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The Sankranthi Hangover (Nut Brittle/Chikki)

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Deepa

Most Hindu festivals are centered around two things: religion and food (usually but not always in that order). When we are not praying or singing, we are eating and talking, often very, very loudly.

Sankranthi is no exception. Known by different names but celebrated all over the country, it signifies not only the harvest but the end of the inauspicious December/January season.

Every region does its festivals a little differently, which I think is one of the best things about Hindu festivals. In Tamil Nadu the occasion is known as Pongal and rice is slow-cooked with jaggery and coconut to make a decadent sweet pudding-like dish. In the west and the north of India, sweets are exchanged to signify goodwill towards others.

When it comes to Sankranthi, we Kannadigas (people of Karnataka state) traditionally make a slightly sweet, nutty mixture called Ellu. As a representative of the harvest being celebrated, we put together sesame seeds, peanuts, semi-dried coconut, tiny dried chick peas and jaggery. We then distribute small packets of this along with fruits to our family, friends and neighbours, our way of ‘sharing our harvest’.

Every year, I look forward to this distribution as every household’s Ellu is unique with its’ own little quirks. But when I’ve picked out and eaten all the jaggery and coconut bits, leaving behind only the sad looking sesame seeds and peanuts, I am often at a loss as to what to do with these wonderful ingredients.

This year, I became obsessed with the idea of making nut brittle, or chikki as us Indians call it. More specifically, I wanted to replicate the buttery, dissolve-in-the-mouth peanut brittle that I have previously eaten in a restaurant.

My first port of call was Deb Perelman’s incredible blog, Smitten Kitchen and it did not disappoint. I learnt soon after discovering this blog that Deb’s recipe collection is extensive and more importantly, fail (and fool) proof.

This brittle was all I’d hoped for and more. If you are into this salted caramel business that seems to be taking over the world (and why shouldn’t it?? What could be better than the world being enveloped in caramel?), this one is definitely for you.

Not only will it make you and those you share it with very happy, but it will allow you to fund your dentist’s next three holidays which will make him or her very happy.

Sweet, a little nutty and just when you think you know what to expect you get a confusing hit of salt, this nut brittle is me all over!

Nut Brittle (Chikki)

Modified slightly from Pepita Brittle on Smitten Kitchen

Get:

2 cups sugar
115g unsalted butter cut into rough cubes
1/3 cup golden syrup
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp water
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 to 1 1/2 tsp salt
2 cups Ellu or your nut/seed of choice

Make:

Preheat the oven to 150 C. Spread the Ellu or nuts out on a baking tray and roast for 8-10 mins, tossing halfway through until the nuts have browned slightly. Leave aside to cool.

Line another baking tray with grease-proof paper.

Put water, sugar, golden syrup and butter in a large non-stick saucepan. Stir to combine well and heat gently until butter is melted. With the heat on medium-high to high, cook while providing your undivided attention and stirring frequently. You will need to play around with the heat as the mixture will foam up constantly. After 15-20 mins when the mixture is a medium-golden colour, lifting off the sides of the pan and thickened to a consistency slightly thinner than honey, take the pan off the heat and add the baking soda. Foam-age will happen again so be careful! Whisk through and then add the salt and whisk again.

Stir in the roasted Ellu or nuts.

Pour the mixture into the lined baking tray and leave to set. You can either use a sharp knife to cut the brittle into pieces while it is still semi-soft, or wait till it is set, then shatter it into pieces.

Notes:

I used a 34cm x 23cm shallow baking tray and ended up with a thick (8-10 mm) brittle. You can spread it more thinly if you prefer.

You can of course use just about any nut, pepitas, sunflower seeds or sesame seeds on their own.

Weekly Photo Challenge ‘Forward’

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Deepa

Young Monk, Siem Riep, Cambodia

This is my interpretation of the theme ‘Forward’ for the Weekly Photo Challenge @ The Daily Post

A shy young Cambodian monk preparing for the life ahead of him in the monastery. Of all the photos we took on this trip, this image is burned into my memory more than any other.

Flourless Chocolate Cake

Posted on February 22, 2013November 5, 2013 by Deepa

A few weekends ago, my friend lovely Maureen came to visit from interstate for a mere 32 hours, a whirlwind trip that began perfectly with some hard core and highly productive factory outlet shopping. You see, despite being a very intelligent individual in all other aspects of life, this poor misguided soul detests shopping and for some unfathomable reason comes to me for fashion advice.

