After a little hiatus, we are back with the Muslim Food Blogger Challenge this month. Of late, we have been looking at easy themes to get in a bit of participation. How much that strategy has helped, I don’t want to comment. 🙂 When it comes to blogging, it becomes the last priority when life keeps throwing things at you on a constant basis. It is happening at the moment for me too. It is just that I don’t want to let my passion die and I am fighting it as much as I can. I have been doing the same for the past two years and so far, I have been successful. But how much I can hold myself up needs to be seen… 🙂 Coming back to the challenge, the theme for the month is “Sandwich”. So what is a sandwich? In layman terms, it is…
Vanilla Bean Custard | Simple Egg Custard
If I had cooked the Dalia Upma and Palak Paneer for HD and me, today’s recipe was made for the girls. 😀 I shouldn’t show any discrimination, right? This week, I am doing three back to back posts for the Blogging Marathon #98 for the theme “Cooking for Two”. Making a purely egg custard has been in my agenda for a long time. But usually, I prefer using whole eggs in my recipes – I did that with my lemon curd, when most of the recipes only use the yolks. I have even made a baked custard which used whole eggs. Somehow it irks me that I have to waste a part of the eggs. When people tell me that they discard the yolks and only cook the whites, I boil from inside. “How dare! The yolks are the tastiest part of the egg!” Hehe… Thankfully, the notions…
Creme Caramel | Flan
I have always written very long posts for almost all my milestone posts on this blog. I have celebrated the blog birthdays, and then each time I achieved a number of posts on the blog, etc. Of late, I stopped celebrating. It started to make no sense to me. Should I say that they started to mean nothing to me? As this post goes live, the blog has completed 6 years old. I should have posted day before yesterday, but I wasn’t in a mood to clog up the posts on the blog. I wanted to give the posts some time, and myself some time too… Last year was a fight of sorts. I fought to keep my spirit of blogging. I fought to keep going. There were so many reasons to it. I started the blog as a diary of recipes for myself, and then it slowly…
Malted Nutella Bread Pudding
With due permission from Valli, I decided to move yesterday’s Bakeathon post to today, since I didn’t want it to clash with the MFB post. I somehow don’t like the idea of having more than one post a day, though I have done that a few times in the past, but not with a full heart. This time, I made sure I asked Valli and as soon as I got the OK, I just went ahead with scheduling the post on the next day. 🙂 The recipe today is an amalgamation of a lot of factors – leftover bread getting stale, wanting to finish a bottle of Nutella nearing expiry date and then not liking the bottle of chocolate flavored Horlicks that I had bought. Horlicks is actually my cheat meal. Especially with nights getting quite chilled now, I always wish for a warm drink before going off…
Banana Cocoa Waffles
The feeling of emptiness is a real tough one. After having a chirping noisy house for the past one month, and a back breaking crazy sessions over the past 12 days, my house is empty. Yesterday afternoon, my kids left for their vacation along with my parents and then at night, my sister and her son bid farewell. It felt all too soon… The house looked so deserted, with everything just left as it is. Today, I have to slowly start putting things in place and make the house look like how it did before. I am looking at the whole thing positively. Last year, my kids and I were apart for more than 5 weeks, but this time, it is shorter. I will be travelling by month end, and it’s not that far away. Moreover, it’s a good time to get back to my routine. The past…
Mutta Urapichathu | Paal Mutta Urapichathu ~ Malabar Egg Pudding
Malabar is the home of so many delicacies, that are slowly moving into oblivion. I am trying my level best to collect, try and post as much as recipes I can, but I believe I am so lazy to work on especially the recipes that need some level of hard work. 🙁 So at the moment I am trying to concentrate and do more of the easy ones, and InShaAllah, as time goes, I will get onto the easier ones. But my task is clear – get in as much as our traditional food on this blog as I can. I got this recipe from a group, and why wouldn’t it attract my attention? I love egg based desserts and this sounded so easy. Most of the desserts in Malabar are steamed or cooked on low flame, like the polas – check out the carrot pola, podi pola…
Baked Blueberry French Toast
We have had some amazing weather over the last weekend. Scheduling posts actually keeps me away from updating the blog with what happens, but sometimes you are forced to, especially when the posts are related to challenges and you don’t want to miss the dates. 🙂 I like to be particular that way, and Alhamdulillah, so far I have been doing well to manage. If you are following me on Instagram, you would have caught up with the weekend weather updates. I tend to post more weather/sky/nature clicks there rather than my food. 😀 Somehow, I prefer to click my surroundings rather than what I am eating, especially when we are at a restaurant. I prefer to dig in right away rather than pull out the mobile, click it till the perfect click is done, and then eat it cold. I can’t take it that way… 😛 The rains…
Balaleet ~ Emirati Vermicelli Egg Breakfast
While I posted the Chebaab as the National Day special, I had mentioned that I would try to recreate Emirati dishes in my kitchen. So far, the process has been slow but steady. I am slowly trying a few new dishes, but not clicking them, since I would like to make them again for the blog and click them well. InShaAllah, slowly you will see a fair amount of Emirati dishes featuring on the blog this year. 🙂 I was introduced to Balaleet by this post of Fami’s. Till then, I was unaware of it’s existence. I was really not sure of how the combination of sweet and salt would co-exist. That was when the breakfast at Logma happened and I got my first taster of this dish. I ended up eating that little portion all by myself without sharing with my friend. 😉 From then, I had…
