Chakkuli / Chakli / Murukku

Murukku or Chakli or Chakkuli(Konkani) is a snack usually which accompanies tea / coffee.
Its spicy and crispy which makes it all the more in demand. I have to thank Praveena here for sharing such a lovely recipe with all of us. Here is the original from a marvellous blog - Simply Spicy....or Zimbly Spicy? :)

My 21 month old gorged on 4 pieces the moment I offered him, I had to physically stop him so that he wouldn't choke on them and asked him to chew and eat. My 35 month old too loved it.

Here is the recipe.


Ingredients :
2 cups rice flour / ari podi/ chawal ka atta
1 cup besan/gram flour(kadala maav)/chaney ka atta
1 tbsp white til / sesame seeds
1 tbsp ajwain(carom seeds)/ Ova
1 tsp red chilli powder
1/4 tsp hing powder / asafoetida
1/4 cup(50 gms) melted butter
225 ml of lukewarm water (approx)
Salt
Oil (Vegetable or Peanut oil) for deep frying


Method :
In a large bowl, sieve together the flours, add ajwain, til, chilli pwdr, hing, salt and mix well.
Add the melted butter and mix well. Add little lukewarm water and knead into a soft dough.
Grease the chakli press with some oil, grease chakli mould too.


Take a part of the dough and stuff insidet he chakli press.










Onto a newspaper or paper napkin, press out in round shape and prepare one batch prior to frying.










Heat the oil on high, lower to medium flame when hot enough, and deep fry the chaklis(flip them once in between till they turn golden brown.)

Remove in a dish lined with paper napkin so that any extra oil is absorbed. Press the next batch while first is getting fried. The yield was 57 chaklis.


Njoi these savory chaklis as snacks with tea / coffee!!



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Mango Cake

Mango is my favourite! Pushpa of PuSiVa'S CuLiNarY StUdiO has gorgeous baking recipes which are very simple yet give out great results!! She has a good collection of cooking books and her own recipes which have been neatly filed away for reference! This dish was baked as a birthday cake for her sister Chikie, by her. The ingredients were few and the photo awesome which made me immediately try it out. Original recipe called for mango puree-I used mango pulp instead. I skipped lemon juice and mango essence.

Ingredients :
1 cup maida / all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup sugar
1 stick(100 gms) butter at room temperature
1 egg
3/4th cup mango puree
1 tsp vanilla essence (mango essence ideally)

1/2 cup milk


Method :
Sieve together- flour, b.soda, b.pwdr, salt and keep aside.

In a big bowl, mix butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the egg keep mixing. Add the essence.

Add mango puree and mix for a while. Add the flour mixture spoon by spoon and milk in turns ending with the flour mixture. Keep mixing till homogenous. Grease the baking pan generously with butter and flour. Pour the mixture in the greased tin / in a tin lined with parchment paper.
Preheat oven at 175° C for 30-35 minutes...or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
Take it out of the oven, let it cool for ten minutes, transfer on to a wire rack and let it cool completely.



Gorge on this delicious Mango cake shamelessly! Its worth it!

I had to pre-heat my oven at 170° C for ten minutes, reduce the temp. to 160° C , baking time 35 minutes .





THANK YOU PUSHPA FOR POSTING SUCH A SUPER-D-DUPER MOIST AND FLUFFY MANGO CAKE!



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Walnut Cookies -Eggless

Vertical section of a cookie --Yum yum yummie to the core!!!!

Walnut Cookies...sounded great, last week when I went through Lazzat blog - Rahin, had a drool-on-this-pic of the cookies. Further when I read her recipe, ingredients and method, it was eggless and didn't have baking soda or baking powder either! What else could I ask for?

Thank you Rahin. I messed up first time, but she resolved my queries soon enough for me to give it a try again and succeed!!

My kids simply love it, I have to hide this cookie jar from them. Below measure gives an yield of 18 cookies.

Ingredients :
1 cup walnut powdered
1 cup all purspose flour / maida
1/4 tsp salt
25 gms granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 stick (100 gms) butter at room temperature
Powdered sugar

Method :
Mix the walnut powder along with maida and salt. (Use dry jar grinder for powdering the walnuts. Walnuts have oil in them which gives the powder not flowing but of a bit sticky texture. It would look like partly fine and partly like rava/semolina.) Keep aside.
In a large bowl, with the aid of a beater, beat the butter with sugar for minimum 2 mins till its homogeneous and fluffy. Add vanilla essence. Keeping the mixer on, add spoon by spoon the walnut mixture till it mixes in pretty well and comes together.
Use a spoon or fixed measure to scoop it out, press the dough a little (like kababs!) and shape it into cookies with shapes of your choice.
Pre-heat oven to 325 deg F. Line a parchment / waxed paper in a cookie sheet and arrange the cookie shaped dough with 1 inch spacing as they tend to spread a bit while getting baked.
Bake for 20 minutes. (You may flip it half-way through.)
Take it on a wire rack or plate for cooling, in a minute or two-not after that, sprinkle the powdered sugar. (I took the help of a new tea strainer, one tsp of powdered sugar in the strainer, holding it on the top of cookie, jerking the strainer clockwise on cookie for equal distribution. Let it cool for another 10-15 minutes before transferring to an airtight container.



