SAMOSA....

So finally, a post from me...and yes after reading this all those who know me would definitely agree that I need a job...after all I prepared Samosa at home!!!...it turned out to be good...so here is the recipe....

Ingredients:

Boiled Potatoes (5-6 should do if you are preparing for 2 ppl)
Boiled Peas (Fistful...with this you would have understood that this recipe comes from my mom :-))
1 tsp Fennel Seeds (basically Saunf)
Little Pudina, Coriander, Green Chilli (depending on your taste), Curry Leaves, Lemon
Maida (think 125 gms should do...but pls add or reduce according to your judgement)

How to prepare:

Paste:
Grind the fennel sees first. Then add pudina, coriander, green chili and a few lime drops and some water and grind all of these together so as to make a paste.

Masala:
Heat oil in a kadhai. Add rai, curry leaves and hing. Then add the above paste and saute the paste for about 5 mins. (You dont need to wait for the oil to separate like we usually do). Then add the potatoes (u need to cut them into pieces although i have not stated this earlier), peas, salt, turmeric, coriander leaves and lemon.

Dough:
Take the maida, add salt and oil (you would need quite a bit of oil here...think i added around 5-6 spoons). Add water and knead the dough well)

Now the Actual Samosa...
Prepare the rotis of the dough...cut each roti in 2 pieces. Take one piece and make it into a cone. Use water to join the ends. Stuff the masala in the cone and then seal the end with water again...

Heat oil in a kadhai and deep fry on medium flame...

DBC (or should it be BCD… whatever…who cares!!)

For a person who is still struggling to make perfect rotis… last Sunday came as a surprise. Well, my MIL asked me to make Daal – Baati- Choorma on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi... the thought itself sent shudders across me… but how could I say no…so with a tensed mind, I got up as 630 (on a Sunday!!) and resolved to make at least edible stuff that day…

Daal: It was the usual moong + udad ki daal. But ensure that the tadka is only of tomatoes and NO onions please. Daal has to be a bit diluted as compared to the daal normally made.

Baati: Well…This was the difficult part. Since I didn’t have Tandoor in my kitchen, making standard Baati wasn’t possible. So for this my MIL gave me the suggestion of making “baafna” baati… gosh… I had just had that once and didn’t even recollect how it looked like. Help came from my husband… no no…he didn’t cook. He just described, how it looked like… as per his description… it looks like “a spongy ball just coming out from a swimming pool of ghee!!” I discovered later that you shouldn’t ask guys for describing anything!

So the first task was to knead the dough. So for that take wheat flour, salt, ajwain, about 3-4 teaspoons of ghee and with warm water, knead soft dough and then form balls of 5 cms diameter. Boil water in a container (2/3 filled) and put these balls into the same. Let it boil for some time (about 7-10 minutes) till the wheat balls become light and start floating. Once this is done, take out the balls and cut the same into half. Heat ghee in a kadai and let these cut balls fry in the same. Ensure that it’s on a low flame. One you get the golden brownish color, take the same out… well…Baati is ready!!

Choorma: If Baati was difficult, Choorma was time consuming. So let’s start…

Ingredients:
Wheat flour: two bowls
Water : Enough to knead the dough
Sugar : we take boora, but if you don’t get it, then take powdered sugar (1 bowl [which can be increased depending upon how sweet you want])
Ghee (lots of it!!)
Cardamoms
Almonds and cashews: Again as per your taste buds

First, knead the dough after adding 8-10 tsp of ghee. Then prepare small balls, about 3-4 cms in diameter, and then flatten the same, so that it is about ½ cm in height. Now deep fry these, on low flame in Ghee. Once its golden brown in color, take the same out and crush it into smaller pieces. Then, crush it those and further crush it finely in a mixer, and sieve the same and add sugar, cardamom and other dry fruits. Add ghee to it. The quantity of ghee should be so much as to hold the choorma together.

So this was the experiment which I did on the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi. Spent some 2 hours in the kitchen to get everything right…and it actually ended up being right :-)

A few words of Caution:

• If you one of those calorie conscious people, this dish isn’t for you!! so starve for a week and then have this :-)

• You will really feel lazy and would feel sleepy after having this…so beware!

• It takes a lot of time, so don’t hurry up!

Ganpati Bappa… Moriya!!!!!!!!

chocolate cake!!

Just when you thought it would never happen.....a recipe from me! :)

Chocolate cake (also known as the-one-and-only-divine-cake-flavour)

So...first...photo...to get ppl interested. Remember this is with my digicam with my extremely advanced food photography skils...ahem..now that we're all drooling...