Iced Chocolate Mousse
A few weeks ago, I had posted a live video of Rasha trying to help me with this mousse on my personal FB timeline. From then on, I received a few requests for the recipe that she tried, or she started to try and then left in the middle, I must say! 😉 I was not intending to do this recipe any earlier on the blog, but then, I thought, since the video had gone live, why don’t I use the opportunity of making this post appear earlier, in the form of a book review? 🙂 Today’s book for review is “Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook 200 Delicious Desserts”, written by Sara Lewis, printed by Octopus Books, UK. This book is a part of a collection of books with 2oo recipes. This was one of the books that HD picked up for me from this year’s Sharjah Book Fair…
Cheesecake in a Jar ~ Microwave Cheesecake
Did the title intrigue you? Yes, today I am going to share how to make a baked cheesecake in a microwave! Isn’t that interesting? A cheesecake is something that I avoid making just because I am scared of the calories that come with it. Not that I am really bothered as such, but still… There is something addictive in a cheesecake, that you feel like having more and more of it. So when I saw this cheesecake in a little book called “Mug Cakes”, I had to try it. And boy, wasn’t I happy? This tastes as good as any baked cheesecake! The only thing you have to be careful is about the microwave time – do NOT microwave it at one stretch, instead you do it in batches, so that you have your microwave in one piece! Since it has egg in it, it can built up a…
Microwave Bread Pudding
Alhamdulillah, so far I have been having a good time organizing the 3 back-to-back posts. I am glad I have received some very good responses for the series as well. Since from last month, I have started the book review series too, I am planning to space out my series from the new year, InShaAllah. I may move the 3 back-to-back to becoming a bi-monthly series and making the book review a monthly one so that my books move in the shelves and don’t rot! 😉 Let’s see how it goes… I would love to keep my blogging journey as stress free as possible, so I have to make sure that I don’t fall into too many plans at the moment! 🙂 OK, so what do we have in store for this month? I guess when you saw the title of today’s post, you must have got a…
Basseema/ Bassima ~ Egyptian Coconut Cake
I have been wanting to post this and I am so excited that it is finally making its way to this space of mine! The season now is such that we do a lot of barbecuing. HD is least interested but his cousin love to arrange everything and most of the time, we only need to be present and eat what they make! 😉 Freshly barbecued chicken with some hummus and khubboos is definitely our favorite winter time foods for dinner over weekend. The men will be doing everything while we women huddle at a corner to chit chat and the kids play their energies out. It is always a time we all look forward to, and definitely I am looking forward to the start during this season too, InShaAllah… 🙂 Everytime we go for it, all the men expect me to make something sweet and take as the…
Carrot Pola – Malabar Carrot Egg Cake
For the past couple of days, it has been a disturbing time for a lot of bloggers. It was noticed that a very popular food blogger, who got her popularity in just around a year, was copying content from many successful bloggers, who have worked hard for the popularity they have now. None of us are walking encyclopedias – we all learn from each other and from many people around who influence us in many ways. Always give credit and never copy what belongs to somebody else… It hurts when your effort is taken and used by somebody else for their own benefits. Definitely, these incidents are not going to go down much, but hopefully bloggers will be more careful on what they do… Hopefully… 🙁 Coming to today’s post… A pola is, I feel, the easiest Malabari treat. All you need is loads of eggs and any…
Podipola/ Kumsi ~ Malabar Plain Cake
Today we are on day 10 of this precious month. That is the first part getting over by today evening. The Prophet PBUH has said, “It (Ramadhan) is the month, whose beginning is mercy, its middle, forgiveness and its end, emancipation from the fire (Hell)” The days of mercy are coming to an end and we move into the days of forgiveness. He is always ready to accept us, as long as our intentions are clean. May Allah have mercy on us and make us among those who receive His forgiveness… Aameen… This is the fourth time I am being featured on Lubna’s Ramadan event, which is entering into its ninth edition this year, MaShaAllah… I cannot express how happy I feel each time she invites me over this lovely space of hers. I still remember how much I couldn’t believe myself when she invited me the first…
Mint Milk Ice Pops
After the Chocolate Popsicles, here is the second one! I am not a big fan of mint as such, but I do love its aroma and it’s flavor. Off late, I had got hooked onto mint choco-chip combination and especially love the Lindt Dark Chocolate Mint – OK, now I am off all that for the time being but I have the right to let my mind wander aimlessly over my past love, right? 😉 One day, I landed up with a bunch of mint leaves and I didn’t want to let them get spoiled. While searching through Google, I stumbled upon this recipe and put it to try almost immediately. I was actually apprehensive if I would be the only one eating it, since my kids are more bend towards chocolate than any other flavor. Still I went ahead thinking that if nobody eats it, I would…