Luckily, despite her lack of interest for retail therapy which I will never understand, we have other common interests on which we have built our friendship, one of these being our mutual love of all things edible.

I had been meaning to try a local Mexican restaurant for months so we decided to reward ourselves for our hard work (all that credit card swiping is exhausting) by doing just that. It was pretty good Mexican that really hit the spot…….but to my dismay, it turned out it was the meal that kept on giving.

The following morning we made grand plans to hit the beach. We packed Cookie into the car and drove across Sydney only to find that nature had other plans. Over a divine beachside breakfast, a pesky bout of gastroenteritis crept up on me like the sneaky rascal it is, and I realised that a walk on the beach was a mere dream.

After depositing my friend at the airport with profuse apologies (among other things that were profusely taking place), I came home to crawl under the covers and rest my slightly dehydrated self.

I awoke to puppy dog eyes gazing at me and a strange sense of invigoration. A strong urge to bake resulted in this flourless chocolate cake for my gluten-free colleague whose birthday was the next day.

I tried out my recently acquired, albeit basic, cake decorating skills (thanks to my friend Subo in the UK and a more recent cake decorating class- more about that later) and Ta Dah! One little birdy cake that was devoured in barely half an hour by the hospital crew.

Make this cake. Even if you don’t need to be gluten free. Hell, even if you want to marry gluten and have its babies, ditch it for one day and MAKE THIS CAKE.

Flourless Chocolate Cake (GF)

Barely adapted from Gourmet November 1997 on Epicurious

Get:

100g fine-quality bittersweet chocolate (not unsweetened)

110g (1/2 cup) unsalted butter
3/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1/3 cup almond meal
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder plus additional for sprinkling

Make:

Preheat oven to 190°C and butter an 8-inch round baking pan. Line bottom with a round of wax paper greased on both sides. Alternatively, you can butter the pan and dust the inside with cocoa powder.

Chop chocolate into small pieces. In a double boiler or metal bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water melt chocolate with butter, stirring, until smooth. Remove top of double boiler or bowl from heat and whisk sugar into chocolate mixture. Add eggs and whisk well. Sift 1/2 cup cocoa powder and almond meal over chocolate mixture and whisk until just combined. Pour batter into pan and bake in middle of oven 25 minutes, or until top has formed a thin crust. Test by passing a clean knife into the centre of the cake all the way to the bottom- the knife should come out clean. Cool cake in pan on a rack and invert onto a serving plate.

Dust cake with additional cocoa powder or cover with white chocolate ganache.

Cake keeps, after being cooled completely, in an airtight container for 1 week (this is sort of a guess as I’ve never actually managed to keep it that long).

White Chocolate Ganache

Get:

250g white cooking chocolate
125ml double cream or pure cream

Make:

Melt chocolate in a double boiler, stirring constantly. Add cream and stir until blended. Allow to cool slightly and pour over cake, spread with a spatula.

* A double boiler consists of a pot or saucepan containing boiling water on simmer and a second pot or saucepan sitting in the rim of the first one. The second pot should contain the chocolate and other ingredients to be melted. It is important that the water is not touching the bottom of the pot containing the chocolate and that you do not let any water in with the chocolate as chocolate and water don’t seem to like each other very much.

Also be careful as burnt fingers do not a good cook make.

How Jamie Oliver Taught me to Cook Indian Food (Pineapple Curry)

Posted on February 16, 2013April 20, 2014 by Deepa

I have a shameful admission to make. It is a fact that one of the first Indian dishes I cooked was using a Jamie Oliver recipe.

Not that there is anything shameful about the loveable Mr. Oliver (who I have for years had a small crush on). But I was brought up by parents who could both cook and my mother despaired that at that stage, I still hadn’t stayed still long enough in the kitchen for her to teach me how to cook a good South Indian meal. She wasn’t sure whether to be offended or relieved that it was that energetic Englishman with an adorable lisp who had finally gotten me to play with ‘our’ spices. And that I hadn’t chosen to make a rasam or a sambhar, but a pineapple curry of all things.

I have always thought of pineapples as the echidna (or hedgehog) of the fruit world. Tough, leathery skin covered in thorns and that spiky tuft of leaves on top all scream TOUCH ME AND DIE (or at least, touch me and get the equivalent of a paper cut).

