Upma + Muffin = Upffin!

Torn between snooty breakfast choice (muffins and coffee) and traditional breakfast choice (upma) we came up with the upffin, which was quite a success. Only one thing was missing, it definitely needs a chutney to go with. We suggest the chat chutneys i.e. the green coriander chutney and the sweet tamarind jaggery one.
It makes a very nice 5pm snack too. The semolina (rava) gives a nice brown crispy outside to these savory muffins.

For four jumbo Upffins you will need:

1 cup Semolina (rava)
3/4 cup plain Yogurt a little on the sour side
1/2 tsp Turmeric powder (Manjal/Haldi)
1/2 tsp Red chilli powder
1/2 large or one small Onion chopped
3 Green chillies chopped (or more as per taste)
1 handful Sweet Corn kernels
1 handful fresh Green Peas
Salt to taste
1/2 tsp Baking soda

For Tempering
3 tbsp Cooking oil, Mustard seeds, cumin seeds and Asafoetida (Kayam/Hing).

Dry roast the semolina in a wok taking care to stir constantly and get an even golden brown colour. Transfer into a bowl and let it cool a bit. Add the yogurt and mix well. You can adjust the amount of yogurt depending on how thick it is. The batter should not be too runny, you should be able to spoon the batter into the muffin tray. Mix in all the other ingredients except those for tempering.
Turn on your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Grease well and flour a muffin tray and keep ready.
In the wok heat the oil and add the mustard seeds, when they begin to splutter, add the cumin seeds and the asafoetida. Turn off the heat and add the contents of the wok to the batter. Spoon in some of the batter into the wok and back into the bowl to get all the oil. Mix the batter well. Spoon the batter into the muffin tray and pop into the oven (even if not completely heated). Bake for about 20mins or until brown. Remove from the mould and serve with the above suggested chutneys.

Slinging pretzels (Brezelschlingen)

(Lye) Pretzel ((Laugen)Brezel in German: pronounce "brey-tsel")

This post is a story post not a recipe post. Though I have no children connection I believe this post could interest children raisers due to the fable like story. This is not the historical account of the origin of Pretzels (which I am sure is not as interesting) but one of the several stories narrated in Germany to explain its origin. The courtesy goes to of course Elvira again and this book she gave me as a Christmas gift. 

In Germany pretzels are famous mostly in the two Southern states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg (especially Swabia). It's a savoury bread with a tick chewy middle and thin tapering ends called the "arms" with rock salt strewn on top for a nice salty punch when you bite into the crispy crust and the chewy crumb. Altogether it's a wonderful warmth that spreads in your body and spirit when had fresh from the baker on a cold morning; dunking it in coffee as some like to do. They are had with butter, cheese or Wurst although they are great even just plain.

The main highlights of the pretzel are firstly it's shape of course and secondly the fact they they are dunked in Lye (Lauge) before baking which is what gives it the deep brown colour. Lye is a diluted solution of Sodium Hydroxide (Soda - NaOH). The way the shape is formed is important as this imparts the tension and stretch to the dough required for most yeast doughs. That's why it's called slinging pretzels (Brezelschlingen). This is how pretzels are professionally "slung". It takes some practice but can be learnt and is great fun! (when you get them right)

Now to the story.

Once upon a time there was a baker called Frieder. He and his wife baked delicious bread for the entire town. There were few other bakers as good as Frieder. He even delivered his bread to the royal palace. The King was very happy with the bread that Frieder provided for him and his townsmen.

As Frieder got richer, he also got greedier. He began mixing his flour with cheap lime and making his loaves too small. When the king came to know of this, he called Frieder to the court and sentenced him to be hanged. Until the decided day he would be locked up in a cell. During his time in the cell the townspeople had trouble getting bread and even the royal palace faced delays in getting their supply. 

The King not wanting to lose his only good baker decided to give Frieder a chance. He summoned Frieder on the evening before the planned hanging and said: "You may go free under one condition. You bake a bread so delicious that I have never ever tasted, before the third crow of the rooster tomorrow and through which the sun may shine thrice". 

