Pudina Pulao with Mix Vegetable Curry

Looks like a time-taking recipe, but trust me, the combo can be cooked in just about half hour.

Pudina/mint pulao's been inspired from Mahanandi.

Coming to veggy curry, I got a chance to taste this at a friend's house. She's this terrific cook and a sweet talker who I'm sure would rock the food-blog-world if she starts blogging on a serious note.

The curry just takes 15min to be ready, seriously.. :) All you need is to have a tin of Trader Joes "masala simmer sauce" in your pantry. Its this tomato based sauce with all the Indian kurma spices included in it.

Here's the curry recipe:

Ingredients:

1. Trader Joes "Masala Simmer Sauce" - 1/3 tin
2. Potato - 1 medium size
3. 1 cup Frozen veggies (carrot, beans, corn and peas) or fresh veggies - your choice
4. Cashewnuts - 4
5. Khus-khus/poppy seeds - 1 tsp
6. Shredded coconut - 1/2 tsp

Method:

1. Break the whole cashew into small chunks and soak them along with khus-khus and coconut in a small amount of milk. I suggest you do this atleast 2 hours in advance, so that the poppy seeds can be easily blended in the mixer.
2. Cube the potato and microwave until they are 75% cooked.
3. Heat a spoonful of oil (not much reqd since the sauce already has enough oil) and toss the boiled potato and the mixed vegetables. Add some salt (just sufficient for the vegetables, sauce contains salt too)
   
4. Cook on low flame with lid covered until the veggies turn tender
5. Add the sauce and may be half cup water to the vegetables.
6. Simmer for about 5min.
7. Grind the cashew-poppy-coconut mix to a not-so-smooth-not-so-coarse paste. Its okay if the poppy seeds aren't crushed completely.
8. Add this paste to the gravy, stir the contents and serve hot with yummy yummy pudina pulao and curd.

Pizza

A decade ago, when I was first introduced to the pizza, my first impression was that its one complicated thing with so many ingredients and could never be made at home. Also, who wants to take the trouble making it, when its just a phone call away. With so many pizza stores mushrooming everywhere making fancy claims like: "Delivery in 30 min or money-back", flooding our mailboxes with all those coupons, etc etc, it never once occured to my mind to actually try to make a "home-made pizza" until I saw the nutrition guide on pizzahut.com. 800+ calories in one single meal???? Got the shock of my life and started trashing away all those coupons in the bin right next to the mailbox, even without bothering to look at what they've got to offer new.

The hunt for recipes started then. Realized it isn't as difficult as I once thought. The main ingredient is the pizza dough. You can either choose to make it at home, or buy a readymade dough. I baked like 3 pizzas till now, and never once kneaded the dough myself. Trader Joes carries a wonderful pizza dough in the cheese section. It comes in three flavours/types - plain dough, wheat dough, garlic & herbs. Having tried them all, plain dough has emerged a winner in my home. :)

If you use all store-bought ingredients like I did, pizza can be made in as less as 30min. For the sauce, I use Prego "traditional" sauce. If you like herbs, you could use Oregano, Basil, and other Italian seasonings.

I'll now descibe the pizza-making process picture-by-picture:

Let the dough sit for about 15 min on a slightly flour-ed surface. In the meantime, get ready with your toppings. For a veggie pizza, I use onion, green capsicum, tomato, jalepenos, black olives and pineapple chunks.




Slightly grease a baking pan/pizza stone and spread out the dough evenly. This is the hardest part of pizza-making. You could use a rolling pin, if it helps.



If you choose to add herbs, do it now. I dusted some garlic powder too.



Generously spread the pizza sauce leaving an outer border of about 1 cm on all four sides. Prior to adding the sauce, you could add some olive oil if you wish.



Now comes the fun-nest step. Decorate the pizza with your choice of toppings.



Cheese. IMO, Mozarella is the one for pizza. Don't be too stingy with the cheese, while at the same time, don't add too much either.



I usually sprinkle a spoonful of pizza/pasta sauce along with some more herbs on the cheese layer.

Bake at 450F for 10min. You'll know when its ready. The smell that gets filled up in the room.. Ahhh! If only smell could be digitized, I could have sent it to my mom back in India to tell her that the smell that emanates from the oven is more filling that the pizza itself. :)


Oh! So restaurant-y



I know its hard to resist temptation, but its important that you leave it to cool for 10min and then run a pizza cutter/knife through.



After looking at the nutrition labels of all the ingredients (using cheese made from 2% milk), I came up with the magic number 300. That's the maximum number of calories in a pizza made with half pound dough. Now, this is what I call guilt-free indulgence.

