This month, I am a part of the team that is going to do the Bake-a-Thon this month. You will see a baking recipe appearing on the participating blogs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, throughout the month of December. Since the month has started on a Friday, the first is up for today! For the first time since starting the blog, I will have a post up every Friday this month! 😀 The only reason why I took up the challenge is because I had enough to support off from my drafts. I know that nobody wants to believe me when I say that I am hardly cooking and clicking, ever since I have come back from vacation – that’s three months now! I have been concentrating on eating clean, staying away from all the “nasty foods”, and trying to tone myself up. It has been a bumpy…
Tropical Trifle – Guest post for Love To Cook
Tropical Trifle – when you hear the name, what comes to your mind? 🙂 All tropical flavors, right? Trifle is one of my favorite dessert to make when I have a lot of guests coming. It is one of the oldest recipes on the blog (which deserves an uplift, but I am waiting for a party type gathering plus some extra time to photograph!) and I was really wondering why I never made variations and posted, apart from the Black Forest Trifle in cups, and yes, the Mango Trifle as well! This trifle screams tropical – coconut in every bite along with pineapples and cherries. The whole point is that it is so easy to put together and doesn’t take too much time. Just assemble everything, push it into the fridge and let it set during the time you concentrate on the other tasks on hand. It is…
Spiced Banana Breakfast Muffins
Nowadays, I buy just enough bananas for us to eat, so that we don’t have much of leftover to tempt me to go ahead and bake. 😀 When they are ripe, I tend to freeze them so that I can use them for my breakfast smoothies during the weekend. But at times, I can’t stop myself from baking and enjoying them, but I try to keep them as close to being healthy. These banana muffins are made of wholewheat flour (aatta) – even better if you can get hold of wholemeal flour, and spiked with a lot of spices. If you thought that banana bakes are supposed to be only with cinnamon, then these muffins will change your thought process. It has almost all spices that would essentially go into your masala chai! I had printed out this recipe from the General Mills site but unfortunately that link…
Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
I am excited to be doing the review for a very cute and interesting upcoming cookbook! Miranda Couse, who blogs at “Cookie Dough and Oven Mitt” is releasing her cookbook called “The Easy Homemade Cookie Cookbook”, which is up for release on October 31 and up for pre-booking on Amazon. Since I am a pretty lazy cookie maker but a lover of cookbook reviews, I decided to jump at the opportunity and get it going. The book is published by Rockbridge Press and contains more than 150 recipes of classics, occasion special and other American favorites. The book starts off with a lovely introduction about how Miranda started the whole process of working on the cookbook and she dedicates it to the two cookie monsters in her family – her husband and little boy. The book then moves on to mentioning the essentials required for baking, and…
Be My Guest – Steamed Bread Pudding with Caramel
Just like I was excited about last month’s guest post, the same level of excitement follows for this month too! It feels lovely to get a “yes” from bloggers who have been doing this for longer years than you. It shows how humble they are in their attitude and quite explains their success too. 🙂 Julie’s blog is also one among the earlier ones I followed while I started blogging. I love how she starts her posts. They start off very innocently. She doesn’t share so much about herself but whatever she does, you can sense a humble and down-to-earth person being behind the blog. I eagerly wait for her recipes and go through them, since most of them are very “naadan” (country style) recipes and I keep pinning up most of her recipes! Hehe… Some of the recipes I really love on her blog are Ragi Ela Ada,…
Gateau aux Pommes ~ French Apple Cake
You would remember I had done the first week of the Blogging Marathon #81 in the theme of “Lentils and Sides”. For the second week, the theme I chose was “Apple Desserts”. It is the season of apples. As of now, you can see wide variety of apples on the shelves with competitive prices. Being in the UAE, the only way to know that it is season is by watching the prices. 😀 All fruits when it is during its season time will be available at really throw-away price, while at the other times, may pinch your pocket despite the availability. I like apples as a fruit and I have one every alternate day. Even during school times, I would be the only one among siblings who would eat apples. I love the red gala ones, which are crunchy and mildly sweet. D likes the round yellow Iranian…