With this task the King let Frieder go home for the night. Frieder went home and made the dough for the bread without knowing how he would proceed. All he could picture in his head was the noose that would go around his neck the next day. His hands formed the dough just like the rope of the noose. His plump wife stood by patiently in the door of the kitchen with arms crossed. Arms that would not embrace him anymore once he was dead. He formed similar crossed arms with the dough with the plump middle. And behold! The sun can actually shine thrice through this bread! Happy with the chance of going free, Frieder and his wife danced about in joy. Alas! They tipped the tray and the shaped dough fell into the bucket of lye meant for cleaning the oven. They hurriedly took the dough out of the lye and replaced them on the tray. There was no time to make more and the bread was baked as such. It tasted like nothing the King had had before. Frieder was free to go!

The below batch was our second pretzel breakfast. The first one was far from perfect. Recipe on request and orders in batches of 12 are welcome :)

Beetroot cake

Eeeew... beetroot in cake? The ugly cousin of carrot somehow didn't make it big in the cake world. Both are vegetables, both are roots, both are more or less neutral tasting and have no strong flavours of their own and take up added flavours well. Why then did only carrot cake make it to the chalk boards of many a café? Somethings are just unfair. Let this recipe change your initial exclamation.


As opposed to plain flour cakes which are more spongy, vegetable and fruit cakes are generally a little crumbly due to the water content in the fruits and vegetables. They pair well with ice cream as a dessert and also are more suitable for drizzling a glaze on them rather than layering and frosting. This cake is no exception. I have not done any glaze on this one. But I will include it in the recipe should you want to try it.

This recipe yields a loaf of 8"x 4.5". You will need


3/4 cup finely grated Beetroot
2 Eggs
1/3 cup unsalted Butter
2 tbsp Olive oil
1/2 cup Sugar
1/3 cup Milk/pouring Cream/plain Yogurt.
1/2  Vanilla pod or 1/2 tsp Vanilla extract or essence
1 cup White cake Flour (maida)
1 tsp Baking powder
1/4 tsp Salt


Leave the butter out in the bowl you plan to mix your batter in while you grate the beetroot and measure out other ingredients. Scrape out the vanilla pod if using. Grease and flour the cake pan.


In a separate bowl mix the flour, salt and baking powder and keep aside. Pour the olive oil over the butter and cream the butter with a whisk (or electric mixer) until fluffy. Add the sugar and vanilla and whisk again until thoroughly combined. Add the eggs one at a time mixing between each addition. Add the flour mixture and the milk alternately in three additions starting and ending with the flour. Your cake batter minus the beetroot is now ready.


A note on the beetroot at this point is in place. You have a choice to make here. You can add the grated beetroot as such or saute it in a little butter before adding it. Sauteing the beetroot beforehand will remove excess water from it and hence improve the texture of the cake. I however didn't bother with this, as I am not much for cooking the beetroot twice; once while sauteing and then again in the oven, which would make it nutritionally null and void. I'd rather have a little crumblier cake than eat beetroot just for its colour. So if you have guests and want to make a better presentation, by all means saute the beetroot in a bit of butter until any oozed juices have evaporated. If sauteing, do it right in the beginning and let it cool down before adding it to the batter else the beetroot will cook the eggs as you add.


So, stir in the beetroot with a rubber spatula, not an electric whisk; the whisk will catch the beetroot shreds and fling around cake batter creating beetroot graffiti in your kitchen! Mix it gently, you can leave a bit of white batter marbled here and there. Pour into the cake pan. Smooth the top and pop into an oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius. Baking time will be more for raw beetroot than for sauted. Bake for about 25 to 40 mins depending on your oven. A toothpick inserted in the middle that comes out clean indicates that the cake is done. Run a knife around the edges and invert cake pan to remove the cake.


If glazing, a lemon glaze works well. Take about three to four tablespoons of icing sugar and add the juice of one lemon to make a paste. Add water as necessary to get a thick syrupy pouring consistence. Drizzle over the warm cake. Cool the cake on a wire rack before slicing.

Lemon ginger cream sauce

Two weeks preceding Christmas of 2011 I was in Stuttgart, Germany on work and made a friend. Elvira Ruhnke-Hauptvogel was one of the few colleagues with whom I laughed a lot and also got a dinner invitation from. Picking up on my inquisitiveness about the food she made and served, she aptly gave me this parting Christmas gift.