Yes, when it comes to self-defence, this tropical treat has the right idea. The plant however, is another story. I first saw the pineapple plant on a holiday in Kerala and I remember thinking that it looked like someone had just placed a pineapple on a stick and surrounded it by leaves. One look at that plant and it is hard to take that bristly Mr. Pineapple seriously.

So let’s get that scary pineapple into this coconutty sauce. Actually I used tinned pineapple but I’m sure this curry will be equally delish using fresh pineapple, provided you have the patience and elbow grease to get past its defences. Either way, the hot-sweet-sourness on a bed of rice makes this a wonderful comfort food in any season.

This makes a fairly spicy curry, so if you are not big on spicy food, use half the amount or just a pinch of chilli powder.

Pineapple Curry

Loosely based on a recipe by Jamie Oliver that I watched him make on TV years ago

Get:
1 tbsp oil
The insides of 4 cardamom pods
1 1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
1/4 tsp turmeric powder
1/4 tsp chilli powder
1 inch piece of ginger, grated
Small handful curry leaves
1 x 825gm tin of pineapple pieces, drained (or about 700g fresh pineapple, chopped)
1 can coconut milk
Salt, to taste
Small handful coriander leaves, chopped

Make:

In a small pan, dry roast cardamom, 1/2 tsp cumin seeds and 1/2 tsp coriander seeds until fragrant. Grind to a powder using a food processor or mortar and pestle.

In a saucepan or wok, heat oil and temper 1 tsp cumin seeds and 1/2 tsp mustard seeds. Add ground spices, turmeric and chilli powder and stir for 1-2 mins on a medium heat. Add curry leaves and ginger, stir until leaves are fried.

Add pineapple and stir to coat pineapple in spices. Add coconut milk and about a tsp of salt. Taste and add more salt if required. Cover and simmer on a low to medium heat for 5 mins. Sprinkle chopped coriander and stir through.

Serve atop steamed or boiled rice.

Save-the-day Mango Dessert

Posted on February 12, 2013February 13, 2013 by Deepa

Right, so you finally got your act together and invited those friends over for dinner.

You know the ones…..

They are invited to every birthday of yours, and you to theirs. And each time you see them, there are promises that you must catch up properly soon, that it’s been far too long and that you really shouldn’t let that much time go by before you see each other next.

But somehow as earnest and genuine all these promises are, before you know it six months have gone by before you finally do get around to inviting them over.

So the day arrives and you have this menu of mammoth proportions planned in your mind.

You jump out of bed, bright eyed and bushy tailed (ok, so in my case it’s usually a reluctant and creaky scramble out of bed after at least 3 hits of the snooze button, but I’m guessing there are some (insane) morning people out there).

So once you’ve done whatever it is you need to do in the morning to return you to some semblance of a human being, you go to the gym, stop off at the supermarket on your way home to get supplies and before you know it, half the day is mysteriously over.

Please tell me I’m not the only person this happens to….?

Vacuum, bathrooms, laundry, make the main meal, tidy up the living room, make a salad, load dishwasher, clean kitchen, pick out not-too-mainstream-but-not-too-weird music for the evening, shower, find clothes, wear clothes, put wine in fridge.

And somewhere in all that, the likelihood of actually making that cheesecake or pannacotta or apple pie that you had planned for dessert becomes but a tiny speck on the horizon.

This is when this dessert saves the day. A dessert so impressive but more importantly, so ludicrously easy that it will catapult you from barely organised slightly frazzled hostess to certifiable domestic goddess.

A layer of jelly (or jell-O depending which hemisphere you’re at) topped by a mango fool and garnished with something crunchy. Serve it in a martini glass and it’ll be ultra sexy (hey, it worked for Beyonce), or in a drinking glass or glass jars for super cute quirkiness.

Easy Mango Dessert

Get:

1 packet mango flavoured jelly crystals (to make 500ml jelly)
Flesh of 2 small mangoes or 425g tin of mango in syrup
Pinch Saffron
3 tsp caster sugar
Insides of 8 cardamom pods
300ml fresh whipping cream

Make:

Make the jelly according to packet instructions. If using martini glasses, pour 1/4 cup of the mixture into each glass. Drinking glasses may fit a little more jelly. Chill for at least 4 hours to set.

