Masala Vegetable Pasta

Macaroni with vegetables in white sauce is an absolute favourite of mine. When S and I met a friend in Hyderabad, he told S that I was a good cook. And that I tried very hard to match my mother's cooking standards. He went on to say that there were many dishes that I made really well, but that there was this one dish I just couldn't make the way she did. I can only keep trying!

1 cup Macaroni (Or any pasta of your choice)

1 cup Mixed Boiled Vegetables (Carrot, Beans, Peas, Cauliflower, Potato), diced
1/4 cup, Mixed Capsicum, chopped
1 tbsp Butter/Olive Oil
1 tbsp Flour
1 cup Milk
1 tsp Sambar Powder

1 tsp Oil

Salt and Pepper to Taste
1 slice Low Fat Cheese (optional)

Cook the macaroni in a cooker with a little salt, a teaspoon of oil, sambar powder and sufficient water. Drain.

Heat the butter in a saucepan. Add the capsicum and fry for a minute. Add the flour and fry without browning the flour. Add the milk and bring the mixture to a boil while stirring continuously. If adding cheese, add it at this point and stir the sauce well. As the sauce thickens, add the salt and pepper. Add the boiled vegetables and the macaroni to the sauce.

Dig in!

Mugga Dali Kheeri for Yugadi

Most of my posts are on auto publish these days. The posts were written over many weekends when I had little else to do. While I tend to post every alternate day (so that I won't suddenly find that my pipeline has gone dry), just for today, I decided to play around with the schedule. I usually do that when there's something special I want to talk about. A birthday or a festival usually makes it to the list.

This blog hasn't seen too many "festival" specials. There are many reasons for that. The biggest reason is probably the time lag between the making and the posting. And honestly, I don't even "make" that much. Is it a sign of the times, is it a sign of my laziness, is it just me asking the question why? Each time, I'd probably pick "lazy". Then again, I have a job that keeps me at work for more than 9 hours a day and the commute usually takes up another 4. So, if I even manage to "make" anything festival related on the actual date of the festival, I would be too tired to talk about it here. After a few days or weeks, it seems so out of place. Maybe I should talk about them the following year. Like I remember taking pictures of our Pongal feast last year. I managed to sneak one of those pictures into this year's post.

While I am not in favour of celebrating every festival around the weekend closest to it (I mean, what is the point?), I have to resort to doing just that, at times. Often, I make one dish that is part of the meal for that festival and leave it at that. Something is better than nothing, right? As this new year begins, I am caught between the past, the present and the future. Will the traditions of my family carry on? Growing up, I had to contend with Konkani festivals and Tamil festivals. Now I have added a third dimension, Telugu festivals. I'm glad that many of them coincide. It is the new year for us (on my mother's side of the family) as well as for S' side of the family. (And for all of you out there who call this the Telugu New Year, please, please, I beg you to stop doing that. It is the New Year for anyone who follows the lunar calendar in India.)

My MIL said that the sweet dish that they make for today is Bobatlu (Punpolo in Konkani, Poli in Tamil, Puranpoli in Marathi). Among other things, Saraswats make this kheer with green gram dal. It is anyone's guess which I'd pick to make today. Much as I'd love to eat the Bobatlu, I'm not even going to think about making it on my own today. (I have made it a couple of times in the past. Feels like a different life though!) Today it has to be Mugga (Moong) Dali (Dal) Kheeri (Kheer). We also make panak (I shall blog about it later as we make it for a different festival too - same as the Tamil Panakam) and usli.

Here's the recipe:

1 cup Green Gram Dal (Moong Dal)

1/2 cup Coconut Milk

2 tsp Ghee

3/4 cup Jaggery

1/4 tsp Cardamom Powder

Heat the ghee in a pressure pan. Add the green gram dal and fry for a few minutes. Add about 3 cups of water and and pressure cook for 3 whistles. Add the jaggery and cook for 5-7 minutes. Blend in the coconut milk and the cardamom powder.

There you go. There couldn't have been a simpler way to make kheer. And there isn't a sweeter way to usher in the New Year. I don't have access to Neem leaves and flowers and as a result, I am not making the Telugu Ugadi Pachadi or the Konkani equivalent (which is very similar to this and has raw mango as well) . For today, I will just have to make do with this bowl of kheer. May you and yours enjoy a lovely year.

Cream of Beetroot Soup

Pretty Pink! Those were my first thoughts when I poured this soup into our cups. The lighting at home is not the best suited to take pictures. As a result, any pictures I take at night are just about average. This is one of the simplest soups I've made, but it had such a lovely hue that I almost felt a little bad drinking it up.

3 medium Beetroots, peeled and diced

2 medium Carrots, peeled and diced

1 Onion, diced

1/2 cup Milk

Salt and Pepper to taste

Pressure cook the beetroots, carrots and the onion together with about 2 cups of water. Liquidize when cool. Add the milk and bring to a boil. Season with salt and pepper.

