Ivy gourd is the vegetable loved by most. It is one of my favorite vegetables. I love it in any form. ‘Fried ivy gourd’ is a very easy to make and amazingly delicious dish. I was not very fond of this dish when I was a kid, but recently I have become a big fan. It tastes great when it is fried till the ivy gourds become almost black and you can’t even say those are ivy gourds....
Being from southern part of India, we were introduced to paneer quite late compared to my north Indian friends. Most of my family still do not like this Indian cheese. I have started using it more regularly (once in 15days or so) in recent years to get some protein in our diet. Few days back I had soaked some green moong and I wanted to use up a block of paneer from freezer, so I decided to combine both to make this green moong – paneer masala....
Our friend’s mom taught me this recipe. She and her daughter came here 2 months back from Karachi. They are originally from Pakistan. We had gone to their house for a dinner and she had made these amazingly crunchy and tasty parathas . Next time I made a point to ask her the procedure. These require a bit more ghee compared to our normal chapathi/phulkas , but they taste simply superb....
As I said in my earlier posts, I asked my aayi to make as many different types of sun dried items as possible. So every weekend we did some vadis/papads , weekends because I wanted to see how she makes them and also take all pictures. If she had stayed here for few more days, I could have written a book on sun dried items ;). Nanchne (Konkani) or ragi (Kannada) is finger millet....
My new year resolution is to eat/cook with more vegetables. The problem I face with this is, I buy lot of vegetables in a week and then they sit in fridge and pass their prime time. This weekend, after a very long time, I prepped all the vegetables – washed them, cut them into pieces, dried them and stored in boxes/zip lock bags in freezer or refrigerator. This is helping so much in fast cooking during weekdays and I hope this will also bring down the wastage....
I studied engineering in Belgaum. There I got my first introduction to many Marathi dishes. Among all, my favorites were sabudana khichdi and vada. I would just gobble down these whenever I got a chance. I stopped making these in last few years as V is not a big fan. Last week I was craving for these vadas, I did not want to deep fry them, but wanted them to be crispy....
This is another recipe sent to me by my pachi (aayi’s sister). I hardly buy shrimp here as we are not big fans of the huge fresh shrimp or the frozen ones that are available in small sizes. I am yet to find small fresh ones – probably I need to check out Asian markets sometime. So this recipe stayed in my inbox for a long time. Finally last week, I prepared this....
Shrimps/Prawns are called as Sungat in Konkani. Hinga uda/udak means asafoetida water. I didn’t know any recipe with any seafood prepared with asafoetida in it (there may be such recipes, but I didn’t know about them). I am a big fan of shrimps. So when I got this recipe from my regular reader Rajasi , I was more than happy to try it. She sent me 3 recipes, here is the first of them....
From many days I am terribly missing these khara (spicy) buns available in Bangalore bakeries. These buns are nothing but very soft bread stuffed with some kind of very spicy vegetable. But I have a very bad history of baking breads. I must have attempted it atleast 5-6 times(that I know of) and consistently I got rock hard products which I am sure would work great as cricket balls :)....
Who does not like the beautiful strawberries? I have this uncontrollable love for them, so I buy them almost every time I go for shopping. As far as I have seen, they have pretty short shelf life compared to any other fruits. So if I forget them for a while, I have to throw the entire stock. That happened a couple of times. So this time as soon as I bought them, I made this delicious milkshake for dinner....
“Dhoddak” usually has a very different way of cooking. The vegetable/fish is mixed with coconut masala. Then kept in between banana/turmeric leaves and charcoals are put on top of the vessel to make an arrangement like baking. (There might be other ways of making dhoddak, but I know only this one). Aayi makes two types of them, one is with vegetables and other with fish(mackerel) . For vegetable dhoddak we use assorted vegetables like ‘pala pansa kadgi/jeevi kadgi’(bread fruit) , gosaLe(ridge gourd) , bhende(okra), raw banana(plantain), bitter gourd etc....
Elephant foot yam or suran/surnu is grown widely at my native. This root is used in a wide variety of dishes in Konkani cooking. We used to grow them a lot in our backyard. I still remember my grandfather used to take out these roots carefully and wash them and store to be used throughout the year. I never had the courage to use this root in my cooking, mainly because some of the roots cause strong itching to hands after cutting them....
I have been cooking a lot of pastas these days. We love pasta, but the main purpose behind this is, I am hell bent on learning to make good pasta dishes. These dishes get ready in a very short time, so they are perfect for weekday nights when I return home tired with little patience to cook anything elaborate. A funky weather is adding to all my laziness. I somehow loaded up my pantry with different pastas, sauces, olives etc, which I need to finish....
For a long time now, I am trying to include more fruits in our diet. But somehow it is one food group that is most neglected in this home. I buy bananas, most of the times we finish them off before they get to the overripe stage. Lately, I find atleast 1 or two that get to that stage before I had a chance to finish them. I thought of making banana bread with them, but get too lazy to bake....
I used carrot only in sambars or in kosambaris until recently. So I never tried to make any sidedishes with this beautiful and tasty vegetable, I thought it tastes awesome raw, so why to take all the trouble to cook it. I always have a big batch of carrot even though most of the time I don’t really know what to do with it. This problem was solved 2 years back....
When I was in Bangalore, I had a habit of ordering chicken hariyali whenever we went out for lunch/dinner. I loved this kabab so much that, my brother and husband were tired of eating this dish. I would order this every single time. Chicken biryani and this kabab was my staple every time. My brother finally decided not to go out with me because I would never agree to eat anything else, and since I could never eat it all alone, they had to share these with me....
AvrekaLu or val is very new to me. I started using it from last year, but since then, we have been great fans of this. I had many recipes which called for dried avrekaLu . I really didn’t know how they looked like. So I bought the first “val” I saw in the Indian store here. It looks like the one I got is a special type of val , called as Rangooni val ....
This is a simple egg curry that I made a couple of days back. Goda masala gives a very good aroma and taste to this gravy. It goes very well with yellow rice or chapathis . Ingredients: 3/4 cup fresh/frozen coconut 4 boiled eggs 1 tea spn goda masala 1/4 tea spn tamarind 1/2 tea spn ginger pieces 1/2 tea spn garlic pieces 1/2 tea spn chilli powder (optional) 1/2 cup onion 7-8 curry leaves A pinch turmeric Salt...
A huge THANKS to all the people who donated for FAHC donate smiles. The goal of the campaign was to raise $3,360, however due to all generous donations, $4,735 was raised. Kudos to all who have supported the cause The Raffle prize winners are announced at Mahanandi , if you had bought any tickets. My raffle prize “ Mountain Valley ” painting is won by Chandrarekha . Chandrarekha, Congratulations!!!.I have sent you email, please reply with your mailing address and I will ship the prize to you....
Basidu (Kannada) – after cooking, tilting the vessel to take out all the water off the coarse materials. Here no strainer is used, sometimes a plate is held at the mouth of the vessel to stop the coarse materials from falling with the water. Vegetable stock is not readily available in all places in India. So this was the method used to collect it. Basidu + saru = bassaru – Saru made from vegetable stock....
