Oat and Fruit Bars

My little one is obsessed with sticky and chewy sweets. It all started with the Vitamin C supplement that I started to give him. Sometime ago, I handed him a dried apricot and told him it was just like a "sticky sweet". He loved it and asked for more. I then introduced him to raisins, which he enjoyed as well. Then, I got quite excited and bought a whole array of stuff from the dried fruit section. And he soon lost interest.

I wanted to put the stuff to good use. I thought I'd make the jewel blondies again. But since cookies keep better, I decided to look up recipes for dried fruit cookies. I came across this Pillsbury site and decided to try this recipe. I modified the recipe a little and made fruit bars instead of cookies. The next time around I will reduce the sugar in the recipe to maybe 3/4 cup in all.

The end result: bars full of the chewy goodness of oats and dried fruit. This is a keeper recipe and I am sure adding nuts or chocolate/butterscotch chips will work well too.

Ingredients

¾ cup Sugar

¼ cup Brown Sugar

½ cup Butter, softened

½ tsp Vanilla

1 Egg

¾ cup Flour

½ tsp Baking Soda

½ tsp Cinnamon Powder

¼ tsp Salt

1 ½ cups Rolled Oats

1 cup Dried Fruit (I used Apricots, Raisins, Cranberries, Blueberries and Cherries)

Heat the oven to 375 F/190 C. 

Line two cake tins with parchment/baking paper. (I used 9" square tins)

Cream the butter and sugar in a bowl until  fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla beat some more. Add the flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon and mix well.

Add the oats and the dried fruit. Mix together until well blended.

Divide the mixture equally into the two cake tins. Bake for 8-9 minutes.

Remove from the cake tins and allow to cool a little on a rack. Cut into squares while still warm using a sharp knife or a pizza cutter.

Store in an airtight container when completely cool.

These will go into A's snack box next week and maybe I can now safely say goodbye to the store bought cookies/bars.

Eggless Butter Cookies

I have always loved this time of the year. It sort of marks the beginning of the festival season for me.  Janmashtami or Sri Krishna Jayanti is one of the more important festivals in my family. Now that I have a little Krishna of my own, it becomes even more important.

As always, there was some confusion about the dates. I just picked a date that was convenient to me and celebrated the festival. I have never tried making any traditional sweets. I was tempted to try the 7-cup cake, but better sense prevailed. I like the story of little Krishna loving butter and ghee, but I give my story a modern twist. I have believed that if Krishna lived in this day and age, he'd probably have liked chocolate and cookies just as much. So while Krishna must have had his fair share of seedai and murukku from the other households, my naivedyam this year was a plate of eggless butter cookies.

¾ cup(generous) Flour
1/8 tsp Baking Soda
¼ cup Powdered Sugar
1/3 cup Butter

1/2 tsp Vanilla Essence

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C.

Melt the butter. Cream the sugar and the melted butter until well blended.

Sift the flour with the baking soda. Add this to the sugar-butter mixture. Add the vanilla essence. Make a dough and divide into small balls. Flatten each ball onto a cookie sheet and bake for 12-15 minutes.

Srijayanti is celebrated in my father's side of the family today. So, I am not late in wishing you all a very Happy Krishna Jayanti.

 

Eggless Chocolate Almond Cookies

Janmashtami! One of the more important festivals for my family. There seemed to be some confusion with the dates. Apparently, it was to be celebrated on the 13th, but everyone around me at work, was celebrating it on the 14th. Then Amma dropped the bombshell last afternoon. She said some folks were celebrating it next month. So, it didn't seem wrong to celebrate it on the 14th after all.

I didn't have the day off as many people in the city did. I thought a lot about what I wanted to make. Two years ago, I made chocolate chip buns for little Krishna. My philosophy is that had Krishna lived in this day and age, as a child he'd have loved Cadbury's. Along the same line of thought, I decided to make chocolate almond fudge this year. But I changed my mind and decided to bake cookies instead. They turned out absolutely divine and I do hope that Krishna had a bite too. A plate of chocolate almond cokies was my neivedyam this year.

