Amn’t I happy today? We were blessed by the Almighty with a beautiful day yesterday. From morning, it was cloudy. While my umma and me were slogging in the kitchen cooking up for the large entourage of guests expected for lunch, the beautiful climate outside kept our spirits lifted. The balcony door was open to allow in the breeze, which sent chills running around. Yeah, quite strange, considering that we are in the end of April and the temperatures are supposed to be not less than 34 degrees. Drops… Once we had lunch – all of us together, it was a fun day with almost 20 people at home!!! – the women huddled together in the balcony to enjoy the rain. Wasn’t it fantastic! That breeze, the continuously showering was just too good to be true!!! Finally, in the evening, not being able to hold onto staying at home anymore, I dragged…
Be My Guest – Pies in a Pot
The next Saturday arrives with another guest post. This time, it is the very talented Priya Elias who blogs at “The Humpty Dumpty Kitchen“. I came upon her blog at the early stages of starting my blog and I really loved what I saw. First of all, I love the way she writes. There is a hint of humor in each line that she jots out that you can’t but help laughing. She calls herself a lazy bone but the pictures on her blog states otherwise. At least she takes the effort to take such beautiful pictures and arrange her food in a lovely way. That is definitely not the sign of a lazyhead but an extremely talented food blogger. This is the fifth in the series of guest posts on my blog. To see those that have been featured till now, you can refer here. First. let’s get…
Vermicelli Sweet
Oh, the weekend is here almost. And it’s going to be a little celebratory weekend. Why? I will let you know in the coming posts. 🙂 Yesterday, we were kind of a little scared when the news of a moderate earthquake spread like lightening. The UAE in certain parts experienced a tremor of 6.5 and aftershocks of 3.5 magnitude, towards the evening time. Actually speaking, I had not experienced it. But from what I knew with all the FB updates, most of them did feel it, especially towards the new Dubai side and the northern Emirates side. It has been a frightening weekend, the heavy sandstorm early this week has wind coming at 70 km/hr speed followed by half an hour of really heavy showers and light showers that continued till early morning. There was quite a bit of debris on the roads, boards and placards had fallen down,…
Gajar Halwa ~ Indian Carrot Sweet
Some posts appear much before they have to actually appear. Just like this Gajar Halwa I made for my colleagues last week… I was definitely not intending to post this anytime sooner as there are so many recipes sitting in my drafts and I wanted to finish off the older ones before I go to the newer ones. However, when somebody is not willing to take down the recipe orally after eating it and insists on seeing it as a blog post, what do I do? 🙂 There she helps… 🙂 I had quite a bit of carrots sitting in my fridge and I had to finish it off. I checked with my colleagues whether they wanted halwa or kheer, and the response came in unanimous tone – HALWA! And it had been quite sometime since I had made it. Once I peeled the carrots and started grating it,…
Be My Guest – Punjabi Shahi Colored Zarda
It’s a Saturday and time for the next guest post… Seriously, I am so happy that whoever I have written to have always come back with a positive response, be it Meena, Hasna and now it’s Noor. I am not sure if you are familiar with her – but her facebook page has over 1000 likes, which is not bad at all!!! I came across Noor through FB and was instantly attracted to her page. I am big fan of Pakistani cuisine and she had a lot of traditional recipes with some really nice pictures, and not only that, her blog is beautifully and very professionally done. I was not sure how she would take my request for a guest post, so I contacted her through FB message and was surprised to find a nice homely lady, ready to give in. This is the first time somebody has asked her…
Custard Sewiyan ~ Vermicelli with Custard
I have again been playing with the gadgets!!! I’ve changed the header, changed the fonts and slightly the colors. I’ve made the blog totally white, and now I am again looking around to make my blog look a bit more better. I somehow don’t seem to be satisfied with what I have. But now, I love the header. Do you like it too, friends??? 🙂 Actually speaking, my head is buzzing with ideas… Last time, when I put up the coming soon part as “Surprise!”, Divya, who blogs at Dishing, asked me if it were a giveaway. 🙂 I’ve never got any giveaways so far, mainly because I can’t keep a track of what all I should be participating. I blog for the fun of posting what I am trying and becoming successful, as well as the level of interaction with people with similar mindsets – read it as…