Blitz the mango with 2 tsp water or syrup (if using tinned), saffron and 1/2 tsp sugar to achieve a thick saucy consistency. Add a little more water or syrup if needed. Taste and add more sugar if required.

Using a mortar and pestle or an electric grinder, powder the cardamom with 1/2 tsp sugar. Place the cream in a deep bowl. Using a hand held electric beater, whip the cream on medium speed until soft peaks are achieved. Be careful not to go too far as there is a fine line between soft and firm peaks. Sprinkle cardamom sugar as well as the remaining 2 tsp sugar over the whipped cream and beat on low speed until mixed. Taste and add more sugar if required.

Add mango sauce to cream and fold in gently to create a swirled through effect.

Divide cream between the glasses, placing on top of the firm jelly.

Top with garnish of your choice, preferably something with crunch. I used some fresh coconut and almond flakes, toasted gently in a dry frypan over the stove. Half a tablespoon of each per glass should do it. Crushed meringues, pomegranate seeds, berries, any other nuts and chocolate shavings would also make great toppings, but feel free to unleash your creativity into the glass.

Chill for at least 2 hours before serving.

Some superficial reflections and Quinoa Salad

Posted on February 8, 2013February 8, 2013 by Deepa

Stupid things I did last week:

1. Spent half a day ignoring the large bag of chocolate bars that were free to a good home at work, only to succumb later in the day and shamelessly demolish an entire Crunchie bar. I could almost hear that low fat yoghurt in my bag screaming STOP!! Mmmmm but that chocolate coated honeycomb…….

2. Resolved not to do 1. again only to repeat the performance two days later.

3. Cut my finger chopping vegetables. How does that happen? I’m a surgeon for gods sakes! There was some blood. And pain. It was not good.

Smart things I did last week:

1. Followed my intuition and operated on a sick cat at work on Saturday. It was just as well as the poor thing had a twisted gut. Good judgement win.

2. Attempted to undo my sins (see 1.and 2. above) and launched into a 1 week detox (which is going surprisingly great, by the way!).

3. Decided to play with quinoa, a grain which I’m only just getting to know. The result was this simple and scrumptious salad that I took to work for lunch.

I had previously put Quinoa in the category of ‘Things that are good for you but probably taste like cardboard’, along with corn cakes and brown rice. I am so glad I opened my mind (and mouth) to this grain. For those who haven’t tried quinoa, don’t waste another day. It has this lovely nutty quality and tends to coat all the other ingredients, sort of like a salad matrix. Plus it made me feel so angelic that I swear I could feel little wings sprouting on my back a la Black Swan (but less creepy).

Pumpkin and Quinoa Salad

Get:

1 cup uncooked white quinoa

500g butternut pumpkin, cubed into roughly 1cm x 1cm pieces

1 Red Capsicum diced
1/2 tin red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1/3 cup feta cheese, crumbled
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1/4 cup pistachio nuts, roasted
1 tsp chilli flakes
Salt
Lemon Juice
Olive oil

Make:

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C.

Boil quinoa in a pot with twice the amount of water, covered, for 13-14 mins. Then drain the quinoa and rinse in a sieve. Partly fill the pot with boiled water so that you can rest the sieve in the rim of the pot without it touching the water. Place a folded tea towel over the sieve and cover with a lid. Boil the water to steam the quinoa for 2-3 mins.

Toast cumin in a non-stick pan until fragrant. Do the same to the pistachios. Toss Pumpkin in a bowl with cumin, a pinch of salt, a drizzle of olive oil and about a teaspoon of fresh lemon juice. Spread pumpkin out on an oven tray and bake for about 10 mins or until cooked but firm.

In a bigger bowl, toss roasted pumpkin, drained quinoa, capsicum, kidney beans, pistachios, feta, juice from half a lemon, a drizzle of olive oil, chilli flakes and salt to taste (start with 1/2 tsp).

Enjoy for a light, healthy lunch that cancels out previously eaten chocolate bars.

Notes:

This makes quite a big batch, enough for 3 or 4 lunches for me.

Think of this salad as a blank canvas. You can add almost anything to it to suit your tastes and the contents of your fridge/pantry. Other additions that would go well are (but not limited to) broccoli in small florets, white beans, chopped and blanched green beans, pine nuts, chopped red onion, avocado, chick peas, tuna, pancetta and chopped up sausage. Feel free also to play around with flavourings…..amp up the chilli, add other herbs or spices, etc. etc.etc.