¾ cup(generous) Flour

2 tbsp Cocoa Powder

1/8 tsp Cooking Soda

¼ cup Powdered Sugar

1/3 cup (generous) Ghee (Clarified Butter)

1/2 tsp Vanilla Essence

2 tbsp Almonds, slivered

Cream the sugar and the ghee until well blended.

Sift the flour with the soda. Add this to the sugar-ghee mixture. Add the vanilla essence. Make a dough and divide into small balls. Flatten each ball onto a cookie sheet and sprinkle the almonds on top. Bake for 20 minutes at 180 C.

Allow to cool and enjoy.

Savoury Cookies

We've finally started having a few get togethers at home. On a regular basis. It isn't like we haven't ever thrown a party before. We just haven't thrown as many as we'd have liked to. And we're attempting to change that.

Some of the parties that we hosted earlier were main meal intensive. I've found that those work best when there is little or no alcohol doing the rounds and/or when there are children at the party. A drink to start with, some soup, a couple of starters, a pulao, a dry side dish, a gravy side dish, rotis, dal, salad and dessert.

This formula doesn't work well for every kind of party though. Many of the parties that we attend and host are snack intensive. By dinner time, no one really wants dinner. There's a limit to the amount of namkeen or chips that one can comsume. "Hot snacks to the rescue" I hear you say. But I don't quite like the idea of slaving over the stove. So I make different kinds of baked cutlets/patties. But then again, there's only so many that one can make. I thought that savoury cookies might make a great snack. And the added benefit was the fact that I could make them much ahead of time and just bring them out at the time of the party.

The night that I made these, the plate was empty in no time at all. The first reaction that people had was "butter". I did use butter, but 6 tablespoons of butter that I used in the dough gave me about 60 cookies. So, that's not all bad. Here is the recipe I used (cross between a recipe in the cookie book and Amma's Nankhatai):

1 1/2 cups Flour

1 1/2 tsp Baking Soda

1/4 tsp Salt

6 tbsp Butter

2 tbsp Coriander, chopped

1 tsp Egg Replacer, mixed in 2 tbsp water (Or 1 Egg)

1 tsp Garam Masala

1 tsp Chilli Powder/Paprika

Preheat the oven to 400F.

In a bowl, mix the flour, butter, baking soda, salt, garam masala, chilli powder till the entire mixture resembles bread crumbs. Fold in the egg replacer mixture and the coriander leaves and mix into a soft dough.

Make small balls of this mixture and flatten them on a cookie sheet. Bake for 12-15 minutes.

These are not only great with cocktails, but even with a cup of coffee or tea. A great alternative to sweet biscuits.

Cashew Cookies

Diwali and mithai synonymous with one another. But I don't have much of a sweet tooth. The little bit of sweet tooth that I am blessed with is a mighty picky one. Indian mithai doesn't find its way into the list very often. The occasional kaju katli, rasamalai and kalakand are always welcome, but I prefer the light sweetness of baked goods. Last year, for Diwali, I made these mava cakes. Little baked goodies with the goodness of Indian mithai.

This year, I chose to make some cookies. They had all the flavours that Diwali mithai have and involved no slaving over the stove.

¾ cup(generous) Flour

1/8 tsp Cooking Soda

¼ cup Powdered Sugar

1/3 cup (generous) Ghee (Clarified Butter)

¼ tsp Cardamom (Powdered)

2 tbsp Cashews, powdered

12 Cashew halves to decorate

Cream the sugar and the ghee until well blended.

Sift the flour with the soda. Add this to the sugar-ghee mixture. Add the cardamom and cashew powders. Make a dough and divide into 12 small balls. Flatten each ball onto a cookie sheet. Decorate with the cashew halves and bake for 20 minutes at 180 C.

These cookies, along with some mava cakes and store bought kaju katli, made their way into these personalized gift hampers that we distributed among friends and family this Diwali.

Do check out the blogs of these fellow marathon runners: DK , Siri, Srivalli, Ranji, PJ, Curry Leaf, Medha, Priya, Bhawna, Raaji, Ruchii, Anu, Kamala, Roopa, Divya Kudua, Rekha, Divya M, Lakshmi.

