For this week’s Blogging Marathon #114, when Valli published the themes and I saw “Bring on The Curry!”, I picked it up right away. I struggle with making curries especially for dinner. For lunch, we have a standard rice-curry-fish-stir fry combo, that is still manageable, but for dinner, to keep the folk’s interest, it is a tough task. Anything non-veg gets accepted with gusto but when it comes to vegetarian fare, I have a roller coaster ride. I guess anybody with a carnivorous family would agree to this. So you can imagine my excitement, when I made this sagu and it got wiped up from the plate. Such a joyous moment! A sagu is a rich gravy that is very specially made in Karnataka, usually eaten with set dosa or pooris. When you go through the list of ingredients, you may figure out the richness. The coconut and…
Madhura Chatti Pathiri | Sweet Chatti Pathal {The Cheat Version}
During the poll on my Instagram profile, after the Bread Kunafa, this recipe garnered the second highest number of votes. A “chatti pathiri” is Malabar’s answer to the Italian lasagna. I already have the savory version on the blog, which is made of crepes, layered with delicious chicken filling, and cooked on stove top till it looks like a beautiful layered cake. Since we don’t have the chatti pathiri in the area I belong to, it came into our family when umma learned it from one of her Kannur friends. She loves making it so much that it repeats on our tea time menus when she runs out of ideas. Hehe… However, the first time I had the sweet version was after I got married. More than the savory version, I would be served the sweet version when I had visited his relatives places as a “puthupenn”. I…
Kadala Parippu Pola | Kadalakka Pola ~ Malabar Chickpea Lentil Egg Cake
Everyone has this habit of making some sort of snacks during Iftar time. In our home, we try not to do it frequently. This year, since my brother’s family is with us, both of us try to experiment something or the other, but in limited quantities, so that there is something to eat for chai time, but not too much to be really heavy. Hehe… But we are always looking to make dishes that are not very time consuming and can be made in no time. So from today, I am scheduling three back-to-back easy snacks that you can make for your family for Iftar time, without spending too much time in the kitchen. I guess that does sound appealing… 🙂 Malabar has its own big share of interesting snacks. Even though I am not aware of majority of it, I have tried to cover all that I…
Easy Jackfruit Cake
Jackfruit is not a fruit that is my favorite. I somehow don’t seem to like it. It wasn’t like that all the time. There was a time I used to hog on jackfruit. My mattamma – umma’s mom – has a few huge jackfruit trees in her yard that yeilds so many fruits every year, MaShaAllah. However, off late, it hasn’t been able to, maybe due to its old age or likely even bad eye. Hehe… When we were in school, our home visits were limited to once in two years. I always wonder what it felt like being home without doing much, and I can hardly remember anything. Nowadays, kids are actually pampered with visits every now and then. I have been trying to see if we can defer plans every year, but there would be something or the other, and we would have to go. This year…
Zucchini Dates Muffins
Sometimes I feel like thanking the Westerners for classifying muffins and cakes as breakfast. It makes our life so much easier. 😀 I mean, would our mothers ever agree to eating cake as breakfast? No way! But then with ways of incorporating all kind of “healthy” ingredients into your cakes, you can very well have a delicious baked breakfast. I have a few lovely bakes that I had made specifically for breakfast, like these Apple Flax Muffins and the Blueberry French Toast, among what I can remember. So when I was considering making something with egg as my breakfast – because eggs are default breakfast material for me since very long – I remembered these muffins I baked recently, which can easily be eaten for breakfast since it has a lot of goodness in it. So after the simple Jam and Cheese Sandwich and the Upma, here is a…
Gajar Halwa Trifle | Fusion Trifle
It is the season of carrots now. When it gets cold, the market gets flooded with the orange Australian carrots and the red Pakistani carrots. There is nothing like eating a warm plate of gajar ka halwa when the weather is at its chilled best, isn’t it? Everybody I am seeing around are making heaps and storing in their fridge, to take out little, heat it and enjoy it in this weather. However, knowing me, I am refraining from doing that, since I can end up eating a big batch in one sitting and then regret doing it. This phenomenon is called “binge eating” and I suffer from it. 😀 As I have been a bit more active on my Instagram handle, I have decided to participate in story hops or challenges that may come up while collaborating with other fellow bloggers. Yesterday, I participated in an interesting…
Honey Kiwi Walnut Salad
I literally feel like I finished an assignment right before the deadline. Hehe… Before that, a quick look into the scenes out here. We have had an awesomely wet weekend, with heavy rains, that caused total water clogging in most of the parts of the city. On Friday, we took a drive towards the outskirts and seriously enjoyed the rains. However, on Saturday, it caused a lot of trouble, but that comes with the enjoyment, isn’t it? The girls had their madrassa closed yesterday, and have their schools off today, so they are pretty excited about what the rains have offered them. 🙂 The rains are expected to be on and off for this whole week. Thankfully, slowly it is feeling like winter, and I hope this chill stays well till March or April. It’s been long since I have participated in the AtoZ Recipe Challenge hosted by…
“Mouthful” Carrot Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting
