Tapioca Rice Vadaam

Vadaam is a sun-dried wafer that gets fried into a crispy accompaniment to rice. A century ago, hot tropical countries like India wasn’t blessed with a year-round bounty of vegetables. In the scorching hot summer months of April and May, everything wilts under the merciless eye of the Sun. So, our great grandmothers thought hard and came up with vadaams as tasty, crunchy substitutes for side-dishes that usually require vegetables. Vadaams are Indianized versions of chips that don’t require vegetables to make them. We do make plenty of vegetable chips too, though!

Vadaam is one of several forms of sun-dried food made in India. Some involve drying (and hence preserving) salted vegetables and fruits, while others involve drying out the moisture from starch - such as rice and tapioca. In South India, starchy foods are almost always available aplenty. So, we are adept at subjecting starch to every conceivable form of cooking. We cook them, pound them, grind them, dry them, bake them.... anything else I’m missing?

So, when the temperature soared to the 80s in my little town, I wondered if I should make vadaams too, for if I missed my opportunity this time, I would have to wait for a year to see the sun shining so merrily on us. Ever since this thought crept into my head in July, I planned to start the vadaam-making-process at the dawn of every weekend, but managed to entrap myself with other activities and projects. Finally, a week or so back, I put my foot down and decided that the vadaams shall be made, come hell or high water. I took down the recipe from my eager and enthusiastic mother-in-law, who by the way, is a huge patron of this blog! She is my most faithful reader and marketing agent for this little space - thank you so much, amma! :). Aside that, she is a great cook, who still does everything from first principles - including, vadaam making, thanks to my father-in-law’s knowledge and help.

The recipe she gave me sounded quite simple, so I geared myself and Anand to execute it.

Ingredients:

1. 1 cup of tapioca flour. I ground tapioca pearls in a coffee grinder and repeatedly sifted the coarse flour to get 1 cup of finely ground flour.
2. 7 cups of rice flour.
3. 16 cups of water
4. A huge piece of Hing soaked in warm water (or about 3-4 teaspoons of Hing. It may seem a lot, but Hing is a major flavoring. Besides, hing helps us stomach the starch).
5. 5-6 teaspoons of salt. Salt is always subject to individual preference, but this is a safe estimate, although it might seem like a lot. Remember, salt is a natural preservative.
6. 10 green chillies (or more depending on how spicy you like the vadaams. Our spice intake is mild, so 10 green chillies were just right for the 8 cups of flour).
7. The juice of 3 lemons (or more depending on how juicy the lemons are)
8. Strong arms to stir ;)
9. A few plastic sheets to lay out the wafers in the sun.

Preparing the Dough:

1. Mix the tapioca and rice flour.
2. Bring 16 cups of water to a boil in a deep, heavy bottomed vessel. I added a few spoons of sesame oil to the water to ensure the flour doesn’t stick too much to the bottom of the vessel. But I don’t think the oil made any difference!
3. Grind the green chillies and salt together (coffee grinder works). When the water comes to a boil, add this mixture and Hing, and stir well.
4. Next, slowly add the flour, simultaneously stirring to avoid lumps.
5. Once all the flour is added, reduce the heat to low and keep sirring (strong arms needed) until everything comes together as a glossy mass of dough. This was too much dough for me to successfully stir. So, Anand, grudgingly helped out :). (note to vadaam novices, start with half the measures)
6. Finally, switch off the heat. Add the juice of the three lemons and mix again.

Preparing the vadaams

1. Lay a few plastic sheets out in the sun. You can also use aluminium foil or wax paper - you basically need a material that won’t stick to the moist dough. Place paper weights, stones or bricks on the corners to avoid everything from taking off.
2. You need some kind of a press, with a hole at the bottom to squeeze out the dough to form patterns. We use a traditional murukku or thenguzhal press which looks like the bottom-right picture:

Moist vadaams on the left, dried vadaams on the right

One fills the lower part with the dough and then pushes down the lever-like press on top of the dough-filled part, and out comes the dough in a pattern that matches the template that has been fitted at the bottom of the press. We went with the “star - *” template - the wrong one for this kind of wafer apparently! But if you do decide to use this, squeeze out the dough in the form of short straight lines. The resulting shape will be like a squiggly line with little thorns sticking out - like a thin cactus. The right template to use is the one which has a bunch of concentric holes. Move/rotate the entire contraption as you press down on the lever, to form complex spirals of dough like the one in the picture.