Nankhatai

You know how it is when you have nothing to do and thoughts fly all around inside your head. Some make you think about the future, some remind you of the past. You begin missing someone and then one thing leads to another. This is exactly what happened to me yesterday. I got the day off as it was Mahavir Jayanti. I had absolutely nothing to do all day. I started my day with the mushroom pancake and then sat down to blog about it. I’d made it specifically for the event. So I figured I should blog about it when I have the time and not put it off to when I don’t.

Having done that, I got on the phone and chatted with two women I’ve never met, but would consider myself pretty close to. The first phone call was prompted by something I saw on this girl’s blog. We’ve been chatting online for about 2 months now and apart from the fact that we share the same name, we’ve found that we have so much in common. Since I found one more thing in common (something that you don’t usually notice online), I felt I had to call her. Then I called the next. Both these women have tried to reach out to me when I was extremely busy just to make sure I was OK. I had a really long weekend and I decide to call them both and tell them that I was fine. But I still felt I had to surprise my namesake by showing her what we have in common.

Then Amma called and we chatted for an hour. During that hour, I was transported back to my childhood. We talked about food, my father, my brother, some friends from IIT. That did it. Any talk of IIT Madras gets me extremely nostalgic. I wanted to do something that would make me feel good. Something that would help me get my arms around that imaginary pillow for a feel good hug.

I decided to make nankhatais. My mother makes the best nankhatais that I’ve eaten. She used to make these by the dozen and stack them up at home. I’d never tried to make them. My classmate went to the US a few years ago and then sent me an email asking for the recipe. She said, “Perellam teriyaadu ya, unnnoda Amma dabba dabba va roppi vechiruppa… andha biscuit (I don’t know the name, your mom used to have containers filled with these biscuits.) Amma was shocked when I forwarded that email to her. She said, “I didn’t know that she’d ever eaten them, let alone get nostalgic about them.”

These biscuits call for ghee(clarified butter), something that is always in short supply in our house as I almost never use it. The last time I bought some brand of ghee, it was horrible. That lasted us a year. I bought a much smaller bottle of Britannia ghee. This is really good. Looks, tastes and feels just like home made ghee. I grew up on cow’s milk. So to me, my butter and ghee must be yellow. White just doesn’t make the cut. Since I bought the ghee as recently as three months ago, I had plenty of it.


The recipe also needed powdered sugar. I have bura sugar at home which I always thought was powdered sugar until I tried to bake a cake with it. That cake would probably go down in my “Hall of Shame”. Picture perfect, but horrible tasting. So I decided to powder a little sugar just for this. When I was done powdering the sugar, I couldn’t resist tasting it. That opened the next floodgate of memories. My brother had a classmate whose mother was very close to mine. Their house was on the way back from school for me and so, at times, Amma and I would visit, or I’d even drop in on my own. She would always indulge me. She’d give me freshly made idli or dosa with powdered sugar and for some reason it would taste divine. The same thing at my own place never did taste the same. We lost her a few years ago to cancer. I remember how it took her away, and how she fought it. She was always cheerful. My strongest memory of V Aunty is when she was in remission. I didn’t know then that it was remission. I thought she’d fought cancer and survived. Then she succumbed. She was at the Apollo Cancer hospital right across the street from my office. I’d take lunch for her and for uncle everyday, never knowing, even on the last day, that it would be the last.


It’s funny how all of this is connected and how sometimes everything comes together. I remember when V Aunty and Amma would make batches of nankhatais and V Aunty also suggested making them spicy with chillies and cumin. All these memories came to me yesterday. And I am glad they did. Because, to me, memories are what make life worthwhile.


I made half the original recipe as it was the first time I was making them and they turned out delicious.


¾ cup(generous) Flour
1/8 tsp Cooking Soda
¼ cup Powdered Sugar
1/3 cup (generous) Ghee (Clarified Butter)
¼ tsp Cardamom and Nutmeg (Powdered)

Cream the sugar and the ghee until well blended.

Sift the flour with the soda. Add this to the sugar-ghee mixture. Add the cardamom and nutmeg powders. Make a dough and divide into small balls. Flatten each ball onto a cookie sheet and bake for 20 minutes at 180 C.

