Millet & Oats idli - quick breakfast recipes

Happy new year to you all. It has been more than six months since this blog was updated. So much has happened in our lives (only for the better, hopefully). One of the two guys is now in Germany (and hopefully will post some recipes from there) and the second guy has quit his job and plunged headfirst into freelance travel writing. Check out his blog, called The Sunlit Window, here. We have realized this blog is part of our existence and it should be kept alive. So here goes the first post of the year. We promise to post more recipe ideas and be regular at it as well.

Off to the post...

Millets have become a regular staple in our daily diet. So should it be in yours. Like quinoa in the west, there is a silent millet revolution happening in India (at least in South India). If you scroll down, you will notice a few more millet recipe ideas here. Besides their health benefits, millets also provide variety in your day to day meal.

This millet idli can be done in 20 minutes flat. It is for those days when you open your fridge and find empty trays staring at you because you forgot to buy that dosa batter previous night. And you realise there are no eggs as well. There is oats but you hate the mushy paste it makes when it is mixed with milk. Should I go on and on about the scenarios here? No, but I will tell you this much. You can get creative with the kind of millet you use with this recipe and these idlis could even make the idli haters fall in love with it because it is crumbly in texture.

Millet / Oats idli (serves 2)

Here's what you will need:

1/2 cup of little millet (coarsely ground)
1/2 cup of oats (coarsely ground as well)
1/2 cup of thick curd
1 pinch of asafoetida
1 pinch of baking soda
Salt - to taste

Millet - Oats idli is ready to serve

Here's how you make it:

1) Coarsely grind little millet. Repeat the process with oats. Mix both.
2) Lightly roast the millet and oat flour mix along with the pinch of asafoetida
3) After the mixture is cool, stir in the curd and salt and make a thick batter. Do not add a lot of water because it will ruin the consistency of your idlis.
4) Stir in the baking soda and set it aside for a minute or two.
5) Pour it into your idli cooker and steam for 7 minutes.

Millets-Oats idli

Ta-da, your millet-oats idli is ready. Serve it hot with coconut chutney.

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Spiced pancake

Why do pancakes have to be just rounds of cooked white flour that depend on syrup for taste? Try out these pancakes with the motley bunch of slightly atypical ingredients and enjoy the sweet spice burst for breakfast.

For about 8 pancakes you will need:
- 1 Tbsp butter
- 3 Tbsp sugar
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp ground mace
- 1 tsp crushed fennel seeds (saunf)
- 1 egg
- 2 Tbsp yoghurt
- 3/4 cup milk at room temperature
- 1 Tbsp sweet basil seeds (sabja seeds)
- 3 Tbsp roasted wheat germ (optional)
- 1/2 cup millet flour (we used proso millet)
- 1/2 cup white flour
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt

Melt the butter on very low heat in the bowl that you will be using to make the batter and add the sugar to it. Mix to cool as well as to dissolve the sugar. While the butter cools, mix the yoghurt, milk and the basil seeds and keep aside for the seeds to ooze their gel. Once the butter cools completely add vanilla extract, ground mace, fennel seeds and the egg and mix well. Add millet flour and mix until well incorporated. There is no need to be extra careful as with wheat flour, as there is no gluten that will develop. By now the basil seeds would have become gelatinous. Add the milk mixture along with salt, stir well and let stand for about 30 mins. This time is necessary for the millet flour to soak in the liquid a little and for the basil seeds to further thicken the mixture. You can even make this ahead and keep it in the fridge overnight, in which case use only one tablespoon of yoghurt. The spices will be more pronounced.
When it is time to make the pancakes, sift in the white flour and baking soda (and wheat germ if using) and stir carefully till the flour is just incorporated and there are no lumps. Heat a skillet and add some oil to it. Ladle in the batter and cook on both sides. Serve with fresh fruit or honey.