Several such spirals will spew out from the numerous holes in the template. The vadaams will not expand in the heat, so you can squeeze out several such shapes close to each other. Refill the press with dough, press, draw squiggly spirals, and repeat. This is a tiring process. But it speeds up if you have handy-dandy helpers like Anand, who has actually done all this as a kid. He even used to sit and guard against crows and squirrels from tasting and devouring the vadaams. So, we took turns and finished forming the vadaams on the plastic sheet.

Typically, vadaams are left to dry and bake in the sun for about 8-10 hours everyday, for roughly 4 days, and sometimes even as long as a week. When the sun goes down, the sheets of vadaams are brought indoors, and if there is rain, they are left to dry under a fan...although fans are never effective and are just mitigating agents making sure the vadaams are not moist enough to go bad in the heat.

As per Murphy’s Law, the sun decided to hide behind the clouds when we finished squeezing out the vadaams. Within a couple of hours, it threatened to rain, and it did rain! Apparently I should have checked the weather more diligently before starting a full-blown ambitious project that is dependent on the weather! As Anand cursed and grumbled at me, I hit upon a rather obvious alternative - the oven! Sun gives heat, the oven gives heat too, right? So I tested one batch at 170 F in the oven (170 is the minimum temperature setting my oven allows - it corresponds to the “Warm” setting). I basically simulated the intensity of the Sun when it lashes over the Sahara desert in peak summer. The vadaams baked at this setting for 10 hours and they dried to a crisp, or so we thought. But I think the outsides baked faster than the insides. So I left the second batch in the oven for 10 hours at 170 F, and for 8 hours with the oven light on and the heat turned off.

This does go against the principle of energy conservation. But the weather decided to be murky the entire week, leaving me no choice. You will know the vadaams are fully dried if they are brittle and have no trace of white dough or moisture in them.


Frying
This is an easy enough step. Heat vegetable oil. When hot, drop in the vadaams and gently move it around encouraging it to expand. Do not wait till the vadaam turns golden-brown. Take them out when they have fully expanded in the oil and continue remaining creamish/off-white in color. Vadaams take just a few seconds to expand and fry in hot oil. So they are very quick to prepare. Make sure to reduce the heat of the oil after a few minutes of frying, for overheated oil makes burned, unevenly fried vadaams. My fried vadaams couldn’t retain their spiral shape because as they expanded in the heat, the tight, thorny spirals broke, resulting in pieces of fried vadaams. All because I used the wrong template on the press! They tasted good, so it was thankfully not a futile venture.

In principle, vadaams are easy to make. But keep in mind constraints like the weather and the other mistakes I did, and you will end up with a blunder-free experience!

Ulundu Vadai / Medu Vadai / Urad Dhal Vadai

Continuing with the Festive theme, the prescribed savory item that signifies celebrations and festivals is the Ulundhu Vadai. Vadais are crispy, deep fried, crunchiliciousness made of Blackgram Dhal, also known as Urad Dhal. These days, it’s much easier and time saving to buy the de-husked version of the pulses than go through the minor hassle of peeling and separating the husk after soaking the pulses in water. But the farther one starts from first principles, the better the output will be!

This kind of vadai is extremely easy to prepare, and is both mine and Anand’s favorites. The only catch is in forming the vadai and dropping it safely into the oil.

 
Ingredients

1. 1 cup of de-husked black gram dhal (urad dhal)
2. 2-3 dried red chillies
3. ½ teaspoon of Hing
4. Salt to taste
5. A few curry leaves
6. 1 teaspoon of ghee (optional)
7. Vegetable oil to fry - 2-3 cups

Preparation

1. Soak the urad dhal in water, for 1 hour
2. Drain the water and grind the dhal to a relatively smooth paste with the red chillies, hing, salt, and curry leaves, adding as little water as possible. My mother keeps stressing on adding as little water as possible.
3. Both mother and mother-in-law recommend mixing the resultant batter with a teaspoon of ghee. Ghee makes everything taste better!
4. Heat oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. Test if the oil is hot enough by dropping a pea sized amount of batter. If the batter sizzles and begins to fry immediately, the oil is hot enough.

