Healthy Semolina

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There are only so many ways to make semolina, I always thought. But the only one I could come up with for a “snack” or what we South Indians proudly call “tiffin” was the boring old upma. First, about the tiffin. It is that mini meal we eat between an early lunch and a dinner, around 3pm. As a kid, I used to love weekend tiffin time because my mother or grandmother would make yummy snacks that were completely dedicated to evening-meals on weekends and they would always be of the fried kind, fritter-like, filled with an assortment of vegetables.

On weekdays, we would be given something boring like an Upma or if we were lucky, Maggi noodles. Upma is sort of like couscous. It is made of coarse semolina, or broken rice, or vermicelli and we add spices and condiments to make it, er, more interesting. But lately, I’ve felt like I’m done with Upma. It is so boring, gets repetitive and has no real nutritional value (yes, I am suddenly all big on that) unless I add on all the veggies I’ve got in my pantry.

So yesterday, I went on a quest: to revamp semolina. I wanted to add some depth of flavor to it, some extra texture and basically make it a teeny bit more exciting. And then I got this bright idea to treat it like you would couscous and make salad out of it. End of the day, I don’t know if we loved it or simply tolerated it. I am guessing the former because we went back for seconds and wiped out the huge portion I had made. So here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

One cup coarse semolina (Indian stores stock up on various sizes)

Two Tbsp olive oil

One and a quarter cups vegetable stock

One cup raisins or dried cranberries

Half cup roasted almond slivers (I cut up my pan roasted almonds)

One Tbsp dry oregano flakes

Few cilantro leaves, rough chopped

For the vinaigrette:

Quarter cup olive oil

Quarter cup apple cider vinegar

Two Tbsp honey

One tsp salt

Half tsp freshly ground black pepper

Method:

Heat the two Tbsp oil in a pan. Add the semolina to it and fry for a few minutes on medium heat until lightly golden-brown and fragrant. Add the vegetable stock to it, close the pan with a lid and let it cook for ten to twelve minutes until completely cooked. Take it off heat when done and let it cool.

While it cools, make the vinaigrette. In a bowl, pour the vinegar, honey, oregano, salt and pepper. Whisk them together as you add the olive oil.

When the semolina is cool enough to handle, fluff it up using a fork. It is an arduous process but make sure it is fluffy. If it forms a thin, brown coat in the bottom, take it off (the browned part tastes yummy, fyi). Add on the raisins, almonds and oregano to it. Make sure it is well mixed. Now pour the vinaigrette on top of the semolina and toss to coat. Garnish with parsley and ta da!

Southern Comfort

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If you stumbled upon this blog post thinking it is about some novel American Southern food, you are in for a disappointment. But if you do stay and read on, you will discover that it is about as much a novel Indian Southern dish. We love it, though it is just one of those normal everyday dish back home which with a little bit of alteration, can play double duty. And at the end of this post, I promise to share a little story like I always do.

So Kootu is a little like the Greek lentil soup which we eat with rice, a side-dish (like the Okra Curry) and Thuvayal. The dish is sometimes seasoned with coconut and cumin. In some parts of South India, it is even cooked in tamarind. The North of India has its own version of Kootu called Dal. It is made with a combination of Dals (lentils), cooked and fried with Masala. That dish deserves its own post which I will post soon. Here is how I made the South Indian Kootu:

Ingredients:

One Chayote (or two carrots, half a head cauliflower or cabbage, a bunch of green beans or a combination of all of these) diced

One cup Toor Dal (from the Indian store or the Ethnic food section in your grocery store)

Couple of Serrano peppers

One and a half tsp Sambar powder (back to Indian store or I will post the recipe soon)

A pinch of pepper powder

Salt to taste

One tsp mustard seeds

One tsp Urad dal

Two Tbsp coconut (optional)

A pinch cumin powder

A pinch Asafoetida powder (optional)

Two Tbsp oil

Cilantro for garnishing

Method:

Add the lentils, veggies, salt, Sambar powder, peppers, salt and pepper powder to two cups of water. Cook them. In a pan, heat the oil, add the mustard seeds, when they crackle, add the Urad dal, Asafoetida, cumin powder and coconut. Fry a little and add the cooked mixture to the pan. Switch the stove off when it starts boiling. Garnish with cilantro.