We enjoyed this soup with some toast. I am certain this would taste great with crackers or even just by itself. I must admit that I was rather happy just looking at it.

Spinach in Coconut Milk Gravy

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. That is how this dish was born. I started to make Palak Paneer, but I didn't have the patience to allow the spinach to cool and then puree it. Since it was necessary to make something, I made this gravy while the spinach was getting steamed and I just threw it right in. I didn't expect the dish to taste as good as it did because I didn't put in any effort at all (and it was my own invention!). But the end result was simply great. I think this will go very well with steaming hot rice as well.

Ingredients:

2 cups Spinach, steamed and chopped

200 ml Coconut Milk

1 Onion

1-2 Green

pods of Garlic

1” piece of Ginger

1 tsp Oil

1 tsp Cumin Seeds

¼ tsp Asafoetida

Salt to taste

Grind the onion, green chillies, ginger and garlic together to a paste.

Heat oil, add the cumin seeds and the asafoetida. When the cumin seeds crackle, add the onion paste and fry for 2-3 minutes. Add the coconut milk and salt and bring to a boil. Add the spinach and cook for a couple of minutes. Serve hot with rotis.

I know I'll make this every once in a while when spinach is in season. Since we've almost stopped taking rice in our lunch boxes and have left pasta for weeknight dinners, rotis with a side dish seem to be a permanent fixture on our weekday lunch menu. And I don't like spending too much time in the kitchen. So these recipes come to my rescue very often.

Mango Muffins (Rasayan inspired)

Indian sweets and I share a very vague relationship. You can’t even call it love-hate. There are a few sweets that I absolutely love (kaju kathli, gulab jamun, rasmalai, badam kheer, sheera, kulfi) and there are those that I really wouldn’t care to look at (rice kheer/pal payasam, falooda, jangiri, rajbhog...). There is one part of me that is, without doubt, Mangalorean. Much as I love my Paruppu Urundai and Milagu Kuzhambu, I love the sweet-sour-hot combination of Saraswat cooking.



I love mangoes and can eat them everyday for every meal (yes, regardless of the eruptions on every inch of my anatomy) and I have been doing just that. Instead of cooking for just one person when I have to, I sit down with a large bowl of cut mangoes and enjoy every piece.


Rasayan is a 5 minute dessert/sweet dish that I absolutely love and it is the dish that I sent to WBB – Summer Fruits last year. That was my first WBB entry. And this year’s entry to WBB is inspired by that very recipe. I saw blueberry cinnamon muffins in some book and thought, “Mangoes and cardamom make a good pair… why not I try?” So with a few substitutions here and there, I came up with my own version of Rasayan inspired Mango Muffins.


3/4 cup Coconut Milk
1/2 cup Vegetable oil
1 cup Mango, chopped into fine pieces
1 cup Flour
1 cup Whole Wheat Flour
½ to ¾ cup Jaggery
1 tbsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Cardamom Powder or Essence
1 Egg
1/4 tsp Salt



Grease 12-muffin pan or line with paper cases. Preheat oven to 400 F.

Place all the ingredients except the mango pieces in a food processor jar fitted with the dough blade. Run the food processor for 2 minutes until the ingredients form a batter.

Blend the mango pieces into the batter and pour spoonfuls of the batter into the muffin moulds. Bake for 20 minutes.

Muffins are a great breakfast on the go and going the whole wheat way is a healthy option too. Mangoes take them to a very different level. My namesake, Arundati of Escapades, is hosting this month's Weekend Breakfast Blogging # 22, the theme of which is Mango Madness. WBB is the brainchild of Nandita of Saffron Trail and I am happy to send these muffins to her.

Vegetable Stew

I have never learnt to make any Mallu (Keralite) food. Maybe it was because I had easy access to it whenever I wanted. The only things I think I attempted to make were the Kadala Curry and Egg Curry after inspiration from Sig. There's a lot of stuff that I make that is so similar to Keralite food. My everyday upkari becomes a thoran in Kerala. I could pass off my proper Iyengar avial as a Keralite dish. But to me these foods are not typical of the only state in southern India that I am not connected to directly. (Being someone from Karnataka and Tamilnadu, I'm married to someone from Andhra Pradesh!) These are foods that I have grown up eating and can hence only think of them as Konkani or Tamil, however similar they may be.

 

Stew is quite another story. I can't remember where I first had it. But I remember licking my lips as I placed in my mouth the last piece of appam soaked with the remnants of the stew in my bowl. And I remember that taste as so distinctly Keralite. I have made this quite often and I used to take it to my uncle after my aunt passed away. It was the last dish I took to him on my way to work. I made this yesterday for the first time since then.