Experiments from Lakshmi's Kitchen

Lakshmi is the first "new friend" I made in the USA. A nice girl who's really good at cooking, and the one who kind of got me into food blogging. She blogs at: Lakshmi's Kitchen  

This post is dedicated to Lakshmi. Couple of recipes I tried from her blog would be presented here.

To start with, the mouth-watering Gobi Manchurian

My changes:

Added tomato ketchup along with other sauces

Vegetable Frittata - Not much of an omlette lover, but enjoyed eating this one. May be because of the veggies.

Many more to try....

Bisibela bath

An authentic Karnataka dish, also called Sambar rice in other parts of the country. A single pot meal that gives the benefit of eating dal, rice and vegetables all in one go! 

Besides dal, rice and vegetables, the important ingredient that goes into the making of Bisibela bath is the spice powder. Most people make it at home, however, MTR bisibela bath masala is good enough for lazy people like me.

Ingredients:

1. Toor dal - 1/2 cup
2. Rice - 1/2 cup
3. Vegetables - carrot, beans, potato
4. Onion - 1 medium size
5. Bisibela bath powder - 2,3 spoons
6. Tamarind juice - 2 tbl spoons
7. Popu/Tadka - mustard, jeera, curry leaves and heeng 
8. Cashewnuts - as you wish :)

Method:

1. Pressure cook dal & rice together with 2 cups water
2. Chop the vegetables into inch long pieces and (steam/microwave) cook them too
3. Cut the onion into thin inch long pieces (as long as the veggies)
4. Fry a spoonful of ghee & oil and do the tadka
5. Once the mustard seeds start to pop, add the onions
6. Next add the cooked vegetables and fry
7. Add the dal-rice mixture to the fried vegetables. At this stage, add salt and a pinch of turmeric powder
8. Toss in the bisibela bath masala and tamarind juice 
   
9. Adding a little water, bring all the ingredients together. Skip this step if you like your bisibela bath to be grainy and not one mashed lump of rice
10. Adjust salt, spice powder, tamarind juice as required. You could also add some chilli powder if you like it hot
11. Garnish with ghee roasted cashewnuts and serve hot

When I cook something from an online recipe, I end up running several times back & forth between the stove & the computer. So as to check if I'm on track :) If you're also like me and if you're going to make bisibela bath using MTR powder, you could avoid running this time - bcoz the recipe above is what is written on the back of the MTR packet. :D

Entry to events:

Single Serving Recipes event.

Cooking for kids: Rice event.

Vegetable puffs

Veg puffs are sold in most Indian bakeries. A very popular snack liked by both young & old. This is called "veggie pattie" in some of the Northern & Western states of India. It hardly takes 10 minutes to prepare them, provided you have all the ingredients. All you need is a pack of puff-pastry sheets (you'll find them in the frozen section of most grocery stores) and mixed vegetables (I use the frozen ones). 

During one of those weekend get-togethers, a friend of mine made vegetable puffs. Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined that veg puffs could be made at home. Though its been like 9 months since I had them at her place, I didn't get the enthu to make them until I started to food-blog. 

I generally don't browse cooking videos for recipes, unless I have a gut feeling that the recipe calls for some level of manual dexterity which can only be learnt when watched. The recipe I followed is the one by Vah chef, Sanjay. If you stock up the puff-pastry sheets and cut vegetables, you can prepare the puffs in less than 10 minutes. But it could take upto an hour starting from the the point when you pull out the ingredients from the fridge to the point when you take out the baked puffs from the oven. That's bcoz the pastry sheets should be thawed for atleast 20minutes. 

Look at how I made them:

Using Pepperidge farm pastry sheets, I could make 9 large puffs using one sheet. The unbaked puffs can be kept frozen for - .... I don't know how many days :) I prepared the filling for 9 puffs and sealed the puffs ready to bake, and then felt we couldn't eat them all at once. So, I placed 4 of them in a Ziploc bag and kept them in the freezer. Unable to resist the temptation, I baked them the very next day :) They tasted just as good as they did on Day 1. 

I've had the experience of having microwave-fresh puffs at the bakeries in India, but never had oven-fresh ones. Can't wait to make them for my sister who loves them! 

Pav bhaji

I'm going to start my "Street food" series with this. This is a copy-pasted recipe from Nupur's kitchen to mine :)

The recipe

The shot:

Extremely authentic, Superly delicious!

She is absolutely right about adding onions in the end, and not while cooking. After making in both the styles (fry onion in the beginning, add onions just in the end), I could only wonder how much one small change could alter the taste of the dish. Since I couldn't find pav bread here in San Diego, I ate my bhaji with ghee-roasted white bread slices. :) Wasn't much different from the taste of pav.

Feel like sipping something? Me too :)

How about a glass of Strawberry banana milkshake on the side?