Pineapple Sheera

A typical Maharastrian sweet served for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Until I started working in Pune, I did not know that sweet can be had at breakfast time too. Back in the lunch room at our office, the caterer would make pineapple sheera for breakfast. I loved it so much that I would usually skip lunch that day by eating 3-4 rounds of this sweet alone.

Actually, making this at home is pretty simple. No different from the traditional rava kesari excepting for the pineapple part. For the recipe, I followed veggiescookbook.blogspot.com. The blog, however, has been removed recently. For the recipe, I'd say keep the ingredients for rava kesari ready, along with fresh pineapple chunks and a pinch of saffron.

1. Fry the rava
2. Boil the pineapple chunks either on stove-top or in microwave. Dont let them get mushy.
3. Take the leftover water from boiling the pineapple and bring it to a boil on the stove-top.
   
4. Add rava while stirring constantly. Cook on low flame, adding more water as required.
5. Add ghee, and continue stirring until the rava gets cooked. Add required quantity of sugar after this. For a cup rava, I add a cup sugar.
   
6. Take the boiled pineapple chunks, cardamom powder, ghee roasted nuts, saffron soaked in milk and ass them all to the kesari.
   

Few things to note are:

1. Don't even try to make this with canned pineapple. Its going to suck! I trashed away the entire pot full of kesari I once made with canned pineapple chunks. That was 1/2 hour of effort... Sigh!
   
2. Use fresh pineapple that's really sweet. Otherwise, unless you tell people its "Pineapple Kesari", it would easily pass for the plain old rava kesari.
   
3. If you take x cups of rava/sooji, take 2x cups of the pineapple chunks.
4. And finally, the typical kesari tip. Be cautious with the amount of water you add, otherwise it'll turn watery. For fine rava, I use like 2.5-3 cups water for a cup of rava. Cooking with lid on low flame ensures that the rava gets cooked without requiring too much water.
   

Drinks - Juices, Milkshakes, etc

Would anyone have a chilled milkshake in Winter? I will! :) & so would my husband. We looove looove the drinks made from fruits. Weekdays, we get our daily dose of milk from the cereals we eat for breakfast. But on weekends, I make south Indian tiffins for b/fast. In the afternoons, I make milkshakes so that we get to have milk in some form during weekends too. They are quite refreshing and at the same time, healthy.

If you have a blender/mixer, you are good to go. Blend any fruit (like strawberry, mango, banana, chikkoo - only used these so far) or a fruit-combo with sugar, milk, ice and vanilla sugar (optional). From my experience, I learnt that banana-based shakes should be consumed immediately. Since we don't get ripe mangoes and chikkoo here, I use store bought mango pulp and frozen chikkoo.

Few pictures of the shakes I make:

Strawberry banana m/s

Chikkoo (sapota) m/s

There's this small chaat place in San Diego called Surati Farsan Mart where you get chikkoo shake. Until few weeks ago, we used to visit this place almost every week to have this milk shake. Fellow used to charge 3$ per serving. I always used to crib that I can get a whole week's supply of milk for the same amount. But because I couldn't get chikkoo anywhere, we had to go to this place to have it. I tried really hard in all the Asian and American grocery stores for something even remotely belonging to the sapota/chikkoo family, but in vain. Then one afternoon, I sat and started thinking, if that Surati fellow can get his supply of chikkoo, why am I not getting? It then struck to my mind that probably he could be using frozen chikkoo from India. I never peep inside the frozen foods section of the desi stores. But when I did, the last time I went, I found a bag of "frozen chikkoo". Hurray!! I proudly showed it to my husband as though that was a trophy/award I achieved :) From then on, we started having home-made chikkoo shake. Very fresh, with a very heavenly taste. This is one truly "dil maange more" drink. All for under 1$.

Coming to juices, the only fruit juices that I make are with watermelon and pineapple. Reason- I don't like to eat the melon directly & my husband doesn't like to eat pineapples directly :)

Fruit + sugar + ice + water = one "aha moment" after a day's work :)

Pineapple juice

Watermelon juice

Masala buttermilk



My grandma first made this after seeing us purchase packets & packets of masala buttermilk from Visakha Dairy. These elderly people tend to favour "at-home" cooking a little too much. "Why waste money, when you can have something more healthier and fresh at home" is what they say. I'm so glad my grandma made this, for now, even in the US, I can have masala majjiga whenever I feel like.

For the recipe, churn the curd with water (manually/mixer) and add salt, lemon juice. Grind ginger, green chilli, jeera, curry leaves in a mixer and add to the buttermilk. Serve chilled.

Caramel apples

During my visit to the Seaport Village, San Diego I bought & ate a "caramel apple". Having never seen such a thing before, I innocently asked the cashier if there's really an apple inside that peanut coated spherical object? :) (They call something "Mysore bajji", when there's no Mysore inside the bajji - I know, a really poor PJ :) ) Thankfully, she didn't put any crazy look and answered "yes, there is" with a smile. This is basically an apple coated with caramel and topped with crushed peanuts. Whosoever came up with this idea, What an innovative thought! There were a line of apples coated with chocolate, caramel, cream, etc etc. A real treat to watch them. I don't usually take snaps inside stores/restaurants. I so wish I did. 

This is what it looked like:

 

Yummy, it tasted! The apple was a little sour though. Had that been a really good one, I can't imagine how much more taste it would have added. Can be made at home too, all you need is a sweet apple, some caramel and anything else to decorate it - put on your creative hat! Stick around, I'll post another picture when I make one in my kitchen.