrooms and cook for 5 min
8. Add salt to the mixture and cook for 5 more minutes
9. After the mushroom wilts, add coconut milk. 
10. Dilute with water if necessary and bring to the boil.
11. Remove from flame and add seasoning and lemon juice and mix well

Ghee Rice

Ingredients
Basmati Rice- 1 cup
Coconut milk-1 cup
Water-1-1 1/2 cup depending on rice quality
Ghee- 2 tsp

Seasoning:
Bayleaf
Cardamom
Cinnamon
Clove
Saunf
Green Chilli-2 slit lengthwise


Method:
1. Wash the basmati rice well and place in pressure cooker. 
2. Add coconut milk and water.
3. Add ghee to the mixture and mix well.
4. After the first whistle from the cooker, reduce flame and allow to cook for 7-8 minutes.
5. Remove from flame and add seasoning sauted in 1 tsp of ghee. Mix well before serving.


Sunday, November 4, 2012

Peas Parantha

One of the first dishes that I created and experimented on my own with, did not learn from my mom and actually managed to add to her repertoire. She has of course improved on it and perfected it. It was pretty cool because I figured the recipe mostly by taste. I had it at some restaurant that I can't even recollect now and wanted to make it at home badly enough to figure out what went into it.

It was also the parantha on which I perfected the art of making nice, neatly rounded ones, I still can't make round rotis. I noticed the way all the parantha shop guys made paranthas like modaks and picking off the extra doughy bits to make a evenly filled parantha. I can safely say I have mastered the art of repeatedly rolling out beautiful paranthas.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup peas
Jeera powder- 1 tsp
Coriander powder- 1 tsp
2-3 green chillies
Salt to taste
Fresh coriander leaves
Ginger- small piece
2-3 pods garlic
Chapathi dough

Method:
1. Chop green chillies into fine pieces
2. Boil peas for 4-5 minutes on a pan with water, until soft.
3. Drain the water and place peas in mixer grinder jar along with green chillies.
4. Add all masalas and grind to a paste like consistency.
5. Add finely chopped fresh coriander leaves and garlic and ginger.
6. Make balls out of chapathi dough, make a hollow space with your fingers and place stuffing. Close the round and roll out into a parantha.
7. Place on pre heated tava, add oil on sides and surface and cook till brown. Repeat  on the other side.