So the story. During one of dad’s health-kicks, my mother used to make a small portion of Kootu every morning for his breakfast. He used to mix in a splash of soy sauce, couple of tsps of vinegar, some green chili sauce and eat it. One Saturday, I woke up early enough to catch him eating his breakfast and he gave me a spoon of the Kootu. It tasted so yummy that my mother had to pour me a bowl of it just to get me off my dad’s!

Try it, it is addictive.

Thank You, Ina!

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If you’ve been following my blog for sometime now, you will know that I worship the ground Ina Garten treads. She makes the most amazing food, is the kind of hostess I’ve always fantasized I would be and she knows that intricate method of entwining rustic and elegance which she does with a panache. All that put together with that very cute relationship she shares with her husband, Jeffrey, makes Ina the most adorable person on television (Sheldon Cooper sufferes a narrow loss but he will survive).

This treat is an adaptation of her Outrageous Brownies, one of the featured Food Network desserts. Featured is the channel’s way of saying that they are unabashedly proud of and the pride is well-justified. I baked half the quantity and made a couple of changes that were inevitable due to (un)availability of things at the store and my pantry but I promise, Ina, that I used the most premium products available in the market.

I made these brownies as a hostess gift and that’s why they are all dressed up and ready to roll (into the gift bag). Making these brownies has also been a challenge to me and I don’t mean the whipping up part. The challenges were of two kinds: restraining myself from eating them, thanks to my intense work-out program (oh, we will need a longer blog post if I start on that!) and styling the brownies up into giftable treats.

I did taste a piece (with my own recipe for icing) and I cried a little. They were so perfectly gooey, crunchy and decadent all at the same time that they might as well be my long lost love that I was never destined to have.The Mister, of course, is jealous… of me. Apparently, he wanted them to be his long lost love.

Icing Recipe:

Ingredients:

Quarter Cup Evaporated Milk

Half Cup Sugar

One Cup Chocolate Chips

One tsp Vanilla Essence

Two Sticks (1 cup/ 8 oz) Butter

Method:

Bring the evaporated milk, sugar, butter and vanilla essence to boil. Switch off the heat. Add the chocolate chips. Stir until it melts. Slather on, baybay!

Ps: see the new changes?

Making Yogurt

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Until a year and a half ago, I never knew that you could buy yogurt at the store. At least not the kind you get here in the USA. Yogurt in India is always flavored. If we needed the kind we get here, we would always make it and it was called curd. Curd was available in stores, of course, but we seldom bought it.

Yogurt is one of the simplest thing you will ever make in life but back at home, it was a tradition of sorts. My grandmother always made it look nothing short of a brief ceremony and her grandchildren were seldom allowed to make it. She probably was afraid that we would add a tad too much of yogurt to the milk which would make it sour. My home was always known for a never-ending supply of sweet tasting yogurt in the refrigerator so I kind of understand her trepidation. Now, yogurt in India is a staple part of our pantry. We eat it with rice; add water, salt and sugar and make Lassi, Neer Mor or what we call buttermilk in India and even use it in side-dishes.

Its an ancient belief that the hand that makes the yogurt decides its outcome: When some people make it, it would come out perfectly but when others make it, there will be an overload of tang, which some people savor. And I was not one of them. Hence I should consider myself lucky because I have a sweet yogurt hand which my mother let me develop when she eventually took over the kitchen back in India after my grandmother passed. Let the old wives’ tale not bother you because I think it is your control over the yogurt that really decides its tang level.

Anyway, when I landed here, I got into the habit of buying yogurt, which used to cost anywhere between ¢.99 and $2.99 for a 32 fl.oz. (low fat). I used to buy 2% milk and make it sometimes and it always worked out cheaper at $3.29 for 1 gallon (138 fl.oz) When we got into the organic mode of life, I figured it would be even more economical to make yogurt regularly ($6.29 for 1 gallon vs. $4.29 for 32 fl.oz). It is, look at how much I am saving!

