Enjoy these wonderful tutti frutti cookies(Karachi biscuits) this holiday season!
This recipe is from this popular blog(link given below) which is my goto blog for baking. She has so many foolproof and wonderful recipes and I love how she explains things so thoroughly. Do try!
Happy holidays!!
One of the very simple yet rich tasting pulavs I fell in love with instantly when I tasted it at my friends place. InstaPot makes it even more simple. Do try!
Craving for sweets - try this healthy halwa.
This is a sugar free healthy dessert. Add sugar if you want to cater to kids as they are not at an age to appreciate sugar free desserts yet.
As the blogger suggests, this recipe is very forgiving. It can hardly go wrong. I added too much ghee and to compensate I added couple of teaspoons of almond flour, and it complimented the halwa very nicely.
It is tasty as it is! But the blogger served this with ice cream. I love that combination! Do try this holiday season and enjoy some guilt free dessert!
Nothing beats winter blues like comfort food like aloo gobhi..
This recipe is supposedly Dhaba style. Here aloo and gobi is shallow fried before making the curry. I was not doing this before. I loved the fried taste of aloo and gobhi.
After the first-try-success(which rarely happens in my case) of badam Katli in InstaPot, I braved to try another similar recipe from the same blog - Milk barfi.
Since this is the first time I am eating this barfi, I have no clue how it should taste. I was expecting it to taste more like doodh peda, but it tasted more raw, in the sense one can easily tell there is milk powder in it. But it was tasty nevertheless. A generous pinch of cardamom powder will definitely enhance the flavor. One cool thing about this barfi is that the texture changes drastically as the barfi cools down. So this is not exactly make-and-eat-directly kind of sweet, you need to give this a good resting time.
I have seen a similar recipe on YouTube which was made on stovetop, which looks very easy, but one cannot beat the convenience of IP in making sugar syrup.
Overall a very easy and tasty recipe. Do try this for Deepavali and enjoy!
With dipping temperatures, what better to have than hot pakoda with some hot filter coffee..
Pakodas are always hit and miss with me. Either they turn out PERFECT or they become rubbery/ elastic after cooling down.. I have no idea why..
But over the years, after many many experiments, I seem to have gotten some grip over this. Please check below for more details..
Enjoy!
One major change that happened in our household in the last two years is the increased consumption of root vegetables. It all started during lockdown when I started sending my husband for grocery shopping instead of going myself, instructing him to buy vegetables with longer shelf life. And ever since it has only been beetroots, radishes, potatoes and onions in our house. How much of only these can one have. He doesn’t like carrots, so I’m spared there. Even after telling him again and again to get some variety, he somehow manages to bring only these.. if this is his way of getting away from doing chores, it’s working!! I tag along these days and make sure he is not even around vegetables when I’m shopping.
Coming to the recipe, I was intrigued when I saw this recipe for Mooli fried rice in another one of my fav blogs. And since I always have lots of mooli in the house(thanks to hubby), I gave it a try. The taste was very unique and moolangi complimented the Indo Chinese taste soo well! And one cannot guess there is moolangi in this dish. Perfect for sneaking in vegetable for picky eaters.
Do try!
Happy Ganesha Chaturthi!
Usli is a popular “prasada” at temples and made during festivals. It is basically cooked beans/legumes + spiced oggarane(tadka). I personally love them all, the one made with kadle(brown chickpeas) is my favorite.
This also makes for a great after school snack. Do try!
Both my husband and my daughter love poha chivda. Many buy it from grocery stores, without realizing how easy it is to make this at home. This recipe is as complicated as making tadka :)
Chivda has a pretty good shelf life too, making it ideal for after school snacks, or evening snacks with coffee/tea.
Do try!
Happy Janmashtami!!
We also make kayi sasive chitranna, but differently. This masala uses green chilies and the ingredients are roasted before grinding. I really loved the flavors and the convenience of making this. You can keep the gojju(masala paste) ready beforehand and mix it with rice (just like puliyogare gojju) whenever needed. This is ideal for festivals. Enjoy!
This is one of my favorite tambLis. I love the flavor and color of this particular tambli. To recap (for people who don’t know what tambLi is) - tambli is a buttermilk based south indian dish, which is both cooling and medicinal. You can find other tambLi recipes here.