1 cup Coconut Milk

1 tsp Oil

1 cup Mixed Vegetables (Potatoes, Carrots, Beans, Cauliflower and Peas), boiled

1/2 cup Onions, sliced

7-8 Curry Leaves

8-10 Pepper Corns

1 Cardamom Pod (optional)

1" stick Cinnamon

3 Cloves

2 Green Chillies, slit

Salt to taste

Heat the oil and add the curry leaves and onions. Add the cinnamon, cloves, peppercorns (and cardamom, if using) and the green chillies. Fry these for a few minutes. Add the boiled vegetables and the coconut milk along with a little water. Add the salt and mix well. Crush some of the potatoes to thicken the stew. Allow it to thicken and then take off the flame.

I love stew with appams, but figured that it tastes great with rice too. Off this goes to Jyothsna of Curry Bazaar for this month's RCI - Kerala.

Tropical Cupcakes

Sig wins! It is her event after all, but yes, she guessed it right. I did bake a cake. Correction. I baked several mini cakes.

We did a lot of shopping on S's birthday. Apart from things for him and things for me, we bought things for the kitchen and the blog specifically. We got some nice ceramic stuff at throwaway prices and I bought a few just to photograph my food in. We also found muffin pans that fit my microwave. I don't have the luxury of a cooking range in this house and so we bought a microwave-grill-convection-combination oven and I never found muffin pans that fit. So when I found those at the I.N.A. market along with the Appey Kayli (special pan to make Appeys), I went ahead and just bought them.




I modified the Golden Glow Cake recipe to come up with this recipe. I thought of all the tropical flavours that I could pair Litchi with. I decided to use coconut and pineapple as I thought these would go well with the litchi flavour.




I used:

1 cup Flour
2 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 cup Demerara Sugar
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 cup Oil
1 egg
1/4 cup Cocount Milk
1/2 tsp Pineapple Essence
1/4 cup Litchi Juice

Sift all the dry ingredients for the cake together into a food processor jar with the dough blade. Pour in all the liquid ingredients and run the processor for 2 minutes.

Prepare muffin pans by first smearing a little butter all over the cups and then dusting them with flour.

Divide the batter equally between the pans and bake for 15 minutes at 350 F. The cakes are done when a knife or skewer inserted into them comes out clean. Remove the cakes from the tins and cool completely.

Pour a little Litchi Sauce over these cupcakes when you are ready to serve them. They taste divine. I just replaced milk with a combination of coconut milk and litchi juice, the sugar with demerara sugar, the butter with oil and the vanilla essence with pineapple essence. What I was left with was a very 'tropical' cake batter.

We've enjoyed these fresh out of the oven and also after they went cold. I didn't think I could just replace ingredients to suit my preference (or that of Sig's!!). But guess what? I actually could. And the end result was simply divine.

Hopefully, this will be the last dessert I make for some time. Given that we're just two people, and ones who don't need dessert, I will stick to normal healthy food for the next few weeks.

So, this is another entry to the A Fruit A Month (AFAM) event hosted by Sig of Live to Eat.

Paneer in Coconut Milk

I found this recipe in one of Tarla Dalal’s books. I can’t remember which book it was, I can’t remember the name of the recipe, come to think of it, I don’t even actually remember the recipe. The book is at Amma’s place and I make this recipe from memory. It turns out just as nice as I remember it. I add the paneer pieces as they are and don’t fry them first as the recipe calls out.

This dish goes very well with rotis and can be prepared in a matter of minutes if you have the ingredients ready.

Ingredients:

200g Paneer, cubed
200 ml Coconut Milk
1 Onion
1-2 Green Chillies
2 pods of Garlic
1” piece of Ginger
1 tsp Oil
1 tsp Cumin Seeds
¼ tsp Asafoetida
Salt to taste

Grind the onion, green chillies, ginger and garlic together to a paste.

Heat oil, add the cumin seeds and the asafetida. When the cumin seeds crackle, add the onion paste and fry for 2-3 minutes. Add the coconut milk and salt and bring to a boil. Add the paneer cubes and cook for a couple of minutes. Serve hot with rotis.

Rasayan

Here’s another example of a dish that my mother didn’t make. I learnt it from my uncle who passed away last year. He made it with finely chopped jackfruit pieces. I am told that this can be made with banana as well. I, of course, made it with mango. It is a dessert that can made in a jiffy. I decided at the last minute to make it on Saturday. Since I always keep Dabur coconut milk cartons ready, this was ready in a few minutes. S was taken by surprise. Dessert specially made when only the two of us were lunching! (I ran out of jaggery and used brown sugar instead. The dish tasted as nice.)

Ingredients:

1 ripe big Mango
1-2 tbsp Jaggery
1/2 carton Dabur Coconut Milk
¼ tsp Cardamom powder

Chop the mango into small pieces. Add the jaggery and mix it well. Add the coconut milk and the cardamom powder. Mix it thoroughly and chill for an hour before serving. Quite like Aamras, this dish also goes very well with poories. Try it if you're in the mood for it.

This is my entry to WBB #11, hosted by Padmaja of Spicy Andhra.