This is the first time baked cookie in which I melted the butter but taste was awesome. I used a star shaped cookie cutter to shape it. I didn't sprinkle sugar on it.





Second time I baked these with butter kept at room temperature, they were sprinkled with some powdered sugar and were awesome to taste.
They were browned at base a bit more than needed as my electric oven emits more heat.
I baked these in electric oven..temp-150 deg C -20 mins precise.






After shifting it to this cookie jar, I had to wrap a paper towel around it so that my son doesn't demand them at odd times -my cabinets being full, I have no other place but my counter-top to place them!! Poor cookies soon would become extinct else!!




Make them, bake them and Njoi them at tea!

Humble Breakfast- Normal Steamed Idli & Microwave(MW) Idli

Normal steamed Idli (Left) Microwaved Idli (Right).

What happens when you run out of time and really want to have a replete breakfast? Microwave (mw) comes to aid! Yes the above pic is of a mv'd idli. It truly didn't take much time, considering the fact that the fermented batter was atop my counter. All I did was to pull out glass bowls, grease them with coconut oil, fill two tbsp of batter...mv on high for 1 minute!! That was it and out came the (15 minutes saver) yummy idli...filling enough!

Here is the recipe for normal Idli...

Ingredients :
1 cup urad daal
2 cups dosa rice
2 tbspn cooked rice
Salt to taste
Coconut oil for greasing

Method :
Step I - Washing and soaking. Wash urad daal and dosa rice seperately until clean water flows. In double the water, soak for around 5-6 hours. Preferable complete the soaking procedure for urad daal under refrigeration. (This tip is from my amma to protect the mixer jar and motor from heating up.)

Step II - Grinding. First grind the urad daal with little water into a very very fine paste, giving the mixer a standing time of a minute or two between every run. Touch to feel the silky-satin smooth batter. No grains of urad daal should be felt at this point. Run the mixie again to get a fine batter. Pour this into a vessel. In the mixer jar, take dosa rice with water visible to an inch above it. Mix it till coarse or smooth. If you are not using cooked rice, make it very smooth. If you grind the dosa rice coarsely, making it look like rava or sugar granules, please add cooked rice for fluffyness. Add the cooked rice to mixer jar, blend till it is well mixed and you get a flowing yet sauce consistency batter. Add this to the urad daal batter. Mix well with aid of a spatula or spoon till its homogenous. Leave aside covered with a lid to ferment. Choose a vessel which is large so that this batter is filled up to two third of the vessel. This batter should neither be too liquid nor too thick.

Step III - Fermenting. For places with a temperature of 25 deg C or more, the batter will ferment in 10 hours. For lower temperature areas, leave the batter to ferment for upto 24 hours or till the batter doubles up in volume. Check for fermentation. Add salt.

Step IV - Steaming and Mv Idlis.
For steamer idlis : Take the idli mould...grease it with ghee or coconut oil. Place 1 1/2 tbpsn of batter into each of the four dents of a idli plate. Leave a little place..say a mm so that idli has space to rise on steaming. I use a pressure cooker. My Mil's way. So one cup of water, first goes the idli stand then the idli plates one after the other, carefully without spilling the batter out.
The stove goes on- its kept on a high flame and lid firmly placed, minus the whistle / weight.
After five minutes or just as high steam is seen from the whistle rod, lower the flame to slow and cook exactly for ten minutes. Have to keep a watch on time for this. Put it off. Give 2-3 minutes, open the lid, scoop out the idlis and serve hot with accompaniment which varies from podi, chutney, sambhar, ketchup(yes..thats for my ketchup loving kids!!) etc. Enjoy!
Ideal for a family of 5-6 members as it gives out many idlis at one go.
Time to prepare - 1 + 5 + 10 + 2 = 18 mins - 20 mins approx frm preparing the greased plates to palating it.

For microwave idlis : Six small glass bowls which are microwaveable are needed to be greased with coconut oil or ghee. 1 1/2 tbspn batter into each of the greased bowls. Place the bowls at the brim of the turntables as heat is reflected more around the corners. Microwave high for one minute and idli is ready! Take it out only after 3 minutes as center is cooked later. Depending on the settings of the mw, try one bowl first and note the time. Thereafter you may use that as standard time for mw idlis. Serve immediately.
Ideal for two people. Total time taken - 1 + 1 + 3 = 5 mins. So a real time saver for me!


Enjoy Idlis whichever way you may please!

Moong Daal Curry With Chappati

A dish made with veggies and split moong daal. Its delicious when served with rice or chappatis.

When ISG posted this recipe on her blog, Daily Musings a few days back it promptly caught my attention. I usually make beans upperi / upkari which is an accompaniment for dal-rice. This dish started off like a upkari is being made and turned it into a gravy with veggies! A beautiful information by ISG in her post about various pulses and their properties. Thanks for posting.

Here goes the recipe for daal.

