Wish you all a very happy and prosperous Diwali. This year has been one of the busiest years as far as I can remember. Although I have weekdays and weekends packed with work, kids activities and other household stuff, I am trying my best to take out some time to celebrate festivals. Diwali for me is full of lights, food and fireworks. Although we don’t do fireworks anymore since they are banned in our city, I always make sure to have some delicious homemade food....
Menthya (fenugreek) soppu (leaves) is one of the greens which we have become great fans. I am not sure why this was one of my most hated herb while growing up. These days it makes its appearance very frequently at my home. Recently I tried this gravy and absolutely fell in love with it. Here the leaves are cooked and then ground to paste. It gives such a refreshing taste to the gravy....
I thought of this recipe while searching for a suitable entry for JFI for Strawberries . I had baked this cake a few days back also, with different kinds of fruit. But this time, I used only Strawberries. The original version does not include any dry fruits, but I used cashews to give the crunchy taste to the cake. I am a big fan of moist cakes. Since this is soaked with juice, it gets the amazing taste and the fruits make the crunchy....
It has been raining heavily for the last few days here. Pakodas/bajes are one of the most loved dishes in this season. We make bajes with many vegetables . I have been making bajes with ginger for years now. These get a spicy and strong taste from ginger pieces. So make them small in size. Ingredients: 2 tbl spn finelly chopped ginger 4 tbl spn gram flour(besan) 1/4 tea spn chilli powder Oil Salt...
As we like fish very much, we try to get as frequently as we can, though most of the weeks that gets confined to Sundays. We hardly find fish of indian variety here. Though we find Pomfret at Indian stores, it will be frrozen one and not fresh from sea. However for the sake of taste buds, I take this, as an acceptable compromise. There are couple of varieties of preparation, I like to try frequently....
My friend M is expecting her first baby. She is a huge fan of Harry Potter. She always talked so passionately about Harry Potter and how she would read the book to her baby whenever she had a baby. Much before she even got pregnant, I wanted to bake and decorate a Harry Potter cake for her. Last month, I got together with some of our common friends and decided to have a baby shower for her....
There was one time, when I absolutely hated horse gram. Aayi even stopped cooking with it after the tantrums I would throw when she made anything with this. Somehow it has changed in last couple of years. One of my friends recently asked me for this traditional Konkani recipe. Koddel is a kind of watery side dish with coconut. I recently prepared it with horse gram and drumsticks. This combo along with the garlic seasoning creates absolutely yummy dish....
2-3 years back I did not know the difference between biryani and pulav. I thought biryani has a different masala called “biryani masala”, but the method for both are same. We were in San Diego for a small business trip and one of my colleagues always prepared biryani on the similar lines as pulav. It definitely tasted great. But then, our manager (who is a Gujrathi but settled here in US), always said ‘what you people make cannot be called biryani’....
Mixed Greens Khichdi I usually get a huge pack of mixed greens from Costco that gets used enthusiastically for few days. Since it goes bad quickly, I try to make few different recipes – this also makes sure we consume all of those greens in two-three weeks’ time. This Mixed Greens Khichdi is one of those dishes. It tastes great, it is a one-pot dish that comes together quickly, it is healthy, so it checks all the right boxes....
‘Nankatayi’ or Nankatai can be called as Indian biscuits(cookies). I had thought this is a Konkani name, but recently I came across this name in many of the food blogs. So I guess this dish does not need any introduction. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Nankatayi. We had the round oven aluminum base and glass top, I haven’t seen any such ovens anywhere these days....
Phodis – vegetables spiced and rolled in rava(samolina) and shallow/deep fried, are very popular among Konkanis. We make these from most of the vegetables. Some examples can be found in rava fries – post . These come very handy when we want to make a very quick side dish. They are very delicious and fast to make. We get small button mushrooms here during the first rain. These are wildly grown in forests....
Few days ago, Sudha Vinod left a comment on Aayi’s recipes. The comment goes like this, “I want to know the recipe of a dish, I don’t remember the name it goes like this – I think its made of rice batter and u add coconut and coriander leaves on the top. They look like uttappam but have a slight sweet taste. One of my friend during collage days used to get this, she was from Konkan area and that was about 12 years back....
Muga MoLe Randayi Muga MoLe Randayi is one of the most loved side dishes in Konkani homes of North Kanara, Karnataka. Muga MoLe in Konkani means sprouted moong. Muga MoLe Randayi is a must-have for almost all functions. During the functions, huge quantities of mung beans are sprouted and washed over and over again till almost all the skin is removed (I like to leave the skin on for extra fiber)....
I have been having a hard time to clean up my pantry, refrigerator etc before our India trip. So I stopped buying any groceries some 15 days ago. Yeah, I am a very bad shopper and my pantries always overflow with different lentils, beans etc. Same goes for refrigerator. So I stopped going to grocery stores and all I cooked for past couple of days was pohas for breakfast – which, according to me, is not a breakfast, it is an evening snack....
Okra/bhindi must be our most favorite vegetable. We buy it every time we go to Indian grocery store here. I love to learn new dishes with this vegetable. So far whatever I tried with this vegetable, it has always been a hit. This recipe is based on a recipe I saw on TV few years ago. I don’t remember the name of the original dish, it had coconut base, but when I made it, I did not use coconut....
It’s time for Daring baker’s challenge again. When I saw this month’s challenge, I was very disappointed. It looked very similar to the Opera cake that we made couple of months ago. Many other DBs had the same concern. But one thing that made me try this was the chocolate. I am not a chocoholic, but I love chocolate pastries/cakes. Its proven again that when I am not fully interested in something, I just mess it up....
Few days ago, we had some friends visiting us. One friend suggested I make ragda pattis for them, I wanted to make something else for starters. Most of these friends are chicken lovers, so I thought of making chicken kababs. There is something very interesting about chicken on skewers – my family is not a big fan of skewers, but I love the look of them. Just to make them more interesting, I added some capsicum (green bellpeppers) and pineapple to them....
I was not a big fan of cabbage while growing up. But recently I have started liking it more and more. May it be simple cabbage upkari or cabbage vada , it tastes delicious. So when I buy cabbage, I make sure to make more than one type of dish with it, so that we don’t get bored of it. Aruna sent me this recipe. She said she had learnt it from a Gujrathi friend....
No matter how much you change your palette to adjust to new kind of food, you always crave for the food that you grew up eating. I stayed away from my favorite Konkani dishes for a few months, just because I was trying out new things. Now we have reached a stage, we crave Konkani food every single day. Konkani kadis – like Jeer mirya kadi , taka kadi are some of the things that we are having these days....
Its been a long time I blogged about any rice items. So here is a simple and helthy recipe.I saw this in kannada programme “Aduge Aramane” on ‘Udaya news’ channel few months back (Before coming to US). I was a regular viewer of that program. Everyone at home cursed me for that, especially my cousin who did not understand Kannada!!. At some point I was so addicted to these programs that on sundays, morning 11 to 1....