Cherry Lassi for a Thirsty Lassie

Posted on February 4, 2013April 20, 2014 by Deepa

Family holidays to Bangalore are usually a whirlwind of meals at relatives homes, action-packed shopping trips, countless rides in auto-rickshaws and multiple visits to tailor shops to try on saree blouses in sweaty, curtained change rooms.

(It’s a hard life, I know)

What (I’m told) used to be a city with a beautifully cool climate, has had its’ central heating cranked up in the last few decades. Pollution, global warming and a population expansion in the city of my birth is making days out and about less comfortable than they used to be.

Enter the Nandini Dairy Stall. Nandini is the name under which the Karnataka Milk Federation, a co-op of dairy farmers, makes and sells its products. Apart from their main outlets, littered around the city are milk stalls which peddle cool, long-necked glass bottles of sweet, flavoured milk.

Exhausted, dehydrated and slightly hypoglycaemic from tromping around the city, me, my mum and my aunts would clamber gratefully onto the curb upon spotting one of these milk stalls. They were a refuge in the sea of traffic and pollution. A sight for sore eyes and parched throats. You really couldn’t go wrong no matter which flavour you chose- elaichi (cardamom), strawberry, pista or badam (almond).

These long-necks would provide an instant cool down and sugar hit, and we would be ready to hit the next saree or jewellery shop.

Those reusable glass bottles have been phased out due to hygiene issues (damm those health authorities!), but flavoured Nandini milk continues to revitalise shoppers in smaller sealed public health friendly plastic bottles.

In the absence of Nandini milk, one has to be content with the offerings of Deepa’s Dairy Stall. Lassi is an Indian smoothie where milk meets fruit and yoghurt and they all get along really, really well. You may be familiar with Mango Lassi and Salty Lassi, but after scoring half a kilo of these beautiful little fruits, I decided to give Cherry Lassi a go and was rather pleased with the results.

In other news, I am just about to launch into a one week detox. Why, you ask? Well, a combination of feeling generally gluggy + a brief moment of insanity in which a commitment was made. Don’t worry, it’s not one of those extreme ones where I will be barely living on organic cucumber juice administered intravenously and nothing else. It’s just avoiding processed foods, meat and most painfully, caffeine for a week. Will let you know how it goes at the end, although it is likely I will be reduced to communicating in grunts by then owing to the lack of caffeine and chocolate. Anyway, here goes!

Cherry Lassi

Get

35-40 fresh cherries, pitted
2 cups milk (I used skim), chilled
3 cups vanilla yoghurt (I used low fat), chilled
4 tsp sugar
1 tsp honey
The inside of 4-5 cardamom pods powdered or 1/4 tsp cardamom powder
Pinch saffron

Make

If using cardamom seeds, powder with 1/2 tsp sugar in a grinder or using a mortar and pestle.

In a food processor, process cherries, cardamom and sugar until the cherries are roughly pureed. Add milk, yoghurt, honey and saffron and blend until frothy and well mixed.

Serve in a tall glass.

Notes:

I have not tried to make this with anything other than cows’ milk but my guess would be other types of milk or yoghurt such as soy or rice based ones would work pretty well. Nut milks should also work, but may give a sweeter result (thanks Alex for this question!).

Summer

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Deepa

Australia is truly a sun-burnt country. Our summer is one of the things that defines us. It is what brings the Europeans to us with their enormous backpacks and sun-starved skin, to mingle with us on our beaches and in our hostels. It is holidays, picnics, swims and post-swim ice-creams.

It is gloriously long days filled with sunshine that fade gently into lingering dusks and balmy evenings, just in case the day’s feeling are hurt by a sudden transition.

Summer comes hot on the heels of Diwali and Halloween and brings with it Christmas and the ultimate night to let one’s hair down after all that holiness……New Years Eve. Even our Christmas cards are adorned with Santa in a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, as if even paper Santa can’t stand to wear his usual outfit in this scorching heat. And after all that is over, there is still the rest of summer to look forward to.

Summer is lovely Saturdays spent doing Saturday things and then realising with stomachs grumbling and light still pouring in the window that inexplicably, dinnertime has arrived.

It is weekends away and weekends in watching the cricket. It is barbecues, ice-blocks and hopefully, slip slop slap. It is too many mosquitoes, too much champagne and too dark tan lines.