Ingredients :

1 cup split moong daal
1/2 cup peas (fresh / frozen)
10-12 french beans
1/2 small red onion chopped finely
1 tsp mustard seeds (rai)
1 tsp cumin seeds (jeera)
2 sprigs curry leaves
Oil (Vegetable oil)

For Masala :
1 tbspn fresh scraped coconut or 1/4th cup dessicated coconut
1 tsp jeera
1-3 green chillies

Method :
Cook daal with peas in a pressure cooker upto three whistles-wt a pinch of turmeric if needed. Grind to fine paste the masala ingredients with little water (say 4-5 tbspns). Wash and cut beans finely. In a deep pan, take a tbspn of oil, add mustard seeds, let them splutter, add jeera and curry leaves, add the onions which are finely chopped, fry until light brown, add the masala, fry a bit. Add the beans and cook for 4 - 5 minutes till tender. Mash the the cooked daal a bit carefully not mashing the peas..add it in the pan and cook further. Add water if you need more watery consistency. Simmer for 3-4 mins on a medium flame..put off the stove and cover with lid for flavour to gel.

Serve hot with chappati or rice.


Thankyou for this lovely recipe, ISG which I tweaked a bit to suit my pantry and family.

Sheer Kurma /Sevaiya Kheer / Semaiya Kheer

This one is from Rakesh Sethi in his Eid special episode of Mirch Masala.
Though I can find this recipe again on Indya.com, I want to file it somewhere, and what better place than my blog can I find to keep this recipe safe.

Updated : Happy Dassera To All My Lovely Friends, Family and Visitors!


Ingredients :
5 cups milk
2 1/2 cups sugar
25 gms roasted sevai
20 gms khajoor paste(approx 5 dates peeled and ground into a paste)
20 gms rice paste
4 pods green cardamom
15 gms of sliced badam,sliced pista,cashew(halved) raisins
Ghee


Method :
In a heavy bottomed kadhai,take the milk and heat on a medium flame, keep stirring till one boil is reached and the quantity reduces by 1/3rd. Add the paste of rice (soak two tablespoon rice for 20 mins, grind with little water, to obtain paste) to milk and stir the mixture will thicken, crush the cardamoms a little and add. Add the khajoor paste, mix well.Add sevaiyan. In a pan, take 2-3 tbspn ghee, fry cashew,badam,pistachios until brown, add to the mixture. Add sugar. Stir till the desired consistency or thickness is obtained.
Serve chilled, garnished with cashew,badam,pistachios.

Eid-Mubarak.

I had first tasted this as a kid at my neighbour's place, who used to fondly call me for eating anything that was made daily and especially for festivals too..for some vague reasons, I was not able to pick up this kheer's name as a kid and used to call it "Surkumba"!! I came across various cookery shows on DD in my teens and realised that I was calling my favourite sweet wrongly!!
I corrected myself then.

This is the first time I used Khajur paste and Rice paste in it, it was too delicious for me!!!
I also added a tbspn of charoli which was originally used by my neighbour's in their dish!
My family(both sides-mine as well as hubby's) makes semaiya kheer with the thick rice noodles,
while I truly prefer these wheat ones which are very thin and lend out a different taste to this kheer!!!

Bon apetite!! Njoi this kheer!!

Golpapdi / Wheat Biscuits

Tarala Dalal is one lovable cook. I used to watch her cookery shows regularly till they were pulled out of the channel. This recipe is from her camp. Golpapdi. (I still am clueless why its called Gol as its not round, why papdi as its a biscuit! Well maybe someday my query will be resolved! :) )This was instantly loved by kids. Preparing Golpapdi is very easy and fast. I got it done in 40 mins.

The taste is heavily of jaggery,ghee and roasted wheat flour. Its crispy yet has a softness to it which makes it heavenly.

Below is the recipe from her blog - Tarala Dalal.

GOLPAPDI

A wheat flour sweet which is easy to prepare.


Cooking Time : 20 min.
Preparation Time : 10 min.

Serves 4.

Ingredients

1 cup whole wheat flour (gehun ka atta) 3/4 cup jaggery (gur), cut into small pieces 1 teaspoon poppy seeds (khus-khus) 1/4 teaspoon cardamom powder (elaichi) 1 teaspoon desiccated coconut (optional) 5 tablespoons ghee

Method

1. Sprinkle the poppy seeds on a 150 mm. (6") diameter greased thali. Keep aside. 2. Melt the ghee in a frying pan and add the wheat flour stirring continuopusly till it turns golden brown in colour. 3. Remove from the flame and add the jaggery, cardmom powder and coconut. Stir well. 4. When the jaggery melts and the mixture is still warm, pour it into the greased thali with poppy seeds and spread it evenly with the help of the base of a small bowl (katori) 5. Cut into diamond shapes while still warm. 6. Store in an air-tight container when cool.

Tips

You can add 1 tablespoon of milk along with the jaggery if the mixture becomes too hard.

The only change I did was substituting the poppy seeds with white sesame seeds (til) since we don't get poppy seeds here.

Lovely recipe for me, I prepare this once in a while. Thanks for posting TD and team.


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