Baid Tamat/ Baith Thamath ~ Emirati Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes
Egg is a universal breakfast item, eaten up in various forms all across the world, isn’t it? Eggs during breakfast for me always meant a bull’s eye or umma’s style scrambled eggs. Sometimes, when I need a change, it would take the shape of a simple saffron flavored omelette decked up on the Balaleet. I really don’t know how I landed up on finding out this simple Emirati scrambled eggs, but I faintly remember, that a Google search for Emirati breakfast dishes landed me up on a site which had the menu of the restaurant, but not it’s recipes! Why on earth did I think it would have it? 😀 But thankfully, the site had a description of the dish. Later, I got a chance to taste the Baid Tamat on the Logma breakfast platter and it made me realize how straightforward this dish is! “Baid” means eggs…
Easy Banana Bread
I normally don’t need a reason to bake a banana bread. I don’t even wait for the bananas to ripe! 😀 Since our house is quite warm most of the time, I buy bananas in small quantities so that we finish consuming it, but sometimes doing it doesn’t help and the bananas get riper quicker than we like it. Just like me, the kids also like the bananas in the just-ripe stage, where the sweetness is mild. Once it gets a little softer, none of us would touch it. Earlier I used to bake quite often, but now I have got myself a bit tight on my baking due to my weight goals. My family has this tendency of eating anything baked only for one day and if there are any leftovers, they wouldn’t touch it in the coming days. I would have to either distribute it or eat…
French Toast
Sometimes I wonder whether I need to post such simple recipes on the blog. But then, at times, I do realize that there are people who don’t know about it or they have simply forgotten about such simple things in life. If you see, today’s food is really complicated. With heavy jargon like “molecular gastronomy” and so on, food is being converted into something more than what is required to fill our stomach. The whole idea is to feed the eyes before the food can actually be eaten. I don’t know if any of you realize that when you see the food, your stomach feels half full that when you try to eat it, you are unable to finish it. When I go to restaurants, I tend to order food which I can eat, or if we are a group, then we order limited. At times, we think we…
Egg Potato Masala
We had a long weekend starting from Thursday, on the occasion of the Hiji (Islamic) New Year. Normally, I look forward to weekends like that, but when somehow it doesn’t go the way you would have loved it to be, it doesn’t feel good. Nonetheless, I relaxed a lot, cooked a lot and even ate out a lot, did a lot of splurging (hehe…), so it’s been a weekend of sorts. I had three of my cousins for lunch on Thursday, so we had a lunch of plain rice with varutharacha sambar, moru curry, string beans thoran and fish fry. There were leftovers, especially of the sambar, which got frozen for future use and the remaining were converted to lunch on Saturday. We relaxed at home on Thursday. I closed the kitchen for lunch on Friday, only making idlis and chutney for breakfast. Since HD was busy, the kids…
White House Honey Oat Muffins
While I was on vacation, I had taken a vow not to cook any new dishes unless and until really necessary. I have so much of drafts to cover and somehow I want to finish them off by this year end, however looking at the way things are, I don’t think I will meet the deadline. At the moment, I am going back to my old posts and seeing which needs updates, but I am taking it slow so that I don’t over do myself. 😀 But I had to adjust the vow a bit when I saw the mail for this month’s Fantastical Food Fighting challenge! Sarah mentions that since September is the “National Honey Month” in the USA, the theme would be – no prizes for guessing – honey! We had done a honey post for MFBC a few months ago. I love honey as an…
Blueberry Mug Muffin
I would be lying if I say I don’t miss home. I am not a person who calls my parents every single day, mainly because we run out of topics to talk. 😀 My sister calls umma almost every day and asks detail by detail, however B and I are just the opposite. We always talk to the point. There are times when I call umma after a week, and she starts off with a lot of complaints, but I patiently hear them and smile at myself. What do you do when you lose track of time? After coming back from vacation, I have been calling them alternatively every three days, and somehow after the call, my heart sulks. There was a time when I used to stay with my parents. Sometimes I wished for my own privacy. But once they left and we moved on our own, I…