The year is ending Merry Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year. Hope 2015 is filled with joy, happiness and magical moments. The year is nearly ending and everyone is in a happy festive mood. Hubby and I are off to Dubai today to spend Christmas with my son, my daughter in law, her parents and brother. Hubby’s first visit to Dubai and my second time. Looking forward to seeing a bit more of Dubai.Double celebration for us… our first Christmas with our daughter in law and her family and my hubby’s birthday is on 25th Dec. Today our house help Julius is travelling to his village, to celebrate Christmas with his family. He has been with us for over 15 years.Don’t know who the…
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Continue Readingdainty and delightful When Niloufer Riyas, a fellow member of the Home Bakers Challenge Group, gave us exciting Malaysian bake recipes, I got excited seeing the first recipe itself. I browsed through the others and my mind kept on going back to the first one which is pineapple tarts. The picture posted on rasa malaysia looked so cute, dainty and tempting. As I read through the recipe, I thought ‘oh no do I really have the time to make the jam?’ I was looking for easier options… that is at the other recipes. I liked the suji cookies, but didn’t want to add artificial colours, thought of the bread but was not too keen on the caramel kaya. So went back to the original idea.…
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Continue ReadingWhat is Dahi Papdi Chaat? Dahi Papdi Chaat is a crisp, tangy, sweet, flavorful, lip smacking, street food that is very common in the Indian Sub Continent. In fact, simple ingredients are put together to create this delicious food. By the way, Dahi means yogurt, papdi here is like a fried cracker, a crispy flat puri. Actually, chaat is the name of the savory dish that is served as a snack or hors d’oeuvre. What is Papdi Chaat/ Papri Chaat? Basically the only difference is that papdi chaat is served without the yogurt, making it a vegan friendly chaat. The rest of the ingredients remain the same. Variety Of Chaats There are so many varieties of Chaat available and new ones keep coming up. As…
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Continue ReadingHunger for food and hunger for knowledge. Last Saturday, our Lions Club went for a service activity to one of the schools in the slum area. We donated stationery and reading books to the school. It has nearly 200 children. Most of these children are either orphans or come from a very poor family.Their parent/ parents cannot even afford to buy an exercise book for them.The school doesn’t get adequate support from the government. These children attend the school in anticipation of a hot lunch every day. However, what I observed is that they were even hungry for knowledge. When we read out a story for them, they listened keenly and were impatient to lay their hands on the story books. One of the…
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Continue ReadingAn exotic flat bread Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen chose Sheermal for our group We Knead to Bake for the month of November. Had I heard of sheermal before? Yes, but and I had written it down to try it out. I had come across the recipe for sheermal by Tarla Dalal and Sanjeev Kapoor. So when I went through the recipe that Aparna gave us, I was pretty excited Finally I was going to bake Sheermal. In the meantime other members had already baked it and shared a few of their experiences. Most of sheermal photos sent to our facebook page looked so perfect, delicious, well baked and rich. I made mine today. I must admit that I had totally forgotten that we had to…
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Continue ReadingUne baguette s’il vous plait! The Home Bakers Challenge for the month of November was to choose any of the recipes given in the previous challenges. For a new member of the group, this was like opening a treasure trove. Which one to choose, which one to choose was constantly on my mind as I went through the lists. My mind was getting all muddled up as I wanted to try most of them. So the other best option was to go through my bookmarked list and see if any were a match to the long list of recipes. I finally chose to make french baguette. Though I didn’t follow the recipe given by Priya Ranjit for the Jan 2014 challenge, I…
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Continue ReadingSlowly working my way through Joining these various groups has so many advantages. Meeting new food bloggers, learning more about international cuisines, learning new methods and I am actually working slowly through my bookmarked and noted down recipes. I have recently joined a new group International Food Challenge started by Saras and Shobha. the challenge for the month of November were recipes from Australia. While I had a bookmarked anzac biscuits and lamington recipes, I had never heard of damper. The dilemma was to make something I had never hear of or tick off some of my bookmarked recipes. Finally the cookies won as I wanted to give them as a gift to my friend’s family. Anzac stands for Australian and New…
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Continue Readingsoft and spongy I bought some bananas on Sunday and by Monday some of them were over ripe. Its the heat ! Over ripe bananas and muffins, cake, bread is all I can think of. Initially, I just wanted to peel the bananas and freeze them for future use. The idea of the hot oven heating up the kitchen wasn’t too appealing. However temptation of baking was greater than the feeling of avoiding the heat. This is one of the first breads I had learnt how to bake when I was barely 21. I got the recipe from my mother in law’s friend. I tried it the first time and it was a hit. After that have baked it so many times. I…
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Continue ReadingMe time! Do you ever get some time in a month or a week just by yourself and no one else? No kids, no family, no hubby, etc etc? I do. Not saying that I don’t get my space with hubby dear around. He is my biggest supporter in whatever I want to do in life. But there are times we women need to be alone, with no one around. I get those days at least twice a month when hubby attends his medical meetings in the evening. For that evening I am free to cook what I like, which usually means something that he does not like and to watch any program or movie that I want. No one…
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Continue Readingtropical taste Coconut is such a versatile fruit. Bake with it, add it in rice, curries, decorate with it. So many ways to use it. I love the taste of coconut combined with a tropical fruit. I hadn’t baked muffins in a while, and yesterday managed to bake some. This time round, I decided to combine coconut and passion fruit. I use the sour passion fruit to make juice, add to desserts or add to a fruit salad. I had a few passion fruits left over and decided to use them up in the muffins.The muffins taste really good… tropical flavour. These are early Diwali gifts for my neighbours as the coming week will be pretty hectic. Still got a lot more baking to do…
