Banana bread

 Here’s a fool proof recipe for banana bread, the one I have tried many many times. This recipe is from one of my favorite blogs for baking(link given below).

Bread comes out super moist and you can hardly tell any difference between this and the store bought ones. I have used milk and butter in this recipe, however the original recipe is for vegan banana bread[with suggestions for substitutions]. 

Do try! Happy baking!!

Pav bread

 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!  

Garlic Breadsticks

 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 - 

• Minestrone soup
• Eggplant parmigiana
• Pasta 

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!  

Tomato Basil Soup and Garlic Toast

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 - 

1. Firstly, it gives a creamy texture to the soup.
2. Secondly and more importantly, it acts like a thickening agent which helps in increasing the quantity of the soup. 

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!