So here is an easy recipe for making yogurt at home. All it requires is a gallon of 2% milk (or full-fat milk if you are making Greek yogurt), which you have to boil on med-low for 30-45 minutes, until it forms a thin layer of cream on the top. Let it rest until it becomes warm. To this, add two Tbsp of store-bought yogurt. Mix it, close it with a lid and let it hang out in a warm place on your kitchen counter (the oven, with the lights switched on works very well). Now, we’ve got to wait… for 8 hours. The yogurt would have set, kind of like custard. Refrigerate it and use it as you would regular yogurt.

Oh yeah, that simple!

Update: Use whipping cream instead of milk if you want to make sour cream. You don’t have to boil or even heat it, let it be at room temperature.

Ps: Ladles and High heels is looking forward to a format change from the next post. I got a crash course from a friend about blog photography and he recommended that I do away with something and add something else on. So here is me looking forward to the newer format too!

Spanish Spicy Potatoes

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It has been a long hiatus and I’m not happy about it. This time, I blame my photographer’s block. Though I made a lot of yummy food in the past month, I did not photograph any of it. So for the past 30 (odd) days, its been like this: I make food, we gobble it up and I end up wishing I had clicked pictures.

To me, half the joy in cooking lies in presentation, especially when I have a blog going. I can go on and on, describing an amazing Kofta Curry I made a few days ago without managing to earn a single “ooh” out of people reading it. So I sadly have to ditch writing about things I haven’t photographed and start putting my camera to use in the future.

The last visual proof I have of in my recipe box is the Spanish Spicy Potatoes. I got the idea for it from random food blogs gawking sessions. I tasted a version of this dish at Zara’s (the Chennai-based Tapas bar) and I remember falling wildly in love with it. My version has a blend of my own spices and McCormick’s Fajita mix. Whatever it is, this semi-homemade is sure to rock your world… until you clean it all up.

Here we go:

Ingredients:

Three large potatoes (I used Idaho), cleaned and peeled and diced

Half a packet of McCormick’s Fajita Mix

(If you don’t have it, mix together the following: one tsp cumin powder, half tsp oregano, a few shakes of garlic powder, one tsp paprika, one tsp cayenne pepper powder)

One tsp coriander powder,

One tsp onion powder

Salt and pepper to taste

Three Tbsp vegetable oil

One Tbsp olive oil

Two tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

Cilantro for garnish

Method:

Heat a pan with two Tbsp oil. While that is heating up, rub the pieces of potatoes with olive oil, the spices, salt and pepper. When the pan is hot, hot, hot (yes, that hot!), add the potatoes. The key here is to cook the potatoes, make it crunchy and manage not to burn it, all at once. Turn the heat to medium and just let it be. Toss it regularly, but manage not to mush it.

When the potato is cooked, it is time to crunch it up. Turn the heat up to medium-high, add the other Tbsp of oil and let it fry away to glory. Give it a shimmy shake regularly until it crisps all over. When done, switch the heat off and stir in the lemon juice. Garnish with cilantro, grab a few tooth picks and dig in!

 

 

Lemon-y Chocolate-y Yummy

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After all that noise about refraining from baking on social media, I gave in to temptation. I tried my hardest but I failed… and I am happy!

I love using lemon in my cooking. In India, lemon and lime means the same to us. Though we did get them in green and yellow, they tasted the same and we used them the same way. And using lemon zest was unheard of! In summer, my grandmother would make pickles from the yellow variety and one of the things she was very particular about was the skin of the lemon/lime. The thinner it is, the less bitter the pickles would turn out. I will get the recipe from my mom and my aunts someday and try it out.

So when I got here and learned that there was a world of difference between lemons and limes, I was shocked and very curious. As I learned to experiment with fresh lemons in my cooking (the only decent thing I have made so far is the conventional lemonade), I fell more and more in love with the fresh, summer-y taste. The tang and the flavor will always be unparalleled and I always look for great recipes to use lemons in.