I had scheduled the last two posts before I left. I went for four days home for my TMJ appointment and then a little wedding in the family. I am usually not someone who attends weddings. Our family is huge and there are wedding happening every now and then. It definitely isn’t pocket friendly to be attending all of them, so I always attend those that come within my usual annual holiday scope. But this one was such that I had to attend. When D informed us about elappa’s daughter’s marriage, I checked my dates and realized that my appointment would come around that time. I clubbed both and took leave. Everything went well, Alhamdulillah. The atmosphere was bitter sweet, thick with grief yet a general relief that she got an alliance that her father had wished for her. I have to say those days were emotionally draining but…
Goji Berry Breakfast Cookies
If anybody enters my kitchen, they will think they have entered an office. I have a white board on the side of my fridge with full of scribbling, a cork board on one of my cupboard doors with lots of cut outs pinned to it and a sticker hanger with even more papers clipped onto it. Anyone new who comes gives a very curious look at them to see what I have spread on them. Obviously, they are recipe printouts and cut outs that I pin up so that I try immediately. That “immediately” has no specific time frame – it can be a week, a month or even years. But I must say that this recipe I am posting today didn’t have to wait indefinitely to be tried, thanks to the Bake-a-thon. 😀 I mentioned about receiving a small pack of goji berries from Zerin, while I…
Eggless Apple Walnut Scones
Bake-a-thon is a yearly baking series headed by Valli during December and I have been a part of it for the past two years. There will be a total of 13 baking recipes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday till the month ends. Since the last post was more related to the UAE National Day, I thought I would rather move the details of the series in this post. 😀 You can find all the posts related to the previous years here. While the first year, I did random posts out of the burgeoning drafts, I focused on chocolate bakes last year, and this year, I am doing based on the theme of individual servings. Just like the Khameer I posted as the first one… As soon as I had started jotting out my posts for this series, I wanted to bake a scone, and somehow it had to…
Easy Milk Pudding with Cashew Praline | China Grass Pudding
After the Quick Jelly Mousse Pudding recipe, here is the second post towards the three back-to-back super easy desserts. I must stay that this is one among the oldest drafts I have on my blog. I started my blog six and a half years ago, and finally this recipe makes its appearance, amidst a lot of requests on how to tame china grass or agar agar. I already have a few agar agar recipes on the blog but they were posted in the initial years of blogging. Somehow, even though I find working with agar agar far better than its non-vegetarian replacement called gelatin, I am not very fond of the jelly consistency it gives to its dessert. I love desserts with a mousse-like structure over the hard jelly types and I always prepare desserts in that category. It was only lately I discovered that my girls love…
Almond Butter Maple Granola
Waiting for a break is something that we all do. We just look forward to it, don’t we? Last year, we had decided to take a year off going home this year, since it involves too much of pressure financially. After all, four people travelling up and down to Kerala during the peak season is no joke. If you combine all the money spent on tickets, wardrobe updates, gifts and chocolates, etc, you can go on two international trips to decent countries. I am not joking about it. For an average middle class family, the daylight robbery that every airline does during the school closing time does put a lot of pressure on their budgets. Somehow, despite so much hue and cry, this practice repeats year after year. Since the number of people travelling home at that time doesn’t seem to diminish, I guess the authorities see no…
Roasted Coconut Cashew Ice Cream
Some challenges are really irresistible, so much that you will make time to somehow prepare it and post it. Ever since Sarah posted that this month’s theme for the Fantastical Food Fight is going to be “Ice Cream”, I have been dreaming about it. We had previously done the same theme exactly two years ago and I had posted this ice cream, which is so similar to what I am posting today! Initially, I was thinking about making butterscotch popsicles that I had bookmarked from a site. But then when I messaged Sarah, she mentioned to stick to making an ice cream. Then my mind was constantly screaming “Salted Caramel and Chocolate”. Of late, I have been obsessed with salted caramel. I really do not why. I have never liked caramel or its flavor before but now I have taken a liking towards it. I still can’t understand…
Honey Labneh Pannacotta with Honey Walnut Sauce
If you think I am going overboard with challenges these days, then please feel free to think so! 🙂 Next month, I am travelling home, so I am going to leave an empty blog behind for you, but making sure that there is plenty to read and explore for all of you out there. I am participating in the AtoZ challenge this month. The challenge is hosted by Vidya and Jolly, and happens every two months, where we follow the alphabets, cook with an ingredient that is supposed to be the star of the dish. You can find the challenge posts done previously here. This month, the letter is “H” and the ingredient I chose to cook with is nothing but “Honey”. I am sure there is no home that doesn’t have a bottle of honey hiding somewhere in the pantry. Apart from being a natural sweetener, it…
Peanut Butter Brownies
This Sunday night, my girls went home. I was under so much stress over this past week due to this. I had few sleepless nights and thanks to that, I landed up with a massive headache. I must blame myself for not doing complete research before I took the tickets. My elder one is 12 and is automatically now an adult as per ticketing terms. Based on this, I booked both of them together, only to realize that for the eight year old to travel, she needs to be accompanied by an adult who is 16 years and above. I did try through all my channels to see if there were any family travelling on the same flight, but I received no good news. Once we went inside the airport, we realized that everyone was scattered and that made it even more challenging. HD was trying to keep…
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