I love the sun, sand and waves as much as the next girl, but I have to admit I’m not really a beach person. Not in the typical sun-baking, volleyball playing, bikini clad way anyway. Evening walks on the beach? Sure! Being toasted to a crisp? No thanks! Besides, like many Indian girls, I am far too interested in preserving my complexion to spend hours in the sun.

For me, one of the highlights of the summer is all the incredible fruit that seems to appear in the hotter Australian months. I will never forget that childhood summer when we returned to Sydney after a family holiday to find that my uncle had filled the fridge with gorgeous fruit. Now that was a sight for sore (jet-lagged) eyes.

Cherries that obligingly dissolve in your mouth, sold by the boxful from the back of utes by the side of highways. Watermelon that is instantly revitalising and refreshing. Rockmelons with their fragrant, meaty flesh.

And the Mangoes…..ohhhhh the Mangoes! The cool weight of them when they are taken out of the fridge. The impossible sweetness of that first good mango of the season. Eaten with their cheeks sliced off, cut into small symmetrical pieces by my dad or devoured uninhibitedly with teeth tearing golden skin, Australian mangoes have to be one of the best parts of summer.

So expect some summery fruitiness to come. And to those of you who are fortunate enough to live in this sun-blessed patch of the globe, happy summer!

Home-laid eggs and their fate (Egg Curry)

Posted on January 26, 2013April 20, 2014 by Deepa

The other day one of my bosses came to work with cartons and cartons of eggs. It turned out that the 12 hens that he keeps in his inner-city backyard had been on a laying frenzy and he had been faced with an eggy surplus. I of course, was helpful enough to take a dozen of them off his hands and find good use for them.

Now being an Indian kid brought up by city slicker parents, freshly laid eggs were never really part of my upbringing. While I was growing up, most of my parents’ friends were like us- Indian immigrant urban professionals who didn’t even have a cat, let alone chickens running around in their backyards. So imagine my delight as these gorgeously imperfect thin-shelled things landed in my hands. Eggs of different shapes, deeply yellow yolks and smudged with dirt for authenticity. Eggs without dates stamped on them!

What to do with this unexpected produce? I certainly didn’t have the heart to bake them into anonymity in a cake nor did I want to beat them into submission to make an omelette. No, these eggs called for a starring role in their own dish, a trailer with gold star on the door and their own stunt men (stunt eggs?). Surely, these eggs needed to be in an egg curry. An egg curry that is inspired by one my friend Sailaja made us when I visited her in Chicago last year. Creamy, hard boiled eggs floating happily in a lightly spiced sauce with the bite of onions and the tang of tamarind.

Of course, if you don’t have a boss who provides you with charmingly wonky home-laid eggs, I suppose the ones from the supermarket (preferably free range) will work just fine.

Egg Curry

Feeds 4

Get:
1 quantity spice mix
8 small eggs or 4 large eggs
1 tomato
Small red onion
Small chunk (about 3cm cubed) of dried tamarind
1 hot green chilli
1 tsp minced fresh ginger
1 chubby garlic clove, minced
1/4 cup passata
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp mustard seeds
1/4 tsp turmeric powder
1/4 tsp chilli powder
Salt to taste
1 cup baby spinach leaves, firmly packed
Small handful chopped coriander

For the Spice Mix:
1/4 tsp Cumin
1/4 tsp coriander seeds
1/8 tsp mustard seeds
1/8 tsp fenugreek seeds
1/4 tsp black pepper
The insides of 3 cardamom pods

Make:
Place eggs in a large saucepan and cover well with water. Bring to the boil and simmer until eggs are hard-boiled. Drain water, allow to cool and cut eggs lengthways into halves for small eggs and into quarters for large eggs.

Soak the tamarind in 1 1/2 cups boiling water. Once the water cools, squeeze the tamarind with your hands or with a fork. Strain and retain water.

For the spice mix, place all the spices in a non-stick pan and toast over low heat until slightly browned and fragrant. Grind using a mortar and pestle or spice grinder to a coarse powder.

Place 1/2 onion and whole tomato chopped roughly, half of the ginger and garlic, green chilli chopped roughly and 1 tbsp of the tamarind water in a food processer. Whizz until pureed.