Forming the Vadai

Urad dhal batter is generally sticky and mushy. It’s not greasy, but it likes to adhere to your hands, making it hard to form the vadai with your hands. So keep a bowl of water nearby to wet your fingers periodically - before and after touching the batter. Secondly, this kind of vadai requires a dainty hole in the middle (like a smaller donut) to ensure even cooking of the batter. Else the outside of the batter crisps up faster, leaving the insides uncooked and mushy. Not pleasant. So, traditionally, a wet banana leaf was used by women to dump a small ball of batter onto it, after which the batter was flattened out (with wet fingers), and a hole was made in the center. Then, after wetting one’s fingers again, the flattened batter was carefully removed from the leaf (by usually inverting the leaf) and gently transferred to the hot oil. Care must be taken to retain the hole, so that the vadai cooks evenly. If the batter was ground with too much water, it makes it much harder to gather slippery batter from the leaf.

These days, in lieu of banana leaves, we use pliant plastic sheets - one way to recycle/reuse the tonnes of plastic wrapping and covers we amass.

Form vadais on the plastic sheet/banana leaf and gently transfer them into the hot oil. Do not splash the batter into the oil, for the little bit of water in it can decide to dangerously splutter. Once the oil is hot, reduce the heat to medium/medium-high, else you risk burning the vadais outside. Turn the vadais gently until both sides cook/fry to a pleasant golden color and transfer them onto paper napkins to drain excess oil.

It is an art to form the vadais. One needs some relentless practice to from even shaped, perfectly formed vadais, so give yourself a pat on the back if you have come close enough to retain the elusive hole in the vadai! I have also come to confirm my mother’s theory that left over batter that sits in the fridge makes exceedingly crisp and wonderful vadais the next day! Of course, it is also accused of drinking a bit much oil in its post-refrigerated state, but the taste and crispiness makes one forget such trivialities :)

Variations:

Hotels add a teaspoon of baking soda to the batter to plump up the vadais. But home-made, conventional ones don’t have this ingredient.

Some people add a few spoons of raw rice to the soaking dhal, because ground rice makes the vadais even crispier. But again, the traditional ones skip the rice.

Finally, one can get creative and add finely chopped vegetables such as onions, carrots, spinach, ginger, etc. to the batter to give the vadais more crunch, texture and flavor.

Paruppu (Dhal) Paayasam

It’s been a while since my whirlwind of posts. I always seem to work in batches and alternate between the binary states of 0 and 1 :).  To dust up this space, here is a “festive” post.

The Hindu lunar calendar recently entered a very busy phase. It is choked with festivals until the month of Marghazhi (i.e. December). In India (or rather South India), this is the time when Saree and Apparel stores advertise a million sales and tantalize the customers with attractive new designs. Oh, I miss the colorful advertisements! Every cook and sweet shop is busy preparing truckloads (yes) of favorite sweets and innovative ones that mark the occasions. From now on till Diwali, every other week will have some festival knocking on our door!

Yesterday was Krishna Jayanthi, Lord Krishna’s birthday. Lord Krishna’s fables make him an endearing God. He is supposed to have loved butter and sweets, so on his birthday, we prepare butter-rich delicacies for him. Cheedai, fried balls of rice flour and butter, is one such offering. But, as I have been warned, one needs guidance and supervision before embarking on a cheedai-making project, for cheedais are known to splutter and pop when dropped into hot oil, and have caused many unfortunate accidents. Hot oil within 10 meters of my presence is a constant source of concern for everybody, so I didn’t venture into trying cheedais. But, as mentioned before, any festival can be satisfactorily celebrated if one makes one sweet and one savory offering. One such common and widely accepted sweet is - Paayasam (sweet porridge), and a hugely popular savory item is - Vadai (deep fried patties of black gram batter).

There are many types of Paayasams, of course. But one of the most popular ones is - Channa Dhal Paayasam. You can’t come out of a wedding in our community without being served this kind of Paayasam. It is blasphemy otherwise!

I followed Meenakshi ammal’s recipe this time. It is slightly different from my mother’s and mother-in-law’s recipes, but I found it much simpler!