Allow to cool and dig in.

These cookies are off to Barbara, who is hosting Livestrong with a taste of yellow, for two reasons. They contain yellow ghee and the memories of a dear friend lost to cancer.

This is also one of those recipes that is distinctly Amma – so representative of her love for food, her love for us and of course, of her showing her love through her food. This is off to this month’s JFI, the theme of which is love. In real time, I also shared these cookies with friends. What good is good food if you can't share it with people who've touched your life?

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I tasted my first chocolate chip cookie in the U.S. I am fairly certain the brand must have been Chips Ahoy. I was hooked from the first bite. I remember that any brand of chocolate chip cookies that we got in India didn't taste quite the same. (I must admit, I don't care for Hide and Seek even now.) I had this habit of getting stuff from my parents in return for the first rank in class. From a watch to a bicycle to a badminton racquet to a new bag... the list was endless. When I graduated from University with the first rank and two gold medals, Amma asked me what I'd like. I asked her for a box of expensive chocolate chip cookies. She bought it for me and I'd planned on savouring each cookie. The box was such a disappointment. Hard cookies with huge chunks of chocolate. Hardly what I'd been fantasising about.

The following year, in Paris, I discovered fantastic cookies at Marks and Spencers. I brought them back for friends, family and myself. I figured that I simply had to make these myself. Last year, I discovered a recipe on the Hershey's site. I had a batch of wonderful cookies. But they were extremely "rich". This recipe isn't as rich. And the cookies are a lot chewier. And the fact that each cookie has a mouthful of chocolate chips is not something I'd complain about.

1/2 cup Unsalted Butter, softened
3/4 cup Whole Wheat Flour or Atta
3/4 cup Flour
1/2 cup Sugar
1 Egg, beaten
1 tsp Vanilla Essence
1 cup Chocolate Chips

Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C).

Beat the sugar and the butter until fluffy and add the essence and the egg and mix well. Fold in the flours and gently stir the chocolate chips in. Grease a cookie sheet and drop spoonfuls of the dough on to the sheet. Leave ample space in between each cookie.

Bake for 10 - 12 minutes. Cool on a wire rack and then store in an air tight container.

I'm sending this plate of these cookies to dear Sig who just celebrated her birthday over the weekend. I meant to post this on Saturday, but I was busy in Chennai with my cousin's wedding. Happy Birthday Sig!

This plate also goes to Meeta as my entry to Meeta's Monthly Mingle. This month's theme is comfort foods. These cookies, along with a glass of milk, is a nice snack. It is one of those foods that help me believe that all is truly well with the world. A warm cookie with a cold glass of milk... aahhh!

Fruit Cookies

One of the books that I picked up recently was The Cookie Book. It has over 300 recipes. I tried a few muffin recipes from this book, but wanted really to make cookies. I think what put me off was the 6 letter word I found in almost each recipe: butter! I finally decided to bring the butter out from the deep freeze and put it to use. I'd promised my team some baked goodies to celebrate a mini milestone. So, I thought, why not??

These chewy cookies are a real treat and considering how many cookies I got (roughly 50), I felt the 1/2 cup butter was understandable. When I see 1/2 cup, I feel like the entire 1/2 cup is going into one cookie and I think that's what puts me off. I modifed the recipe that I found in the basics section of the book. I remembered Anita asking me to try cookies with half and half (flour and wheat)

1/2 cup Unsalted Butter, softened

3/4 cup Whole Wheat Flour or Atta

3/4 cup Flour

1/2 cup Sugar

1 Egg, beaten

1 tsp Vanilla Essence

1 cup Candied Fruit Bits (Papaya, Pineapple, Mango, Apricots)

Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C).

Beat the sugar and the butter until fluffy and add the essence and the egg and mix well. Fold in the flours and gently stir the fruits in.

Grease a cookie sheet and drop spoonfuls of the dough on to the sheet. Leave ample space in between each cookie.

Bake for 10 - 12 minutes. Cool on a wire rack and then store in an air tight container.

Off this goes to Nags of For the Cook in Me who is hosting this month’s A Fruit A Month event. I even bought a raw papaya to make something savoury, but the baker in me took over.