Enjoy spinach tambLi in these hot summer days to beat the heat.
Making Pav bread from scratch for pav bhaji or vada pav is a tedious process compared to the convenience of buying it from stores. But let me point out the advantages - by making it at home, you can go as healthy as you like. Like instead of adding all maida, I made it half maida and half wheat flour. These taste extremely fresh. The short shelf life of homemade(fresh) stuff makes you wonder the the kind of preservatives that are added to the store bought stuff to keep them fresh for more than 2 weeks, sometimes even a month!!!!
And for convenience sake, you can always make it a day before. Lastly the house smells divine after baking bread!
Try these next time and eat away happily! Enjoy!
Continuing with another Italian favorite of our family - garlic bread sticks. My daughter wanted me to recreate olive garden menu for her birthday, and I had made eggplant parmigiana, breadsticks, minestrone soup and pasta. The link for each can be found here -
Coming to the recipe - Breadsticks are nothing but bread in different shape… may be little less fluffy. Prepare the dough, after proofing, shape them in the form of breadsticks. Once they are done baking, brush them with garlic butter. That’s it! Make sure to brush butter generously though, I didn’t as seen in the picture below.
I followed this recipe online while looking for Olive Garden breadsticks and was very happy with the results(link given below).
Enjoy!
Last year, my daughter asked me to recreate olive garden’s eggplant parmigiana for her birthday.
The recipe is not hard to guess, but I still googled to see if there is anything fancy. I found one in olive garden’s own website(I think) and it was just as easy as I thought it would be. I replaced their egg dip, with maida dip. And it turned out the same. But frying eggplant took forever! Then I found this recipe(link given below) for airfryer. Since I don’t own an airfryer, I did half frying on stove top and remaining in the oven. My friend Ashwini helped me by giving me tips on how to get the airfried effect from the conventional oven.
If you own an airfryer, I think making this would be extremely easy. I am still debating if I should just buy one. I see all drool worthy recipes online, but don’t know how much it'll help with my style of cooking. Don’t want to use up my counter space unnecessarily. Anyways, for those who own one, this is the method mentioned in the blog - After the patties are coated well and ready to be fried, line them on the airfryer tray without crowding them and bake at 390 F for 10 min. Turn them mid point. Once done, put the toppings and bake them again until cheese melts. For more details you can follow the link below.
Enjoy!
Akki rotti is one of the most popular breakfast items in a Kannadiga’s household. It is basically rotti(flatbread) made out of rice(flour).
I like crunchy yet soft texture in akki rottis. Initially my akki rottis were turning out chewy rather than soft. Later in one of the recipes I found online for ragi rotti, I got to know about usage of avalakki(poha) which gave the desired results. Recipe for ragi rotti can be found here - ragi rotti.
Enjoy these with some butter and coconut chutney!
If you are craving for some cake and want it instantly, and don’t want to get into the hassle of baking a whole cake + wait for an hour or so for it to bake + then clean up after it’s done, then you should try mug cakes. These are so easy and they get done in 3-5 min max, then all you have to clean up is just 1 coffee mug!!!
Mug cakes recipes have been circulating around in the net for many years now. For those who don’t know what it is - it is basically a single portion cake that you cook(bake) in the microwave in a coffee mug!
But what’s special about this particular mug cake recipe is that it uses ragi.. RAGI!
My kid who doesn’t like anything made out of ragi, loved this.
This cake doesn’t taste like regular cake, you CAN taste ragi in it. This tastes like some exotic version of dark chocolate cake. If you are a dark chocolate lover like my kid, you will definitely love this.
Do try this for Mother’s day this weekend and enjoy it guilt free!
Happy Mother’s day!
Generally thepla recipes I see online have wheat flour and besan as main ingredients. This recipe uses bajra flour. I just loved the flavor of it. And bajra is healthy too. Lauki makes it more tasty and more healthy. Do try!
Happy Ugadi! May all of you have a blessed year!