Ingredients

1. ¾ cup of channa dhal
2. 1 cup of sugar
3. 2 cups of milk
4. 2 teaspoons of ghee - you can’t skip this, or you’ll be offending Krishna!
5. a few broken cashews
6. a few raisins
7. a sprinkle of saffron
8. 2 teaspoons of cardamom powder

Procedure

1. Dry roast the channa dhal until it gains a bit of color. Immediately remove from heat, and soak in water for about 1-2 hours.
2. Drain the water from the soaked dhal and grind it to a paste, with as little water as possible.
3. Transfer the paste into a heavy bottomed pan. Add 2 cups of water to it.
4. Constantly stir on medium heat until the raw scent of dhal subsides. Take care to not let the paste stick to the bottom of the pan, or form any lumps
5. After about 5 minutes, add 1 cup of sugar and continue stirring constantly till the sugar is fully incorporated.
6. 5 minutes later, add 2 cups of milk and continue stirring. You may reduce the heat to low at this point. Keep stirring till everything comes to a boil.
7. Add this point, add a few strands of saffron, and cardamom powder (If you happen to have edible camphor, throw in a tiny bit of it). Stir till the saffron brings out its lovely sunset hues.
8. Fry the cashews and raisins in ghee till they turn golden brown and plump respectively. This garnish is what gives the Paayasam its unmistakable taste and scent!
9. Add the garnish of cashews and raisins to the porridge, and remove from heat.

That’s it! My mother usually adds jaggery instead of sugar, and cooks the dhal instead of grinding it. But cooking the dhal involves using the dicey pressure cooker which sometimes decides blow up, so I found this much easier. Besides, this is how I remember Paayasams being served at weddings.

The Paayasam tends to get thicker with time, so diluting it with a bit of milk and reheating it up to two days won’t hurt. A hint of this Paayasam is served at the beginning of every festive meal - a teasing teaspoon full of it finds it way to the bottom right corner of the plate (or traditional plantain leaf). It is to symbolically start the event/meal with a sweet, happy note. But in Brahmin meals, Paayasam is not had as a dessert at the end of the meal, but during the middle of the meal. After the second course, you will be served with several ladles of this sweet concoction that will decide to wildly run around the plate (or worse, the plantain leaf) and it is an art to scoop it with your palm and fingers and slurp it down! I can never do this. I will fascinatingly watch everyone around me casually make a swift nimble movement with their fingers to tame the Paayasam within their palm and relish it down, while mine will dribble down my arms (embarrassingly) or slither down my leaf, as I request to have a cup of it after meals. I am always reminded of the Panchatantra tale of the fox and the stork during these innumerable events. A fox invites a stork to dinner and serves food on a plate, in a manner that the poor stork can’t fathom to eat with his sharp bill. Hence to teach the fox a lesson, the stork invites the fox to dinner and serves him food in a tall jug from which the stork can easily pick out his dinner, thanks to his long and sharp bill, but the fox will morosely repent his mistake. Not that I intend to teach anyone a lesson! This is a nuanced way of eating/drinking that I unfortunately never learned, but I always feel out of place and very much like the stork as I attempt to gather the Paayasam with my thin, unyielding fingers :)

Lemon Rice

Lemon rice is  nothing but lemon-flavored rice! As easy as that. It’s again one of the most popular quick-fixes we South Indians rely on. Is there an outing? A long train journey? Lemon rice will surely be one of your trusted companions to keep your tummy happy. It is as tasty as it is simple. Anyone can do this! 

Ingredients:

1. 1.5 cups of raw rice
2. 2.5 big lemons (This is an approximate that mostly works well. The tartness of the lemons vary widely, so it’s up to your preference to either increase of decrease the quantity, although I wouldn’t advise decreasing it.)
3. 1 teaspoon of bengal gram dhal or channa dhal
4. 1 teaspoon of split urad dhal / split black gram
5. 1 teaspoon of black mustard seeds
6. 1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon of Hing
7. 1 Teaspoon of Turmeric
8. 1-2 dry red chillies
9. 2 green chillies, finely diced
10. A few curry leaves
11. Some coriander leaves
12. Salt to taste - about 1.5 teaspoons
13. Two tablespoons of vegetable oil/Olive oil

Preparation:

1. Cook the 2 cups of rice (the rice:water ratio depends on the type of rice, but it is usually 2 cups of water for 1 cup of rice, if you like your rice to be firm and al dente, else it is 2.5-3 cups of water per cup of rice)
2. Squeeze the juice out of the lemons. Add salt and turmeric powder to the juice.
3. In a deep vessel, heat the oil. Once the oil heats, splutter the mustard seeds. Following which, add the channa dhal, urad dhal, red chillies, green chillies, curry leaves, and Hing and saute for a bit. Once the pulses begin to brown a bit, turn off the heat. This is basically the seasoning.
4. When the rice is cooked, fluff it with a fork to make it light and fluffy. Mix the rice with the prepared seasoning.
5. Then, slowly add the lemon juice mixture to the rice, and mix the rice with all the juice. Check for salt, and tartness. Add more salt or lemon juice as per your taste.
6. Garnish with coriander leaves.
7. Let the lemon rice rest for at least 30 minutes before serving, so that the flavors meld. Serve with papad, chips, or vadams (basically anything crispy)