This post is hence dedicated to her and though I am not as much in touch with her as I promised to be, I would like to tell you Elvira that the books you gave me are on the top of my pile of cookbooks and very soon I even plan to attempt Spätzle!
This books is about 50 sauces and the kind of pasta (Nudeln = German for Pasta) they go with well. I had Thai rice sticks and was rummaging for a suitable sauce for the same. I zeroed down on this recipe to which I have made significant modifications by including more spices, vegetable and seeds.

It is a typical fusion dish with Asian spices and yet a very European slant due to the cream base. It pairs well with flat rice noodles (Thai rice sticks) as well as with regular wheat pasta. As you might notice even the book files this recipe under "euro-asiatisch". It is a cold dish; it is served at room temperature. The concept of distinguishing a warm meal from a cold one is also typically German and it is considered healthy to eat at least one warm meal a day. A cold pasta dish is not necessarily a pasta salad and neither is this one. It calls for only minimal cooking of the ingredients- just browning the onions and cooking the noodles.

For this dish (for two) your pantry should include...

Ingredients

-Flat Rice Noodles or Pasta (if using pasta a similar flat pasta like fettuccine would work well)
-About 20-25 fresh Basil leaves
-A stalk of Lemongrass
-1" piece of Ginger
-1 Lemon
-3-4 dry Red chillies (you can go up to 6 if you like it really spicy)
-3-4 cloves of Garlic
-1 Onion
-1 Green Pepper
-1 Tbsp Black Sesame seeds
-150-200 ml Fresh Cream
-1 Tbsp Honey
- Salt

Boil a liter of water in a large pot. Place the red chillies (stem removed), the garlic cloves (peel only the outer wispy skin, leave the tight snug skin on) and some salt in a mortar (I use rock salt in the mortar as it helps grinding the spices) and add one tablespoon of the boiling water to it. Peel the ginger and chop into fine pieces and add to the mortar as well and keep aside.

Thinly slice the onions. In a skillet, heat about a teaspoon of any oil and add the onions to it. Spread the slices. You have to get the onions brown, so lower the flame to the lowest and start also thinly slicing the green pepper while keeping an eye on the onions, stirring when needed. When the onions are nearly brown, add in the sesame seeds and toss around till they crackle or show some form of acknowledgement of the heat and turn the flame off. Take out the onions and sesame and add the green pepper slices to the skillet and let them get just very slightly done in the residual heat. I like green peppers just slightly done, even raw is fine.

Remove the outer leaves of the lemongrass and chop the stalk as fine as you can. Even the basil has to be cut very finely. A good idea to finely cut basil is to stack up 3-4 leaves at a time, roll them like you would a cigarette and cut finely using a pair of kitchen scissors. Add the basil and the lemongrass to a mixing bowl. Zest the lemon and squeeze the juice. Both go into the mixing bowl as well.

By now your boiled water would have cooled down a bit, add the rice sticks and keep covered. Rice sticks don't need a flame to cook in. Just immersing them in hot water (not even boiling water) will cook them. But again this depends on the variety and quality of the noodles. I have described what worked for these Thai rice sticks. Follow the instructions on the pack for cooking the noodles.

Back to the spices. Now the chillies in the mortar would have softened. Crush and pound with a pestle to make a fiery red paste. You are now nearly done; it is now mixing time. The red paste and the onions- sesame mixture go into the mixing bowl. Add in the cream and honey and mix well. This is what allows you to add so many spices and yet not burn through while eating. Your sauce is now ready. Add the green peppers and drained noodles to the sauce. Toss well and voilà!

Basic cheesecake

For a long time and after a lot of rummaging on the internet I had almost resigned to the fact that  Cheesecake in India was not practical. The core ingredient "cream cheese" is not easily available. There are only few brands and terribly overpriced. Splurging that kind of money on one ingredient for a home dessert is not my thing.
For me a recipe is somehow not interesting if there it calls for an excess (of money or quantity) of just one very rich fattening ingredient; like EIGHT eggs or more for a 9inch cake or Croissants.. (..stretch and wrap the yeast dough around a slab of butter... Ugh!!).
Most of the recipes for cheese cake on Indian websites were either dubiously simple (the "I-doubt-they-actually-tried-that"- variety ) or just some method of solidifying milk or worse, maintained that condensed milk and yogurt mixed together produced cheesecake!
This recipe for cheesecake has been tried and tested (not perfected). I was told that it is a little lighter than the version made with cream cheese. The recipe proceeds in three stages. Here is the ingredients list.