We celebrate Souramana Ugadi and not Chandramana Ugadi. But in our house there is only one way of celebrating, so it doesn’t matter which one we celebrate.. because the only way we celebrate any Hindu festival is prepare special food and then eat. I keep it in front of God, light the lamp, prostrate, that much I do.. 🙏
Coming to the recipe, gasagase payasa is our family favorite. Grinding gasagase is little bit tricky, water should not be added all at once, but little by little for it to grind properly. This is my mother’s recipe, with tips and tricks as she taught me. Enjoy!
Making Indian sweets/ barfis is always a daunting task for me. Bringing sakkare paaka(sugar syrup) to one string consistency is where I get stuck mostly.
Thanks to my friend Anusha, I got this recipe which uses InstaPot to make sugar syrup. She shared it along with some yummy katlis, which gave me more confidence to try them myself.
I remember my other friend’s words here that more the gadgets you use in the kitchen, less is the skill required :)
Earlier cooking needed skill/ experience, now everything seems to happen at a touch of a button - electric rice cooker, InstaPot, Bread machine, Rotimatic.…
I’m not complaining. This recipe is so easy and fool proof and it turned out extremely good. Make syrup in InstaPot, mix almond flour from Costco, let it cool and done!
You can make this for any festival/potluck without breaking a sweat.
Do try!
Happy Holi!
Want some simple, filling, tasty lunch/dinner for the weekend? Try these oven roasted veggie enchilada…
The procedure looks lengthy, but it is not. You can either use store bought sauce or try this easy homemade Enchilada sauce(click for the recipe). Oven does the work of roasting veggies. I personally like refried beans in Mexican dishes, but you don’t have to add it if you don’t have it, or you can add some cooked black beans. Assemble and bake away!
My goto stuffing for puff or sandwich had mostly potatoes and then some vegetables + masala powders. And I would avoid cabbage(and it’s family). And because there was lot of potatoes, masalas would lose flavor by the end of the day.
This stuffing happened by chance. One time while making palya for puff, since I didn’t have enough potatoes, I added cabbage. This turned out exactly like Bangalore Iyengar bakery style puff. Cabbage not only complimented all masala powders very nicely but made it taste more like Indo Chinese. Super happy with this accidental discovery..
Do try!
Want some masala puri?
This recipe is very similar to the first recipe of masala puri recipe I posted long time back(which can be found here). But there is little change in the procedure and masala. Instead of using raw ingredients for grinding, you sauté and then grind. Very small thing, but I loved subtle difference in the taste. I also liked the usage of pav bhaji masala here(It is my goto masala for many dishes these days). This one too, like the previous recipe, tasted restaurant quality.
Do try!
I hardly experiment with things I know, leave alone stuff in completely unknown territory…
When my cousin gave me squash from her kitchen garden, I was completely clueless what to do with it. Upon talking with friends and googling, I found this extremely easy, hard to resist recipe. You just cut squash in slices and bake with some cheese.
Tada!
It turned out very flavorful, and the whole batch got over in no time.
An easy appetizer to go with pasta.
My daughter was very eager to cook something in the kitchen, so I let her do this completely by herself.
Tomato soup and bread sticks combo is always a popular choice in my house. And we eat it more like main course rather than appetizer. So obviously I need to make one too many servings per person. But the problem with tomato soup is you need way too many tomatoes to get a decent amount of soup. Long time back I had tried using canned tomatoes to simplify the process. The problem there is, if you are using canned paste in any curry or rasam, the (canned) taste is not too prominent as there will be other spices, but if you use it in something like tomato soup, where you taste mostly tomatoes, the canned taste becomes too overwhelming. But recently I got canned organic tomato paste from Costco which surprisingly didn’t have any weird taste in it. I was just about thinking that I should try this in tomato soup sometime, when this recipe popped up on my FB feed. Talk about “law of attraction” or was it just FB reading my mind(like that chappal joke circulating on WhatsApp) 😁
Anyways, two things grabbed my attention in this particular recipe. Firstly the awesome presentation - the blogger served it in bread baskets, how cool is that!
Secondly, the use of cashew paste. Though we use this a lot in curries, I never ever thought this could be used in soups too!
Adding this has twofold advantage -
I mostly followed the recipe as it is, only did some minor changes - like I used almond flour instead of cashew paste. Soup turned out very tasty and creamy.
Garlic toast is adapted from Hebbar’s kitchen.
Enjoy this tasty and healthy soup in this cold weather!