Millet Banana Breakfast Muffins

Yes, it's muffins again, but this is not so much a recipe as it is an idea that opens up to several recipes for the imaginative. So, we all know muffins, cakes and most bakery are best enjoyed when you don't make them yourself i.e. you don't see the amounts of white flour, fat and sugar that goes into them. We try to add some healthy things in them such as vegetables or fruits and try to step down the fat by substituting milk but alas these are tricky options as the gluten in the flour begins to develop when in contact with water (in the vegetables/fruits/milk) yielding a bread like chewy consistency. So we keep the healthy stuff to a minimum, step up fat and the vicious circle repeats.
Enter - the millet. If you have already jumped onto the gluten free bandwagon, you have probably started experimenting with millets. Millets are perfect if you are aiming at a gluten free diet. Considered among the most ancient of grains, millets provide you with a healthy alternative to rice, wheat and corn. They don't grow big and fat with starch like other main grains, but this is the very trait that makes them an healthier option. India is almost the top producer of millets in the entire world. If you are in India you can add 'responsible eating' to your portfolio while consuming locally grown millets.

Millet muffins

Ingredients (yields up to 7-8 muffins):

- 2/3 to 3/4 cup mashed bananas
- 1/4 cup fat: butter (or oil)
- 1/4 cup milk
- 1 egg or equal volume of thick non-sour yogurt
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla or nutmeg
- 1 1/4 cup millets *
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup or 2 tbsp white flour.

* options are: foxtail millet, barnyard millet, amaranth or a mixture of these.

Here's how you make it.
Whisk butter and sugar until fluffy followed by other wet ingredients i.e. egg/yogurt, milk, bananas and vanilla.

Run the millet(s) in a blender to make a fine powder. It can be made coarse if you like some extra texture in the final product. Experiment varying the coarseness to find out what you like.

Mix salt and baking soda to your millet powder and add this dry mixture to the wet and mix. This is the step where you would truly appreciate the gluten free nature of the millets. Were this white flour, you would have to be extra careful not to over mix and your cook book will advise you to "gently fold in the flour". With millets however, there is no fear of turning the batter bready due to over mixing. Give it a good whisk until the millet powder is thoroughly incorporated.

Finally add in the two tablespoon of white flour by sprinkling it evenly over the mixture and gently folding in until just moist. This small amount of white flour is to provide some binding, else the cakes would be too crumbly.

Divide batter among muffin cups and bake at 180 degrees C for 20 mins or until the cakes pass the toothpick test.

Cornbread breakfast muffins

Though we do not make muffins as often as we would like to, we are all for the simplicity of muffins. Especially the savory ones. It is - just throw in the flour, oil / butter and some vegetables and mix it and spoon it into the tray - simple. When I found this recipe for Jalapeno Cornbread Muffins at Damn Delicious, I knew it was a must-do. As you can see, I used her entire recipe (down to the styling of the dish) but made it savory by skipping honey.

The challenge though, will be the availability of cornmeal in India. What we did was simple. We bought dried corn from the supermarket (not the frozen ones, but you get dried ones in the pulses section) and ground it coarsely. That became an effective cornmeal for this recipe. Don't let the unavailability of ready cornmeal deter you from making these little beauties. Just make your own!

Here's how I made it.

Your dry ingredients

Your wet ingredients

whisk together to form a spoon-worthy batter

Pour the batter in muffin trays and bake

This recipe yields 4 large muffins. Good enough for a breakfast for two.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup of corn flour
1/2 cup of plain flour (maida / all purpose)
1/2 cup of buttermilk
1/4 cup of cooking oil (we use rice bran)
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
Salt, according to taste
1 egg
1 block of cheddar cheese
2 green chillies 

Here's how you make it:

1) Combine the dry ingredients - flour, soda and salt
2) Combine the wet ingredients - buttermilk, egg and oil
3) Pour the wet over dry mixture and whisk gently to combine
4) Add shredded cheese, chopped green chillies and combine
5) Spoon the batter into greased muffin trays and bake in preheated oven for 200 F for 15 minutes or until it passes the toothpick test (poke a toothpick and see if it comes out clean, if it does, your muffins are ready)
6) Serve hot over coffee.

Cucumber dosa with green chutney - Easy Breakfast Recipes

If Tamil Nadu is the Masala Dosa capital, Karnataka stakes its claim for the Dosa crown with many easy to make variants - neeru dosa, cucumber dosa and so on. While I haven't mastered neeru dosa as yet (it is made with a super thin batter and takes good expertise to swirl it around in the dosa pan), making cucumber dosa wasn't a difficult task. It makes for an easy breakfast / dinner recipe with only a teeny bit of planning. 

