Krishna Jayanthi

I'm not religious in the least and nowadays I find that I celebrate festivals only to feel good about concocting some of the traditional recipes. 

Seedai and aval payasam for Gokulashthami this year :) Needless to say, I was the only person who consumed the seedai (Disclaimer: it tasted good! But Ads doesn't care for fried stuff and Y copies him in most matters culinary :))

2 breads and a healthy cake

So I'm too lazy to check whether I've posted the bread recipes earlier, but I'm almost certain I haven't so here goes. 

I've been getting back to baking. I don't bake for months then suddenly the mania hits and I bake almost everyday and we end up distributing my efforts all over the complex. Not that people are dying to eat my creations (we have far better bakers and cooks around!) but hey, who says no to a piece of free cake? :)

Banana Bread

Banana bread is something that I make well. I like it because it's moist and makes a lovely snack for school. Plus its healthy! I got the recipe from a friend who asked me to replace some of the plain flour with wheat flour, and also to use oil+dahi instead of the unsalted butter that I was using. The 2 keys to getting this bread just right are:

a) To use over-ripe bananas, ones where the skin is turning black and brown. If I don't get such bananas, I buy the just-ripe ones, hide them and make sure no one eats them for several days until they ripen :)

b) To NOT over-mix the batter. It needs to be a bit lumpy and not too well-mixed. Just make sure the dry ingredients are moistened and the oven will do the rest.

Ingredients:

2 large or 3 medium sized bananas (over-ripe)

1 large egg (or 2 small ones)

1 cup maida

1/2 cup atta

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla essence

3/4 cup powdered sugar

1/2 cup thick yogurt or dahi

1/4 cup oil (I use sunflower or olive and haven't found any difference between the two)

Mash bananas in the mixer and mix well with yogurt and baking soda. Let the mixture rest for a while unti lyou do the rest of the prep. In another boil, whisk the eggs, vanilla essence, sugar and oil. In another bowl, mix with a wooden spoon all the dry ingredients (atta, maida, baking powder and salt).

Now mix the banana mixture and the egg mixture. Make a well in the flour mixture and pour the banana/egg mixture inside it slowly, in 2 instalments or 3. Here, you must fold the wet mixture into the dry and not just mix. Look at this link to see how to fold. Too much folding will result in a tough texture so do just enough to moisten the dry flour mixture. It's ok if the batter looks a little lumpy.

Bake at 180 degree C for 45-50 minutes. My LG microwave takes 40-45 minutes. I still like to occasionally bake the banana walnut bread from here. Not as healthy, but ooh so yummy!

Dried Fruit and Nut loaf

For this loaf, I blindly follow this recipe. However the amount of nuts and dried fruits they suggest is way too much. If I used the 6 cups that they suggested, not a soul in my family (myself included) would touch this bread. I use just 1 cup combined raisins, dates, almonds and walnuts. Remember to adjust the sugar levels if you have a lot of dates and raisins as they are so sweet in themselves. This recipe calls for brown sugar but I've often used the same amount of white powdered sugar with no appreciable difference. I haven't tinkered with the recipe to find a healthier version so if someone does have any tips, I'd be grateful if you passed it on :)

Healthy whole-wheat chocolate cake

This is a good one, suggested by a friend/neighbour. I baked this just an hour ago and my friend has substituted atta, oil and jaggery instead of maida, butter and sugar!! I was out of jaggery today and made it with sugar and will update this recipe once I am able to bake it with jaggery. 

Ingredients:

1 cup atta

3/4 cup powdered sugar

1/2 cup oil (sunflower was what I used today)

1 tsp vanilla essence

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

2 large eggs

Mix the atta, sugar, baking powder, soda and salt. In another bowl, whisk the eggs and mix with vanilla extract and oil. Fold the wet ingredients into the dry and bake at 180 deg C for about 15 minutes. The cake mix was rather dry and I had to pat it down with my bare hands to fit it into my cake pan.It wasn't as soft as I'd like but it tasted good. I have a feeling I overbaked and that 10 minutes would have been enough, with an  additional 5 min cooling-off period in the pan. One lives and learns :)

Do let me know if you bake these, and how they turned out!

Maggi Mee-Goreng

This is probably the most easy recipe (one of the most tasty too, but S doesn't care so much for it, so I make it far less often than I'd like to) to whip up. It's Maggi with a twist! The recipe here is the authentic Malay one but my mother-in-law, who first taught me this, says the Indonesians add coconut milk to the final product and that's how I make it.

