Ingredients: Serves 6-8
3/4 cup small grain rice (any long grain basmati rice does NOT work well here. Dubhraj, punni or sona masoori work best)
5 cups whole fat milk
1 teaspoon ghee
1 bay leaf
2 cloves
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon saffron
1/4 cup toasted nuts, like almond, pistachio, cashews etc (optional)
1 teaspoon cardamom powder (optional)
Method:
Soak rice in water for 30 minutes. Drain water. Set rice aside.
In a heavy bottom, wide mouthed pot or pan, heat ghee. Add bay leaves and cloves. As they sputter, add rice. Fry rice in ghee until all the excess water evaporates.
Add, milk. Scrape the bottom to make sure there’s no rice sticking to the bottom. Bring the milk to a nice rolling boil. Turn down the heat to low.
Stir in saffron. Let the kheer simmer until the rice is cooked through, approx. 20 minutes. Stir occasionally. Make sure nothing sticks to the bottom and sides.
Stir in sugar. Mix well, scraping the sides and bottom. Continue simmering, storring and scraping until the milk is reduced to half. Stir in toasted nuts.
Turn off the heat. Allow the kheer to cool down before transferring it to refrigerator. Chill for a few hours, approx. 3-5hrs.
Serve chilled with a little cardamom powder sprinkled on top. Enjoy!
Ingredients:
Being a food blogger for these many years now, I have tried and tested so many recipes that I’ve lost count. Only a small part of those trials turn to success and then even lesser number make their way here. Many times a recipe is a success but then for some reason they stay in drafts, I forget about them and even though they are some of my favorite recipes they still do not see the daylight. This is one such post.
Ingredients:
Somewhere around 5:00- 5:30 in the morning, gently shaken by a light beeping of the alarm on my phone, I wake up. I pull the phone out, from under her crib, parked right next to my bed and turn it off in a hurry avoiding, waking the baby up. Complete silence all around and only the sound of their rhythmic breath and soft snore filling up the house. First rays of sunshine trying to penetrate through the crisp white curtains on our bedroom window. Early mornings are golden in the house. There was a time when I’d resent waking up at such wee hours and it would only happen if there was a plane to catch or something of similar urgency. Now I look forward to it.
I look forward to the only “me” time I get through out the day and try not to miss it. With eyes half open and a sweet ache in the back reminding of its presence, I sneak out from under the covers, tip toe my way out the door, straight into the kitchen. Eyes are fully open only after the first sip of my ginger chai. Leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping my sweet tea and reading whatever interests me that morning is a daily ritual. There’s always an attempt to keep the subject positive but presidential race has been trending lately.
But then somedays you bump into something heartfelt by someone, like 
At the same time there’s always an effort to pass down a little of myself to them. And when they show similar love to some of the things I am passionate about, its makes my world a little brighter. Like the love for cooking. Maybe its because they’ve seen their mum spend so much time in the kitchen or some other reason, but both the girls love being in the kitchen themselves. While the little monkey would insist on climbing up the kitchen counter and watch me cook, the older one is already cooking with me. This recipe is a very simple one, nothing out of the ordinary, only my butterfly developed it with me. The idea is pretty much all hers and I am so darn proud of it. We make it very often as a weeknight dinner and I just couldn’t be prouder sharing it with you here.
So here I am with the recipe, which is not much of a recipe beyond what you see on the video. Egg dosa is something that is always a hit in our household. I love the fact that its so quick to put together. Just pull out the batter from the refrigerator, crack a couple eggs and you are good to go. Breakfast, after school snack, lunchbox meal, you name it. And the kids love it because they can just roll one up and they are good to go.
Ingredients:
It can be a challenge to decide exactly where to put the focus point in your image. Think about your story for each image and what you want to portray. Often this will help you pinpoint where the focus should be in your image. For example, if you want to portray an entire dessert buffet, your focal point or center of interest will be pretty much in the middle of the image. If however, you are showcasing a specific dessert as part of the buffet you will focus directly on your showcase dessert directly.
It also gives you four ‘sections’ (marked in red in the picture) that are also useful positions for elements in your photo.
In the breakfast image, once again there are many items in my shot and while I wanted the viewer to take in the entire scene, I pinpointed my point of focus on the croissant and selected a medium depth of field.
In the asparagus image I was looking to shoot the lovely fresh vegetable which was my main ingredient for a dish. While I wanted to have the entire bunch in my shot I planned to highlight the tips. Being the most valuable part of the vegetable, it was easy to decide where the focus point would be. I focused on the asparagus tips towards the back of the bunch and blurred the stems as the color and volume take up a larger part of the image. However, while the viewer registers the stems and the color, the eyes are directed instantly towards the tips that are in focus.