Ingredients!!
2 cups maida
2 cups powdered sugar (not granular sugar ppl...so u need abt 1.5 to 1.75 cups of granular sugar to get 2 cups of powdered)
1 cup water
2 tsp vanilla essence
4 tbsp cocoa pwder (i like my choc cakes darrrrrrrk....so i put 4 heaped)
1/2 cup oil (regular cooking oil...koi sa bhi chalega...not like mustard obviously...)
1/4 cup white butter (also knows as cooking butter) DO not put amul or any other salted one. bad idea.
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk (at room temp)
1 tbsp vinegar
2 eggs
3/4 tsp baking soda

How to:
1. Seive the maida, baking powder, salt and cocoa powder together...abt 2 to 3 times. Keep aside.
2. In a largish vessel...mix together sugar, oil, butter and vanilla essence. Beat with an electric beater if u have one. If you dont have any...lure ppl in the family to do it for u....(with huge portions of cake promised...it usually works). The idea is to get a lot of air incorporated into the sugar mix....
When u think ur done...or are tired of beating the damn thing....add the eggs...again beat well. then add water, milk and vinegar and mix nicely. The mixture will seem extremely liquidy. Do not panic.

3. Grease and flour a baking dish of ur choice. Remember this needs to cook in an convection oven....so use aluminium or glass. No plastic. I have reason for stating this very obvious fact.

4. Also preheat ur oven. I make this on a gas oven...so i have no clue to what degree C u need to preheat ur oven. I think 200 deg C should be good. If it isnt...well...there's always a next time.

5. Now...take the flour mix (already seived and put aside) into a big bowl. Add the liquid mix to this slowly and mix it all together with minimum strokes. Yeah u need to add it slowly..but mix it quickly...just another way to make things look difficult. Main idea being...mix it before the fizz of the soda goes away and u end up with a flat cake.Sufficiently scared?

6. Bake for approx 40 mins. I think 20 mins at 200 deg C and then another 20 at 180 deg C should do it. Check...do the toothpick test and cook more if required. Like i said....i use a gas oven...so i take no responsibility for the time recommendation.

7. Once done....cool and then dig in!!

Enzoy.

Wow…what an achievement!!

After months of experimentations, I managed to do what I always (oops…not always, mmm…since last 2 months) wished I could do but would end up in frustration coz it never ended up the way I wanted.

Ok…so here’s my achievement. For the first time, I managed to fulao my roti!!!! Yess…I am sooo very happy and so very proud of myself!!! You must be wondering, what’s so great in that. Every Indian female can do it. I agree, but I am different...you know, after all I manage screw up the easiest things ;)

So thanks a lot to my mom (who keeps on giving me tips), my cousin (whose advice, a week back helped me get the basics correct) and my co-blogger (who never blogs of course) for helping me out!!!

Yippee!!!

DISASTROUS DAAL

I know you must be wondering…how can daal turn out to be disastrous…but you forgot one thing…where there is ME, nothing’s impossible!

Well, so here it goes, after a lot of experiments with the other veggies, I was confident that daal will be a baayein-haath-ka-khel…coz everyone had told me that daal is very easy to make. So I decided to do the ShriGanesh of my newly bought cooker by this supposedly "one of the easiest dish"

So as per my mom’s instructions, I took half a cup of moong ki daal, washed it and put it in the cooker. Then added around 1 cup of water, a bit of salt, turmeric powder and then closed the lid of the cooker. Now here's the catch...I am really scared of cookers. Why?? well, once I had seen the cooker lid blow up and the contents all stuck on the ceiling of the kitchen. Since that day, I am dead scared of cookers.

Anyways, now the time had come for me to fight my fears. My mom had instructed me to put the flame on high and after one whistle, to put it on low flame and then let it cook for 5 minutes …so bhagwaan ka naam lekar, I tried to follow her instructions. After around 1 minute, the cooker started making strange sounds. Petrified, I switched off the flame. Then told myself, that I HAD to be brave. I restarted the gas, waited for a couple of minutes and when the pressure started building in the cooker, I decided to turn it to low flame and cook for another couple of minutes. Then I switched off the gas and after the pressure was out, I opened the lid to find out that the daal was not yet done…huh, so for the third time, I re-started the gas! This time I let it cook for 10 whole minutes. When I opened the lid, I found that almost all the water was evaporated, and the daal was more like khichdi! Since it was cooked and since it was already 9pm I had no more patience left, so I prepared the tadka and took the daal in my katori.

What was my first reaction after tasting this “easiest dish”?? namak kam hai….so I added some more salt, then realized, even mirchi was less, but now I had no more patience and so ate it as it is. Hey hey…its not yet over…the best part is yet to come. Now while I was preparing the daal, I was so over confident, that I thought that I will make some extra daal for the next day too. So there was around one extra bowl of daal left. I took the remaining daal in a bowl and left it on my table in my room (so that I don’t forget to keep in the fridge) to let it cool. I started watching a movie and fell asleep and got up only in the morning to realize that…that…that…. the bowl was full of ants…boo hoo hoo!!!!! So all my hopes of rectifying my mistake the next day went down the drain!!!!