That’s it! There are a few variations to these basic steps. Some people toast cashews and raisins to make the rice more rich and flavorful. Some others mix the lemon juice and turmeric along with the seasoning, and then add the rice. Having tried all these variations, I can say that the taste remains just the same. One thing I perceived is that the lemons in the US are not as tart and sharp as the little Indian ones. So, I always find myself wanting more lemons than present. I’ve never tried making this with limes though... perhaps that will make a difference!

Bread Upma

Bread Upma? What happened to Rava Upma, Semia Upma, and other upmas endorsed by and perfected by Meenakshi Ammal and the rest, you ask. Good question. Although it seems like I often stray away from the aforementioned project (and book), I have been diligently trying out her recipes. I have a huge backlog of recipes/stories/dishes to post, but they are a little involved and require the most elusive ingredient of all - time. And right now, too many things are going on. So I am utilizing my lunch break to type out the simpler posts.

Bread upma is basically a quick-fix. Every South-Indian resorts to this when a meal needs to materialize within 15 minutes. It doesn’t involve roasting the rava/semia/bread or time to properly cook it, and hence becomes a tad more easier to make.

Upma presents itself as an empty canvas. You can add your own spices, seasoning, and vegetables once you understand the fundamental formula. Actually, every dish is like that. Once you connect with the basic principles, you’ll find plenty of room to innovate and adapt. But the core remains the same. So, it’s essential that one understands and masters the core.

Ingredients

1. 7 slices of bread (any kind of bread. Whole wheat, multi-grained is a healthy choice). Remove the crust, and cut the bread into bite-sized pieces. 7 slices may seem like a lot, but bread reduces in size as it touches heat, oil, and the spices.
2. 1 medium-sized onion, finely diced
3. 2 tomatoes, diced
4. ½ cup of carrots
5. 1 cup of mixed vegetables, such as beans, corn, any other left over vegetable (I usually have a bag of mixed vegetables in the freezer for such quick fixes)
6. 2 green chillies, finely sliced
7. 1 teaspoon of finely diced ginger
8. 1 teaspoon of mustard seeds
9. 1 teaspoon of jeera (cumin) seeds
10. 1 teaspoon of turmeric powder
11. 1/4 teaspoon of Hing
12. 2 teaspoons of curry powder (any spicy powder of your choice)
13. 2 tablespoons of vegetable/olive oil
14. Salt to taste
15. Coriander leaves for garnishing
16. A slice of lemon for garnishing

Preparation

1. In a pan, heat the oil. When oil is heated, splutter the mustard seeds. Then add the cumin seeds, chillies, ginger, turmeric powder, and Hing, and saute a bit.
2. Next, add the onions and saute till it becomes translucent or golden brown. Some people don’t like their onions well roasted, so it depends on your choice.
3. Add the tomatoes and saute till it becomes soft.
4. Now dump all the remaining vegetables and stir them all together.
5. Add salt, and curry powder. Saute till the vegetables are evenly coated with the spices.
6. Pour ½ cup of water, close the lid on the pan, and wait for it to come to a boil. Once the water comes to a boil, check whether the vegetables are cooked. Else, cook for a little while with the lid closed. Make sure all the water is evaporated. (The more finely chopped the vegetables, the faster they cook).
7. Once the vegetables are cooked, add the bread pieces. Reduce the heat to low, and gently mix the bread in the vegetable curry until all the pieces are evenly incorporated with the spices. The bread tends to soak up all the oil and turn mushy, so take care not to vigorously stir - you will then end up with bread paste. You may add a little more oil to fry/roast the bread before adding it to the vegetable mix. But I prefer to keep oil to a minimum.
8. Once the bread is mixed, turn off the heat. Garnish with a liberal bunch of cut coriander leaves, and the juice of half a lemon.
9. Serve with a side of spicy pickle or cooling yogurt.