Finally in the image with the chilli bunch, my focus was on the two chillies in the front but I wanted the viewer to get the picture of the entire bunch. By placing the bunch so that my two chillies are more or less focussed in the middle I selected a shallow depth of field allowing me to soften and blur other parts of the image. This way the viewer still takes in the wonderful long stem the chillies are on but his eyes fall first on the parts that are in focus.
Selecting the right aperture and focus point to get the depth of field (DOF) you want often depends on what part of the image you want to highlight. Is it the entire table, just a plate or a blueberry on top of a dessert? The answer to these questions will often make it very easy to determine where that focus should be.
Yesterday, it took me a total of 1 hr 10 minutes just to step out of the house to go to Trader Joe’s, IN MY PAJAMAS! I know the time precisely because the little monkey usually naps around 11am so I had planned my schedule in a way that I am back home by the time she’s ready to sleep, hence I was constantly keeping an eye on the clock. After just somehow sending the big sister off to her school and daddy for work on time I was positive the day was under my control. All I gotta do is head out and without fail that’s the time when baby decides to poop. For the third time! No biggie, changing diapers are like clockwork by the time second one comes around. I do that and I go to grab my wallet. Of course, it’s not where it belongs so looking under the couch, in the pantry and the shoe closet is a norm. While I’m chucking the clothes out of the laundry basket frantically looking for it I hear a thud. Kitchen floor covered in pecans and the little one happily munching on them. While cleaning it I realize i am still in my jammies and decide I deserve to get into a clean pair of jeans, or clothes devoid of flour, chocolate or sauce stains. Luckily I found one too. But then I thought I heard the little monkey say “yuckyyy”. That is a red flag! I run and find ricotta smeared on the floor AND all over her body. Then bath, clean up, you know the drill.
1 hr 10 minutes, just to get to the freaking grocery store which by the way is where I realize I did not get a chance to slip into that shiny looking pair of jeans I pulled out of the closet. How do they do that? How do these deceivingly adorable looking, chubby little humans take down their own procreators so easily? I thought I have done this once and this time I got it all in bag. Well that’s what they all made me think. You’ve done this before, second time’s easy. Well, it’s not! It’s equally tiring and exhausting only this time the challenges are different from before. Oh, but let me also add the “politically correct” plugin here, it’s still so darn rewarding and heart warming! But boy being a parent is tough.
While I am still trying to figure this whole motherhood thing out, I’ve got the food part under control. Most of the days. Or so I think! Quick fix dinners, one pot meals, get the 6 yr old working in the kitchen. Some of the skills I am trying to master these days. And some of my favorite recipes lately are dals or lentil soups. You throw everything in the pot or a pressure cooker and let the ingredients do their job while you are busy cleaning the legos off the floor or scrapping soggy cereal stuck to the high chair.
Panchratan Dal is a new found love. It might not hold the popularity award as dal makhni or tadka dal but it is still one of the oldest preparations of dal in Indian cuisine. Panchratan simply in hindi means five gems which in this recipe stand for the five kinds of lentils we are going to use. Split bengal gram (chana dal), split pigeon peas (toor dal), mung beans, spilt and dehusked brown lentils (masoor dal) and Black gram lentils (Urad). These are simply cooked together with salt and turmeric until done and blend into each other and then a spicy tadka to give it the warmth and armoa its popular for for. Here comes the recipe:
I quickly picked one, broke it from the middle to see whether it snapped, to check for its freshness. It was, so we packed the smaller, greener ones from the pile, into our bag while telling her how I hated this vegetable as a kid but slowly it turned to be one of my favorites. Probably because of the way my mum, her nani, cooked it. She wanted to give it a try. We decided this should be dinner. We came back home, I restocked the refrigerator while she washed the tindoras under fresh water. Little monkey munched on a couple, raw, while the butterfly and I prepped them for a stir fry.
She has an advanced palate for a 6 year old who would pick mussel soup over french fries any day but prefers cleaner flavors. So for her to try a vegetable for the first time I always cook them as simple as possible with as little ingredients as I can. For tindora I went my mum’s way and sautéed them simply with panch foran spices. Just to subtly perfume the vegetable without overpowering its innate flavors. When put on her plate, she made a face, was probably expecting it to look different? After a stern stare from me, picked up a few and tried them. Rest went untouched for the rest of her meal. Later that night, maybe she felt something, comes to me and admits, “the tiny green vegetable you made me eat, wasn’t that bad”. Since then tindora has become “the tiny green vegetable Maa makes me eat”, but we are beginning to like it better now. Baby steps at a time!