Eggless Caramel Bread Pudding
After being on Blogger, I am trying to get a hang of Pinterest and Twitter. I am an expert in Facebook, I can do anything on that with my eyes closed!!! Yeah, kind of an addiction… 🙁 I tried Twitter sometime back and then just closed it down. Now for my blog, I am trying to learn it again. I guess I will go slow on it and learn it at my pace, whenever I have time! 🙂 The recipe for today is a simple steamed pudding, made with ingredients in your kitchen cabinet at any point of time and yummy to be true! It tastes as good as any steamed pudding would be. As soon as I got hold of the recipe, I tried it and it was a lovely looking dessert, which was really tasty as well. When you have guests coming in, this can be made…
Banoffee Pie
I was actually not intending to do this post anytime now, but then when my cousin, who happens to be carrying, saw the picture on my FB page and asked for the recipe, I couldn’t say no! So here I am posting the recipe, as good as fresh!!! 🙂 The DDL, Instagrammed… 🙂 I’ve been wanting to make banoffee pie for quite some time but thinking about the calorie laden dessert gave me weak knees. But then, what do you do when you are faced with the below situations: 1. Dulche de leche at half the price because the expiry is less than 2 months old. 2. Whipped cream spray bottle at 25% price because the expiry date is by this weekend. 3. Biscuits lying in your pantry, not wanted by anybody because it was not the biscuits you had intended to buy! 4. Some nice ripe bananas!!! …
Crunchy Cornflake Cake
I am a big collector of recipe cutouts. Wherever I go, I see if I can take in a few magazines which have some interesting recipes that I can cut and paste it into my “recipe scrap book” and then refer to it whenever I am in a mood to cook something new. I am sure many of us have that habit of doing this, apart from the umpteen number of recipe books we collect! I have already taken a full section of my cupboard which is almost 80% full. I have a few cookbooks that I had ordered from Amazon and Book Depository on its way, which I am not aware what the sizes would be, but then I am sure once they are in, I will have to rummage around for a brand new spot for my future cookbooks and scraps, or shift everything to a brand new…
Carrot Pudding
After posting 18 recipes, I finally showed my little blog to my HD. He was kind of surprised plus happy as well. He somehow never thought that I would even do a recipe blog, especially knowing the lazy cook that I am. There is no surpise that he was surprised! 🙂 Hehe… He is happy for me and wants me to keep posting as long as I make something interesting. I’m glad that he is supportive… After sometime, I guess I can hand over the mantle of having to take the photographs for me, because he is a much better photographer. But then, to get his time is quite a big difficulty. Hopefully, later I may have some decent looking pictures… OK, now stopping my chatter and going off to the recipe… I like to call agar-agar a life saver. You can literally make a pudding of anything with this wonder-weed …
Mexican Flan
I do have a sweet tooth, but I can tell you one thing – once I started cooking, I really cannot eat Nutella, condensed milk or the likes directly into my mouth. I somehow feel that they are better when included in cooking. Seriously!!! These were things I could keep licking my spoon and dipping it over and over again, but now I have got over the urge to do so. Therefore, last time, when I baked a cake for our schoolmates get-together (will post sometime later), I had this remaining dulce de leche, called DDL with love, lying in the fridge and was really wondering what to do with it. Seriously, if it was not for blogosphere, I would have never know what DDL is!!! As usual, I hung onto my phone surfing for some idea – I love to do that!!! – to finish it off and I found…
Easy Coconut Milk Pudding
This was one dessert I had made with all leftovers I had. It was a depressing day – my whole family had gone to India and loneliness was creeping in. And me, being the sweet tooth, naturally went on to depend on a dessert. This was whipped in no time and set in very little time as well. Was really spongy and melt-in-the-mouth. Would definitely make this again… Updated on March 12, 2016 with new pictures! 🙂 The only difference is I made it in a mould instead of pouring it into a loaf pan. The old picture is below… Update on March 13 – after uploading the new pictures, I have got a few queries regarding whether the agar agar mentioned in the recipe is enough to hold the pudding. Yes, it will just hold the pudding, but it won’t be sturdy enough. If you…