When I started looking for recipes (on the internet as well as asking around colleagues who are native to Karnataka) to make cucumber dosa, I found an overwhelming number of variations to this recipe. Some suggested urad dal, some plain rice, while some fermentation. In the end, I picked and chose the techniques from various recipes and arrived at this one.

The measurements yield about 10 tiny dosas. Here is the recipe for dosa and green chutney.

Ingredients for the dosa:

1) 1/2 cup of uncooked raw rice (pre-soaked, preferably overnight)
2) 1/2 cup of uncooked boiled rice (pre-soaked, preferably overnight)
3) 1 tiny piece of ginger
4) 1 green chilly 
5) 1 cup of grated cucumber
6) 1 handful grated coconut

How to make dosa:

1) Wash and grind the rice along with the rest of the ingredients (do not add a lot of water while grinding because the cucumber has water in it)
2) Let the batter sit for about half-hour (if you are in a hurry, go on and pour your dosas)
3) Heat up your dosa pan and spread the dosas

Your cucumber dosa and chutney are ready to be served!

Here's how you make the green chutney to go with it.

Ingredients:

1) 1/2 cup of grated coconut
2) 1 tiny bunch of coriander leaves
3) 1 tablespoon of roasted gram dal (pottukadalai)
4) 1 pod of garlic 
5) 1 green chilly
6) 1 teaspoon of oil

How to make chutney:

1) Heat up the oil and fry chilly and garlic
2) Grind the rest of the ingredients along with the fried chilly and garlic. Your chutney is ready.

Enjoy your quick-fix breakfast.

Zucchini / Pumpkin Flower Fritters - Quick Breakfast / Snack

I dream of Italy. A lot. I do. It is my culinary mecca (as it is for three quarters of the world). And when I go there someday – which I hope to – I will eat like it is nobody’s business. I will stuff my face with their glorious gnocchi, ravioli and tagliatelle in millions of sauce variations eating like a pig (and eat pig too), making orgasmic noises. But until then, I will continue to discover little Italian culinary pleasures in my own kitchen like this post.

Although you can find every single Italian dish ever invented in the restaurants, some are still far from reaching the kitchens of India. Zucchini flower fritters is one of them in my opinion. And when I planted zucchini in the backyard it grew wildly and made humongous zucchinis besides also producing numerous flowers. That is when I decided I should try making zucchini flower fritters. The internet is filled with deep fried versions of zucchini flowers but I found one at Parsley Thief that I loved. This is more like a zucchini pancake and you need not necessarily fry them in oil, which means slightly healthier than the deep fried version.

Zucchini Flower Fritters

Ingredients you would need, well almost.

Chop the zucchini flowers, shallots and garlic

Saute the zucchini flowers

Make the fritter batter

Pan fry the fritters

You will need:

Zucchini flowers - take 10 – 15 for 6 pancakes

Flour - 1 cup

Basil leaves - handful

Egg - 1 (you can totally skip it if you are not an egg person)

Yogurt - 1 cup

Garlic - 2 pods

Shallots - 4

Cheese - a tiny block (of cheese in stock, I used cheddar. Also I tried once with tofu and it tasted well too)

Baking soda - a pinch

Oil - as required

Salt - as required

Preparation:

• Wash the zucchini flowers thoroughly under running water. Remove the green sepals from the flowers and chop them finely after checking for any bugs.
• Chop the shallots and garlic.
• Heat oil and sauté shallots and garlic for a minute. Drop the zucchini flowers and sauté them for another minute. Turn the flame down and leave it to cool.
• Grate the cheese.
• Break the egg into a bowl, add chopped basil, grated cheese, yogurt, flour, salt and then the cooled down zucchini flower mixture.
• Whisk well and check for consistency and to avoid lumps. If needed, add water / yogurt / milk to adjust.
• Add baking soda as the final step.
•  Heat the griddle and pour the fritters, cook in low flame on both sides.
• Transfer it into a paper towel so the towel absorb oil from the fritter.
• Serve hot (it can be eaten plain or with Tabasco).

Note: I tried making the fritters with whole wheat flour and found that it turns out dense. I also tried without adding soda but the effect was just not the same.