Today, I gave in to our sweet tooth and baked chocolate cookies with lemon filling and honestly, this ended up being one of my most favorite things I’ve ever made!

This is how I made it:

Ingredients:

One cup All-purpose flour

One tsp baking powder

A pinch of salt

Half cup butter

Half cup white sugar

Quarter cup brown sugar

Ten oz chocolate chips

Two large eggs

For the filling:

Four oz cream cheese

One cup confectioners sugar

Juice from one full lemon

Two Tbsp butter completely softened

Method:

Sift all the dried ingredients for the cookie together. Melt the butter and chocolate together over a double broiler or in the microwave. If you don’t know how, here is a video from the ever-helpful Food Network website. Mix it together with the dry ingredients. Now cover and refrigerate for half hour. Pre-heat the oven at 350 F (176 degree C). Line a baking pan with parchment or aluminum foil. Drop dollops (I used the ice cream scoop) of the dough on the pan. Bake for 13 minutes.

For the filling, thaw the cream cheese completely. Add the softened butter, confectioners sugar and the juice from the lemon. I added a few drops of a gel-based yellow color but you can leave that out if you have issues with using artificial coloring agents. Whisk the icing until blended. Fill a Ziplock with the icing and refrigerate until you need it.

When the cookies are done, let them cool down. Now, bring the icing out, snap the end of the Ziplock and fill one cookie. Close it up with another cookie. You can also zest the lemon before you juice it and and the zest on to the icing for an extra lemon-y kick.

I can now safely say that I have fallen deeper in love with lemons!

Brunch for Two

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Valentine’s Day is fun. Especially when you are two non-believers put together by nature and feel that you don’t need a single, randomly picked day to tell each other how much you mean to one another. Plus, it falls on a weekday five years at a time and you cannot do anything huge like taking a trip or going dancing. That, you must know, did not stop me from feeding my man a huge meal on the Sunday before February 14.

He loves brunch, I love making brunch. Last year was our first Valentine’s day as a couple and I was just learning to make yummy food. I made him a good breakfast and he loved it. This year, I am better around the kitchen and it only made sense to try and surpass last year me. Additionally, I also love traditions so this could be our personal tradition for every February.

What you see up there on my banner: Orange-cream cheese stuffed crêpes, Mexican potato bake, Southern buttermilk biscuits, peach and granola parfe and every Valentine’s day meal’s must have, chocolate (and coffee)-covered strawberries. We ate at a coffee table in our dining room since we don’t own a dining set yet. It was fun and if it hadn’t been for the calendar on the wall, we could have made the world believe it was February 14.

Here is the recipe for the Mexican potato bake:

Ingredients:

Hash browns from two huge potatoes (grate the potatoes, squeeze the water out. Heat a pan with some butter, arrange the grated potatoes in a single layer. Let it brown on one side before you flip and cook the other side too. Add a little salt-pepper when the first side is cooking)

One small box sour cream

Half an onion chopped

Garlic powder a dash or one bulb garlic finely minced

Half a can mushroom soup (or half a packet powdered mushroom soup)

Green onions a bunch (white and the light-green part) chopped

Kernels of corn two Tbsp

Pepper and salt to taste

Adobo sauce (optional) one tsp

Melted butter one Tbsp

Cheddar cheese half a cup

Cornflakes a cup

Cilantro for garnish

Method:

Preheat oven at 350 degree F (176 degree c) Grease one muffin tin with olive oil. Lay out 9 compartments with a layer of hash browns. Mix the sour cream, onion, garlic powder, whites of the green onions, mushroom soup, kernels of corn, adobo sauce, melted butter, pepper and salt. Pour the mixture on top of the hash brown layer until it reaches three-quarters of the tin. Garnish with the greens of the green onion, cheese, cilantro and top it with cornflakes.

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes, until the cheese is bubbly and the cornflakes have lightly browned. Serve with salsa.