Lemon juice actually spruces up all the flavors of a dish. I never used to add lemon juice at the end of most dishes, for I feared the dish would be overpowered by the intense lemon flavor. But, trust me, a small amount of lemon juice amplifies the flavors of the dish, and doesn’t stand out as being tart and lemony.

Chocolate Espresso Cheesecake

So, finally, here is the cake that was baked for Anand’s birthday this year. Having never tried a cheesecake before, I bravely ventured into it and tried Ina Garten’s Chocolate Espresso Cheesecake. To date, this is the most sinfully delicious cake I’ve ever baked! I couldn’t bring myself to stop licking the cake batter off the sides of the dish :). It was so fantastic that I wanted to cry.

The cake’s crust is graham crackers + butter + cinnamon. The filling is a whole lot of cream cheese + melted chocolate + coffee + sour cream + vanilla + almond extracts + baking soda, powder and salt. And the topping is chocolate ganache. Can it be more chocolatey? Highly rich, sinfully decadent. I loved the mocha flavor. But thank God there were about 13 of us to share all the calories and be content with a small slice of the cake :). 

 

Lessons Learned:
I did learn a few lessons though. I was surprisingly not daunted by making a cheescake, for I trusted Ina and her recipes so completely and blindly! I followed every step carefully, but still forgot to add ½ teaspoon of Kosher salt. I don’t think it dramatically changed the cake. But, what did happen was - the top of the cake cracked a lot. Apparently, this is a common problem with cheesecakes due to uneven heating of the pan. So I’m guessing my spring-form pan wasn’t that great. But to avoid such cracking, experts advise that the cheesecake be baked in a tray of lukewarm water to ensure even cooking. It’s called a water bath. I was so disappointed that Ina missed out this crucial step, and couldn’t stop sighing at how perfect her cake was in comparison to mine! But oh well, next time I’ll try the water-bath. And perhaps place the pan on the second rack in the oven - a little away from the heat. Due to the cracking, I had to add the chocolate ganache on top. I was initially thinking of eliminating this extra dose of chocolate, but the cracking forced me to cover it all up with yummy chocolate.

Secondly, I didn’t particularly care for the cinnamon in the crust. I just wanted chocolate and coffee flavors, and the cinnamon was distracting. I would skip the cinnamon the next time. But on the whole, this is a great recipe!

Jeera Cheddar Cookies

As a child, I used to love the melt-in-your-mouth butter biscuits. Later, I grew up and butter-biscuits grew out of my reach, but its cousin, jeera biscuits, became my favorite. Good for me, Anand loves it too, and always asks for them. So I always look for an opportunity to make them, with slight variations here and there.

This time, I tried this alluring recipe to make shortbread jeera cookies. I’ve tried both the fruity and savory versions of the shortbread cookies twice, and they have come out really well both times - especially the orange cookies - yum! The only minor changes I made to the savory version were - I skipped the thyme, added shredded cheddar instead of Parmesan cheese, and went heavy on the jeera - I added about 3 teaspoons. The thyme does add a nice aroma to the cookies, though.

It seems like this blog is more about recording recipes from a ton of sources, than coming up with innovative recipes of my own! It’s turning into a tribute to all these wonderful sources! Oh well, I’ll need more time to experiment a little more. Since most of the dishes I make are usually to entertain or to whip up something within a constrained time period, I really don’t feel like experimenting anything in that frenzied state.

Anyway, the recipe is quite perfect. It results in cookies that are crumbly, cheesy and cumin-y! The best part is, it envelops the whole house with the lovely aroma of butter and toasted cumin!

Almond Kulfi

In my tradition, a person has two birthdays per year. In addition to having a zodiac sign, Indians have a lunar sign based on the star that’s present during the time of one’s birth. So we get to celebrate two birth-dates! One is based on the Solar calendar, and the other is based on the lunar calendar that predicts when our  particular “star” rises. You can imagine how much fun this is for kids! They get goodies and wishes on two days!

Since we pay more importance to the lunar calendar, the star birthday is special. So, for Anand’s star birthday, I decided to make Kulfi! Since I now own popsicle molds, I was excited and eager to try Kulfi. While Anand is a huge fan of ice creams, I am not really one. Kulfi is the only exception. And it had been ages since I had one. When I was young, rare trips to Marina beach usually ended with Kulfis. As my cousin and I competed with each other on who would eat the Kulfi the slowest (so that the winner can taunt the loser!), it would melt and drip onto our clothes and muddied slippers, much to the rage of our moms. The smell of Kulfi stained clothes, the salty beach, and the feeling of gritty sea-smelling mud transports me back to a small fragment of my childhood. So, there were so many reasons to learn to make Kulfis.