Chop the other half of the onion finely. In a non-stick saucepan, heat the oil over a medium heat. Add 1/2 tsp cumin seeds and 1/4 tsp mustard seeds. Once these are popping, reduce heat and add turmeric, chilli powder and spice mix. Fry, stirring for about 2 minutes and add curry leaves (stand back as these will sizzle!). Once curry leaves are browned, add ginger, garlic and the chopped onion. Sauté the mixture until the onion is translucent, then add the pureed mixture, passata and the remaining tamarind water. Add salt to taste, about 3/4 tsp. Bring to the boil and simmer for 5-10 mins, adding water if necessary to maintain a gravy consistency.

Reduce heat and add spinach and stir mixture until spinach wilted. Add eggs by gently placing into gravy. Stir gently, spooning gravy over eggs. Allow to simmer gently for 4-5 mins.

Serve on steamed or boiled rice with coriander sprinkled over the top.

Notes:

I realise not everyone wants to be grinding spices after being at work all day. To simplify this, you can use about 1 to 1 1/2 tsp of garam masala instead of making a spice mix, but of course IMHO, freshly ground spices always taste better.

Dried tamarind is available at Indian grocery stores. If you can’t find it, you can use about 1 tsp of tamarind paste, but this may give you a darker curry.

This makes a reasonably spicy curry, so feel free to leave out the fresh chilli if your spice threshold is on the lower side of if you are feeding little ones.

Hello, welcome and Mum’s Pista Kulfi

Posted on January 20, 2013April 20, 2014 by Deepa

Starting a blog is both exhilarating and terrifying. Buried under all those great ideas for blog posts, there is a tiny little voice that questions whether this is too big a commitment for my flitty piscean self. That squeaky voiced me wonders if anyone would even be interested in anything I have to say in this, my little patch of cyber-space.

“What if no-one reads it apart from my my parents? What if even they don’t read it and just tell me they do so as not to hurt my fragile ego? What if everyone around me secretly thinks that I can’t write or cook to save my life and they just haven’t broken it to me yet?”

Says that (rather annoying) little voice, her pitch reaching alarming heights.

You see, I am a person driven by outcomes and as I result I often bypass the most interesting part of life- the journey. This blog is one of the few things in life that I have launched into without any thought of what might become of it and currently that little voice is as panicked as a movie star who’s make-up artist has gone missing three hours before the Oscars.

Luckily I had a jalebi on hand to plug the little voice’s mouth and currently it is happily munching away on this soft, sugary sweet, so it should leave us alone for a while. Speaking of sweets- and you’ll find I often am- I thought I’d kick off with an Indian sweet that caters to not only my raging sweet tooth, but also fulfils one of the basic premises of this blog, to expand my repertoire of Indian cooking.

Plus, I’m always trying to start with dessert but there are too many ~~boring~~ sensible people around me who insist I eat a ‘proper’ meal first. Something about nutrition or whatever. So since this is MY blog, I shall start with dessert. And since my mum is one of my biggest cheerleaders, I will start with her Pista Kulfi, an Indian ice-cream.

Mum’s kulfi is a fuss-free but moreish version and it’s a little lighter than some of the restaurant offerings I’ve tried, which is one of the things I like about it. There is no churning, no fancy equipment, just a little bit of pistachio powdering and mixing. Then you put it in the freezer and get some beauty sleep or watch three seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.

Mum’s Pista Kulfi
Get:
1 Can Evaporated Milk
1 Can Condensed Milk
300 ml Thickened Cream
90 grams Pistachio kernels (unsalted)
1/4 tsp Cardamom Powder or the insides of about 8 pods, powdered
Medium pinch of saffron

Make:
Grind nuts to a powder. Mum tends to make a fine powder while I prefer a more coarse powder. Take your pick, it’ll be yum either way. Use the grind function on your food processor or a mortar and pestle if you are a more patient person than I.

Blend together powdered Pistachio and all the other ingredients to a smooth consistency, working out any lumps. I like to use a hand held electric blender, but a good manual stir should work.

Pour this mixture into containers of your choice. Popsicle moulds work quite well, or for a more sophisticated approach, pour into plastic or silicone moulds that will create shapes that you can tip out onto a plate. Freeze for at least 8 hours or overnight.

Kulfi sets harder than ice cream and has been known to stubbornly cling to its mould. Run the outside of the mould under hot water briefly to loosen and this will make serving much easier.

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