My Milk story - Milk cake

As always last week I bought 2 gallons of milk. Normally I finish it off with in 2 weeks.

Daily my hubby has it along with cereals for breakfast, but last couple weeks he is getting up late and almost rushing to office straight from the bathroom. Also I make my own fresh curd every 2 days, this time it also failed me. For the past one year I have been making my own curd as a daily ritual and excepting just a handful of days it use to come beautifully well. Wondering what happened this time, my milk is not turning as curd at all. I tried options like putting a chilly and a very small piece of tamarind in the milk along with the curd but still the curd was not good. Left with  no option, I started buying 'Desi curd' from Indian grocery

I had a gallon of milk left in my fridge with yesterday's expiry date. I felt terrible about having to throw it all away.  So I started searching Milk sweet recipes. Suddenly I thought of my Auntie who once sent us a milk sweet from Chennai. It was fantastic. Last night, I called her, took the recipe and tried it in a litre of milk.

Milk cake - Easy available ingredients but time taking process. Though its a little painstaking process in the end all your effort will be rewarded.

Ingredients : 5 measures of milk, 3 measures of Sugar and 1 measure of Ghee
Procedure : Mix all the ingredients and boil until the milk mixture becomes one third. Stir it becomes to the Halwa stage.
Time : 3.30 hrs

The aroma of the milk sugar mixture filled my whole room. It took 2 hours to come to a stage of condensed milk.

Nobody can go wrong with this recipe. In different stage we can get different kind of milk sweet.

Stage 1 - After 3 .15 hours the milk will be in a molten lava stage, called 'Theratti pal'. A famous south Indian dish.

Stage 2 - Further boiling will thicken the milk more. Now you can pour it on to a greased tray. Cut in to desired shapes. It will be bit soft like the one below.

Stage 3 - Boil the mixture until it leaves  the sides of pan. Then as usual pour it on to the greased tray, cut it and eat it. This will be hard milk cake.

In any of these stages the end result will be a sweet and delicious one. Enjoy the Milk sweet :)

Chocolate brownies

A month ago, I bought some ingredients for making "Classic chocolate fudge brownies", a bookmarked recipe from 'Chef in you'. Don't know why I waited a long time to give it a try. Last Thursday after watching the serial "Everybody loves Raymond" my temptation towards brownies reached the climax. Immediately went to the kitchen and started doing it.

Before that let me tell you what tempted me to do brownies. Let me tell you in short about the serial, for those who don't know ? Everybody Loves Raymond - A hilarious comedy serial. Raymond is a main character and the whole story goes around him and his family. His wife Debra, daughter Ally and Twins Michale and Jeffery. He resides opposite to his parents house. His father is a Korean war veteran named Frank Barone and mother Marie, House wife. Raymond has a big brother named Robert, NYPD Sergeant. If you like to watch the serial, click here and enjoy it. Its our all time favorite comedy serial.

OK, let me come to the point about last week Episode, Its a Christmas eve, Marie and Debra were in kitchen preparing dinner after exchanging gifts. Marie - consider herself as a master cook, prepares her special Brownies with Walnut. As Raymond enters inside the kitchen, she offers him the spatula to lick it. He takes and starts licking it.
After seeing this, who will not get tempted to eat brownies !

I followed all the procedures and set my oven in baking :))

 After cooling the brownies in the pan, I applied a nice thick chocolate frosting on top and kept in the fridge to set completely.

After 30 minutes took the knife and ran through the sides of the pan to make sure the brownies come out easily from the pan. Then I turn upside down and patted on the bottom of the pan. After few seconds top part of the brownies fell off and the bottom still sticking to the pan. I was shocked to see it.
Felt like crying, called my hubby and told him. He convinced me a lot and asked me to try again after some time. The brownies tasted good, I don't want to throw them. An idea flashed my mind, I scratched down all the brownies from the pan, mixed them with the top frosting part . Voila ! made a yummy chocolate walnut balls out of it.

When my husband was back from office, he thought that I lied to him, because those brownie balls tasted delicious. Though I made some mistake the end product was good. Felt more satisfied and happy.

Small fact about brownies - Brownies are introduced in the end of 19th century and got more popularized in US and Canada in the mid of 20th Century only.

Say NO to Deep fry !

Nowadays all of us are more health (fat) conscious. The moment we think of eating fatty items we immediately think about the health, our intake calories, daily workouts, blah, blah, blah....

I like to eat deep fried snacks like hot spicy pakoras, bajjis, Home made chips etc, occasionally, when I am enjoying the good weather like a rainy day, breezy evening, or bone chilling cold. Before marriage my mom used to make delicious evening snacks . If I talk about fat, high calories to her, she would laugh at me and  say that once in a while if you eat nothing will happen. She is my role model in cooking and in eating.

After marriage, I am also little concerned about the health. Not cooking deep fry items. (This because of my hubby). But I was surprised when I come to know about baking instead of deep frying.  Thanks to all, whoever did this research and shared your healthy recipe to us.