Kulfi is basically condensed milk/cream, sugar, and nuts that get frozen into popsicles. It can even be refrigerated and relished as a rich creamy dessert like rasmalai. I personally prefer the latter version to the former. No matter which version, kulfis are as delicious as they are fattening!

 
I followed the recipe from here, and the resultant Kulfis were fabulous! The only minor change was that I used almonds instead of pistachios. The recipe clearly explains every single step, and I precisely ended up with 6 Kulfis! So if you follow the measurements, you can’t go wrong! It’s extremely easy!

Oatmeal Raisin Bread

One of the rituals that marks weekend-life these days is a Potluck. It has somehow become unacceptable if a Friday evening or Saturday evening is spent at home with a relaxing movie, or book, or just conversations. Weekends simply cannot end without socializing - that’s the unsaid rule :). So, almost every Friday evening, I find myself peering inside the pantry and the fridge, wondering what to make. This time, I leafed through William Sonoma’s Baking Book to find some inspiration, and came across a simple recipe for an Oatmeal Raisin Bread. But I had to tailor the recipe to fit the ingredients sitting in my pantry. So, here is my adapted version of the recipe.

Ingredients

1. 1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
2. 1 cup oats
3. ¾ cup raisins (I used golden raisins, for that’s what I had)
4. ¾ cup brown sugar (you can substitute this with regular white sugar as well, but since brown sugar has molasses, it gives a rich jaggery-like flavor)
5. 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
6. 1 teaspoon baking soda
7. ½ teaspoon salt
8. 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon
9. 1 teaspoon of ground nutmeg
10. ½ teaspoon of ground clove
11. 1 teaspoon of ground cardamom
12. ½ teaspoon ground allspice
13. 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
14. 2 Tablespoons of flax seed
15. ⅓ cup vegetable oil
16. ¾ cup unsweetened applesauce (if you don’t have applesauce, it’s easy enough to make it with apples)
17. ¾ cup buttermilk (or ½ cup of yogurt)

Preparation

Making applesauce:

1 medium sized apple yields about ½ cup of sauce. So for ¾ cup of applesauce, you’d need 2 apples. It’s not necessary to be overly precise about this. The more applesauce, the more moist the cake would be. Since I had no eggs, I had to add yogurt, applesauce, and flax seeds to make the bread relatively light and moist.

Peel, core, and dice the apples. Transfer them to a saucepan with ½ cup of water, and cook well on medium-high heat till the apples can be mashed. It takes about 40 minutes for the apples to cook well. I’m not a big fan of using the microwave to cook for prolonged periods of time, so I avoid it.  A pressure-cooker will be ideal for this. The mashed apples = applesauce. 

 
Preparing the bread:

1. In a deep bowl, mix together the flour, oats, raisins, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove, and cardamom. If you’re not a fan of these spices, you can skip them. But I love these spices. They infuse so much flavor to the oats and the bread. Besides, I find every chance to finish these spices that seem to be residing in the pantry forever.
2. In a separate bowl, mix two tablespoons of ground flax seed with 6 tablespoons of warm water, and whisk well. Microwave this for 30 seconds and whisk it vigorously till it becomes sticky and frothy. Let it cool.
3. Make a “well” in the centre of the dry ingredients. Into this centre, pour the oil, yogurt, applesauce, vanilla essence, and the whisked flax seed concoction.
4. Slowly combine the wet and dry ingredients, and mix just until evenly combined. Do not over-mix, or vigorously stir. Doing so will make your bread dense.
5. Grease a 9 by 5 inch loaf pan, and spoon out the batter into it. The batter will be thick, so not to worry.
6. Bake for 30-40 minutes (or till a cake-tester comes clean) at 350 F.
7. Wait for the bread to cool, run a knife around the edges of the pan and gently tilt out the bread.

Since this bread has oatmeal, raisin, and flax seed, it is an ideal breakfast item. I would even call this reasonably “healthy” since it uses very little oil. Two slices of this bread fill you up well. As a dessert, it goes well with ice-cream. What doesn’t go well with ice-cream? ;)