Stir fry spring onions and your choice of veggies, add 1.5 cups of water and tastemaker and cook Maggi as usual. I also add chopped paneer and scrambled eggs to this mix for an additional health boost. Once all the water has been absorbed, add about a quarter cup of coconut milk and cook for a further minute on low flame until the milk is almost absorbed but not fully. You want the noodles to be somewhat wet. 

Not a good lunch-box option - Maggi forms a solid mass in the tiffin box and its difficult for the kids to eat with a fork. People also fry green chillies and garlic and other spices before adding the vegetables but that seems like too much work so I just skip that part! This recipe is best had hot and steaming on a rainy evening :)

Chinese-style noodles

I remember making Chinese-style noodles a couple of times when I had just got married and they had been quite edible. However I am not a big fan of Chinese food and so noodles haven't figured in our menu in any major way. A couple of times after moving to Gurgaon, I tried making them for the kids' lunch but I must have got the wrong kind of noodles because all I ended up was a major sticky overcooked mess which I had to throw into the bin, so inedible was it. Does anyone have any fundas on what kind of noodles I should buy for a Chinese stir-fry recipe? What I now have is something called a Rice Stick which is super-easy to cook (just soak in hot water for a few minutes) and does not get sticky in the wok. 

Heat 1 tbsp olive/veg oil in a shallow pan and stir fry veg. I throw in anything I have - cabbage, baby corn, sweet corn, peppers, beans, carrots. Add the cooked noodles, salt, pepper, chinese seasoning (I get a mixed herbs/spices box from the grocery store), soy sauce, vinegar (the latter two are optional; my kids don't enjoy the flavouring too much so I add very little) and mix well over a low flame and voila!! On ocassion I have added peanuts and scrambled eggs as well. 

I've been making these noodles a couple of times for school/work lunches and they turn out okay (well...atleast no one has complained yet ;)). If someone has a better recipe, please do share :)

Veg pancakes

No, this is NOT turning into a food blog!!! I forget my own recipes so easily so I'm looking at this as one way of remembering what I made :) I'm not a great cook but I am passionate about getting my kids to eat right and call me crazy, but I never once mind getting up at 5 am to make the kids' lunch/tiffin. It's a labour of love, putting all that healthy stuff into the lunchboxes. Never mind that one set comes back almost untouched. Sigh. Yesterday Y came back with a sad face drawn on her hand. Apparently the teacher drew it when Y refused to eat her lunch!

So -- back to the food. Ads loves pancakes. I didn't know until a few years ago that pancakes could be made at home without the aid of Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker :( Ads will sometimes ask me to make pancakes for breakfast (on weekends) or for afternoon snack. The health nut that he is, he will drizzle honey/agave on the pancakes, turning away the chocolate syrup and maple syrup. I love this guy!!!! Anyway pancakes are yummy and all but I thought for lunch I should send something more wholesome. A stuffed dosa or uthappam would be healthier of course, and also it would be nicer if it was eaten warm but we'll just work within these constraints. Ads asked for a pancake, and a pancake is what he got :)

This morning, I used finely shredded beetroot, spinach (palak) and yellow bell pepper. I cooked them in the microwave until well done. 

My pancake batter was comprised of maida, salt, pepper, 1 large egg, milk and baking powder. For additional seasoning I added a tsp of Chinese spices that I had on hand. Don't ask me in what proportions I added everything because I never know that - basically you just need to get the usual pancake batter consistency. I added the cooked veggies to that and mixed them all up, and poured the batter into a greased omelette pan, adding a generous topping of grated cheese. And this is what the pancake looked like.

I was out of hummus so I sent some ketchup as accompaniment. Unfortunately my kids don't eat any kind of chutneys and I am yet to hit upon some chutney which they will like.

Next time I am thinking of making a fruit pancake which would be sweeter and more interesting for the kids (maybe?).

Vegetable-paneer cutlets (or somethin' -- need a proper name for these!)

Ever since I got myself a non-stick kuzhi-paniyaram maker a year ago, dishing out afternoon snacks has been a breeze. I love this baby, definitely the single most useful cooking utensil I have ever possessed. For starters, my kids (ok ok one of them!) ADORE kuzhi-paniyarams. Most of the time, most of the idli batter I make at home never gets used to make even a single idli. It gets exhausted just in making KPs and dosas (probably a good thing now that my idlis are coming out like rocks nowadays. In my defence, I learnt how to make idlis using the idli rava instead of boiled rice and I have always got amazing fluffy idlis with it. This rice and urad dal combination mystifies me). Anyways, back to the point. Which is, that the KP-maker is a very versatile piece of work. I have hardly ever made any snacks which involve deep-frying. Both S and I have been health freaks for too long to indulge in more than the occasional pakoda/bajji/cutlet. When we had people over, the most I could bring myself to do was shallow-fry the starters. But with this thingy, I can now indulge in some guilt and oil-free treats and my son will NOT perk up with "Amma, why are you feeding us unhealthy stuff?"!!!

