Gobi Masala

Everytime we got gobi home, we would end up making aloo gobi. There was another familiar way of making gobi but it always so happened that we did not have the necessary ingredients for it. This time, after finding the gobi of the optimum size, we made sure that we picked up all the other raw materials for the gobi masala recipe.

You would need:
One medium sized cauliflower- cut into florets.
One Onion- finely chopped
One tomato- finely chopped
Turmeric
Jaggery and salt to taste
Coriander, for garnising
Ghee

For paste:

Cinnamon- one stick
Moggu- One
A fistful of cashewnuts
Jeera, pepper, poppy seeds- one teaspoon each
Red chillies- three to four
Tamarind paste- half teaspoon
Coconut- grated- three tablespoons

Boil cauliflower in salt and turmeric. Close and keep it aside.
Soak the poppy seeds for ten minutes in water.
Grind the paste ingredients into a fine paste.
In a pan, add ghee.
Fry the onions till they turn pink. Now add tomatoes and fry until it becomes mushy.
Add the ground paste and fry until the raw smell in it goes.
Now add some water to obtain gravy consistency.
Add in the cauliflower and add salt to taste.
Jaggery can be added if you like the gravy a little sweet.
Now let all the ingredients come together well by frying it for a few minutes.
Garnish with coriander and serve hot with chapathis/ phulkas

Pasta Exotica!

For starters, there may not be anything exotic about this pasta for people familiar with Italian food. Just that, we visited the local grocer and found that he had a batch of broccoli, red and yellow bell peppers and parsley and celery, all of which come under exotic vegetables category for us cause its not everyday that we buy and cook them.

So when we spotted the vegetables, we picked them all up and the only recipe that came to mind to put all of them to use was, well, our almost staple food- pasta!

Ingredients:

Red and yellow bell peppers- chopped into inch sized pieces
Broccoli - 1 medium sized, split into florets
Garlic- A few pods, finely chopped
Parsley- One small bunch, finely chopped
Pasta of your choice- cooked Al Dente
Milk- one cup
Cheese- two heaped tablespoons
Olive oil- two spoonfuls
Salt and pepper to taste.

Method:

In some olive oil, toss in the chopped garlic and fry for a minute. Add the chopped peppers and fry until they are tender. In parallel, boil the broccoli in water until it is cooked and add it to he peppers. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Now, in a pan, add the cooked pasta, milk, some salt and a spoonful of sugar and bring it to a boil. Stir in the cheese. Now add the cooked vegetables into the pasta and toss it well. Garnish with chopped parsley and serve it hot!

Stir fried veggies

So it has been a while since the last post. Not due to inactivity in the kitchen, but simply because of our laziness. Since we broke from the humdrum and tried something new today, we realised that it should go up in the blog!

After stocking and overloading the fridge with veggies from our shopping trip yesterday, we were spoilt for choice for dinner. So decided to stir up a dish with all possible veggies. It looks really colorful, is healthy and is really easy to make once you do all the chopping ;). So here is the recipe:

What you'd need:

2 carrots, a bunch of beans, 4-6 babycorns, one capsicum - all chopped lengthwise.

One onion, finely sliced

A couple of pods of garlic, crushed

Some salt, pepper and oregano for seasoning

How to go about it:

First, wash and chop all the vegetables. Your job is almost done by now.

All you need to do is blanch the carrots and the babycorn for a couple of minutes along with some salt. Then run it under cold water.

In a skillet, heat 2-3 spoons of olive oil ( its the good kind of oil, nothing wrong in being generous with it :))

Add the crushed garlic and onion and saute it for a minute or two. Add in the capsicum to this. Toss and stir for a minute.

The beans can be added directly in case it is tender. Else, that also goes into the boiling water along with the other vegetables.

Now add in the boiled vegetables. Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir well until all the vegetables are coated with the spices. Top it with a dash of oregano.

Can be eaten directly or along with some rice. We seasoned the rice with saffron and pepper and called it "saffron rice". So dinner for the day- saffron rice with the stir fried vegetables.

Quick dinner: Veggie rolls

On a day when we had the basic vegetables- potato, carrot and capsicum and were out of options and patience to make dinner, we decided to try making rolls. Chapathis are anyway prepared for dinner everyday. So it was just a matter of fixing something for the filling.

Method:

Dice the carrots and potatoes into cubes and pressure cook them until they are just about done and not very soft. Chop the capsicum well. Heat oil in a pan. Throw in some mustard and jeera. Wait until you hear the chata-pata sound. Add a bunch of chopped methi leaves if available. Add the capsicum to this and fry well. Once it is fried, add in the cooked vegetables. Season with salt and coarsely ground pepper-jeera.

You can apply some chutney on the chapathi- mint/ tamarind. Or tomato ketchup bhi chalega. Place this filling in it. Roll up the chapathi. Chitke le ready! MakLu gu ishta aagatte. Try maaDi. Namigu heLi, heng aaithu anta :P

Dinner: Paneer paratha

For the past two days, the milk is for some reason getting curdled at home. Whether it is the problem with the refrigeration at the store or what i don't know. Normally we would have thrown the milk away. But Jyo suggested that rather than crying over the spilled milk, we can make paneer with it;). And we strained the milk for a long time and then froze it. So today, it was time for paneer dish. I remembered the yummy parathas from Mast Kalandar and we decided to give it a try.
It was not just paneer that went into it, we added a good deal of carrot and corn too. In a tablespoon of oil, fry one grated carrot and add to it half a tea spoon of ginger-garlic paste. Once the raw smell of the paste disappears, add to it the corn. We chopped the corn finely given that it was going into the filling. To this, add half a spoon of cumin and coriander powder and fry well. Add the crumbled paneer in the end. Add salt and chilli powder to taste. Top it off with some garam masala and kasuri methi. The end product should resemble paneer bhurji.

The biggest challenge when making paratha is to roll them out and making sure the filling spreads evenly. And it worked for us only when the amount of filling is less. So today, for a change, we rolled two really thin chapathis, spread the filling on one of them and closed it with another chapathi. Sealed the edges with some water and rolled it again to spread the filling uniformly. Had to struggle with the first one, but from then on, it turned out to be easy.
Once done, roast it on a tava, just as a normal chapathi and make sure it is nicely baked on both sides. Apply a generous amount of ghee on either side (It tastes so good that for a day, you can forget about your diet). Serve it hot with some curd and mango pickle. We made a curry out of the remaining corn and carrot and had that also on the side! And trust me, Mast Kalandar is good, but the satisfaction of making one's own paratha and eating it too, is great!

Palak dosa

We decided to make dosa out of Palak, when we saw a bunch of Palak leaves and dosa batter in the fridge.
Ingredients:
->Bunch of Palak
->Dosa batter (Rinse 1/2 cup urad and 1 cup rice in water for about 3 hours, and grind them and leave it overnight)
->Finely chopped onion(1)
->Carrot grated(1)
->Green chillies
->Little oil/Ghee
->Salt!

Preparation:
Cook the Palak leaves and green chillies with very less water and let it cool. After it cools down grind it. Take a spoon of oil/ghee in a pan and fry the onions and carrot.
Add the Palak paste, onions and carrot to the dosa batter and mix well. Add salt to taste

Heat tava, put little ghee so that dosa comes out easily. Spread out a big ladle of batter in an ciruclar manner. You can put little more ghee on dosa if you are not conscious of the calories it adds! Remove it from the tava and serve it hot.
We had the dosa with chutney powder which my mom prepared and it was very nice combination :-)