Some of the items I regularly do at home for nice yummy, spicy crunchy snacks.

Pakodas

When I saw this recipe first, felt as if I got a treasure pot from nowhere. I couldn't believe that we can bake pakodas instead of deep frying.
I tried two different kinds of pakodas - crunchy one and a bit chewy one.

Procedure : For Crunchy type
All the steps are same except frying. Final step, line up on the baking sheet and bake it @ 400 F for about 20 min. I tried this recipe from 'Trendy Relish'.
Procedure : For Chewy type
Add equal measure of Besan flour with Whole wheat flour and little Rice flour. Add onions and Cilantro (optional). Without fail add chilly powder or green chillies and salt as per your taste. Mix it with little more water (Like Roti dough consistency).  Baking procedure same as above.
PS: I forgot the site from where I got the recipe from.

Paruppu vadai

A must recipe in all our festive menu.
Procedure : All the steps are same as we do at home except frying. Instead of putting in to the oil, line up on the cookie, sheet brush little oil on batter and bake it @ 400 F for about 15 min on each side. That's it ! the taste is similar to how we deep fry it. This recipe is from Chef in you . Hm...one more information our vadai is called as 'Falafel' here. For more details check here

Baked Nippattu

Nippattu, the name itself is so fascinating, isn't it !!! It is a savory cookie. The main Ingredient is Maida, like other cookies 'Baking powder' is an important ingredient, rest all other ingredients like spices, onions etc. are optional and as per our taste.
It is a Karnataka recipe, I tried from website called ' Red Chillies '. You can see the ingredients and the procedures of this baked Nippattu here .

Say NO to deep fry and enjoy eating healthy food.

Recipes,Tried and Tasted - Muffins

Apple Raisin Muffins, today's Special in our Menu

Whenever I bake cookies or cakes here, next day I will call home (India) and tell everybody what I did and how it tasted. My sweet manni (Sister-in-law) once asked why I hadn't try Muffins yet.
The very next day I went and got my Muffin tray.

Then I sat down and searched for recipe in 'Google', the first hit was 'Madhuram's Eggless Cooking'. In her recipe I chose Apple raisin mini Muffin. Why I selected this is because, I had many apples at home :)) LOL. Also the procedure was pretty simple.

First time I was baking muffins, read her notes and updates for couple of times and carefully followed all the steps of Madhuram's. This is the first recipe I tried from her site and liked the way she writes; especially her warm and personal tone.

My hard work got answered... The muffins tasted great. The grated apple gave a nice texture and taste to the muffins. For the original recipe pls click here. From then I started doing lot of different muffins.

Recipes, Tried and tasted (tested) - Thattai

The one nice thing which I am doing now-a-days is cooking. Cooking good and healthy food. If I am bored at home, immediately I will check for new recipe and give it a try instantly, No, i m not joking, that's how I learnt lot about cooking.

Thanks a ton, to all food blogger for sharing wonderful healty recipes.
Here, I am going to post all the recipes which I tried, tasted and tested, of course it is a test for my hubby :)). I m sure he likes it.

Diwali Special : Thattai

This is my very, very special recipe in many aspects... This is the first recipe which I tried from for my first Diwali from a site called "Chef in You" . When I wanted to try this, I had so many silly doubts. Immediately I wrote to DK and got it clarified. Thattai was a big hit in my Diwali bakshanam. It lasted only for a day. My hubby and his friend finished it on a day.
This recipe introduced me to a new blogger friend, DK. To see her recipe, please click here.
Hey, one more thing, after somedays my "Thattai" photo along with the thanking notes got published in the  'Chef in you' site. If you want to see that, you can check it out here

I was so happy, felt like flying in the air.

Its always nice isn't it, when our little work got appreciation !!!

Our long trip and the foodie bag

We went to Pennsylvania last week .Hey hey...a long drive after 8 months, we enjoyed a lot. We both with 2 of our friends planned this place a month ahead.

The main highlight of the trip is our foodie bag. This bag is successfully coming with us for almost all our trips.
This time we took some foods which will lasts for our three day trip. Poor thing it lasted only for 2 days, because nothing was left for the third day. Do you want to know what I took for our trip :

1.Idlies – 32 nos
2.Chappathis – 50 nos
3.Puli Sadam – 2 big boxes (1 liter capacity each)
4.Thakkali Thokku – You can imagine how much I would have made to fulfill both Idlies and Chappathis
5.Curd – 1 litre
6.Oats + Raisin Cookies – 3 dozen
7.Chocolate Chip cookies – 3 dozen

Everybody enjoyed the food , its unfortunate that we didn't take a proper photos of my food.

One more main highlight was we had the food in so many different places
1.Out side a service plaza with mosquito bites
2.In the middle of a Lancaster, Amish county place besides a stream under a small tree. (It was more romantic)
3.A very funny place inside the car, outside a shop under hot sun.

We all enjoyed the trip a lot with the good home cook food.

If you have any funny experience, pls write to me