I've dipped paneer, potatoes and green gram dal in batter and cooked in the KP-maker and they've all been pretty good to eat. The recipe below is the one we had yesterday.

First, I made a thick batter of gram flour and rice flour with water, salt and red chilli powder. I cooked peas and sweet corn (in the microwave) and ground them coarsely in the mixer with 1 green chilli, salt and coriander leaves. I grated carrots and and added them to the above mixture and made small balls with my hand. These were dipped in the batter, then coated with home-made bread crumbs. I'd heated up a little oil in each of the compartments of the KP-maker and now I placed these vegetable balls in to cook, turning them over after a minute for even browning. For Ads, I added some paneer to the vegetable mixture separately since Y doesn't care for paneer.

Unfortunately I have no pictures but bar any vegetable cutting/grating, this recipe hardly takes any time. I've stopped buying bread crumbs now that I learnt how ridiculously easy it was to make them at home and we have bread every single day, so I always have a stash of bread slices to work with.

YET - it's still BOILING out here and I was running out to the dining room every minute or so to stand under the fan :) I hope my children remember and are suitably grateful for all the sweating and toiling I have done for them :(

Mini-pizzas

This is a variation of the pizzas that I usually make, except that calling it a pizza is a bit of a stretch of the imagination, being a pizza in looks only! BUT - big advantage - it's very quick and handy especially for the lunch-box meals, not to mention supremely healthy. You do however need to get hold of some whole-wheat pita bread for this, and some hummus (store-bought or home-made) would be great too.

So here's what you do. Take a bunch of veggies that don't need much cooking. I chose red and yellow bell-peppers, zucchini, spinach and carrots, all shredded finely. Mix them well along with salt, pepper and any Italian herbs you have. Cut each pita into 4 and carefully pull off the tops from each slice. On each slice, spread some hummus (or any butter/spread), layer the veggies and sprinkle some cheese/paneer on top. Bake for 2-3 minutes at 180 degrees and you're done. If the pitas have pockets, another idea would be to use the veggies plus cheese as stuffing and then bake.

This picture was clicked just before I put the pizzas into bake mode.

This is what they look like after baking.

This is one no-brainer recipe and next time I plan to use pesto sauce as a spread - that should be yummy! 

Now I'm posting recipes!

We're pretty healthy eaters in our household. I keep trying out a lot of new stuff in the kitchen and my mantra has always been quick-fix, healthy meals. I'm not a great cook (just average) and I can't stand around slaving in the kitchen for hours so what I really love are the "one-pot" meals where you throw everything into a pot, switch on the gas/electric cooker and 20 minutes later, it's all done! Pongal, pulao, veg noodles, veg casserole - anyone? So - I've been thinking for a while that I should post some of the new recipes I try out, on this blog. Just so that I remember them myself, if nothing else :)

Yesterday we had my tried-and-trusted staple - the veg paratha with a simple moong dal on the side. I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've made a traditional paratha - y'know - the aloo, the gobi, the mooli ones? Most of the time, my parathas are a medley of several things and not just one vegetable. Yesterday, I wanted to use up a lot of cilantro (coriander) that has been lying in the fridge. There was also some leftover arhar (tuar) dal. I also threw some pumpkin (cubed) into the pressure cooker. I don't know why but it was an inspired choice, as it turned out. In the mixer, I ground jeera, shredded ginger, 2 green chillies, the arhar dal, lots of coriander leaves, along with some salt and milk (the things that went into that paratha!). After the pumpkin was done, I ground that too along with all the other stuff. Poured the whole thing into wheat flour and mixed it really well. The parathas came out so soft that it was a pleasure to eat them, even plain. I suspect the pumpkin made all the difference to the texture. 

My other favourite is the beetroot paratha. The beetroot has to be grated beforehand. Saute it with jeera, red chilli powder or green chillies, salt, coriander (if you like) and ginger. Stuff into the dough and roll it out and cook. It's yummy! Unless you like the slightly sweet taste of this paratha, you might want to add a little extra salt and spice to compensate. Or one could balance it with a spicy side-dish or chutney. The sweetness of it works just fine for us because the kids can't take spicy food anyway. This paratha also looks very appealing - brown with red and green spots due to the beetroot and coriander :) I'll try and post some pictures next time I make this.