For a 7" round cheesecake you will need:
400ml tubs of plain Yogurt (set curd if you will) - 2
1/2 cup Sugar
1/3 cup Fresh Cream
2 Eggs
1 Tbsp Cake flour (maida)
1 Vanilla pod/ 1/2 tsp Vanilla essence
1/4 tsp Nutmeg
8-10 plain Biscuits (neutral tasting and less sweet like Marie) or Plain crackers
2 tbsp melted Butter
For cheesecakes you also need a springform pan.


Start the previous night. Hang the yogurt. Hanging yogurt gets rid of the whey and gives you only the cheese. Take a bowl, spread a cheesecloth or a clean handkerchief over it empty the two tubs of yogurt into it. Gather and tie the ends of the hanky and hang it overnight. This is what I do.

A note on the yogurt used. You want the least sour yogurt you can get. Usually the carton has a production date and the life thereafter is two weeks. While this is okay for most uses, buy a carton that is not more than 4-5 days old.

Stage one:
The next day start with the biscuit base. Put the biscuits or crackers into a plastic bag and use a rolling pin to crush the biscuits to crumbs. There should be no chunky pieces left. Be careful with the plastic bag. Crush more by rolling and less by pounding. If the plastic bag tears, it's a mess! Pour out the powdered biscuits into a bowl. Add the powdered nutmeg, melted butter and half an egg white into the biscuit powder. For the egg white, crack an egg around its middle and using your fingers slightly cleave open the egg shell letting some of the egg white to flow into the biscuits. Keep the remaining egg aside, it will be added to the filling.
Now stir the biscuit powder well to get it all wet with butter and egg white and empty the bowl into an ungreased springform pan (Yay... no greasing and flouring required for cheesecake). Spread evenly on the bottom of the pan and then press down with the back of a spoon to form a firm base. It should look like this.

Now stick the springform pan in the freezer. Cover it with a plate to avoid any drops of water from falling in. Freezing will cause the butter to get firmer and this will hold the base better. The egg white is actually a safety measure. When the cheesecake is popped in the oven, The butter in the base will melt again and the egg white will get firm by cooking. This will ensure that your base is not too crumbly making it easier to cut and serve.


Stage Two:
We make the filling now. Open the cheesecloth and plop its contents into the bowl (you can use the one which had the biscuit powder). Use a spoon to get any significant remains in the cheesecloth. Scrap out the vanilla pod onto the cheese.

Add in the sugar, cream and eggs one at a time and flour and mix with a large spoon after every addition until the mixture is homogeneous. While mixing do not take out the spoon with every stroke. The aim is to mix everything without getting too much air into the mixture. 
This is the main difference between cheesecake and a regular flour and butter cake. In the latter you want more air incorporated for a nice rise in the oven. Here you want absolutely no rise else the cheesecake will have cracks (which is what happened to me). Keeping air out is also the intention of not using an electric balloon whisk. I, however, do use it as it gets the filling nice and creamy quickly without lumps. The cake eventually cracks but the taste is better. 
Ideally do all the mixing with a spoon and just at the end use the electric whisk on lowest speed for just 5-10 seconds to smoothen out the filling. Take out the base from freezer and pour the filling into the pan. Use a rubber spatula to get all of the filling.

Stage three:
When you have poured the filling out it doesn't settle in smoothly. You need to use the rubber spatula to smoothen it out before baking it. Let the pan stand for about 5-10 mins before baking. This gives some time and us some hope that the air bubbles from mixing will pop. Bake on the bottom rack of an oven pre-heated to 180 Degrees Celsius for 40-45 mins.

The test is to verrrrry slighly tap the middle with a spoon and see if it jiggles. The filling should not come onto the spoon. Take out the cheesecake and let it cool. Once cooled run a knife around the cake and the base to make sure nothing it stuck and refrigerate for 4-6 hours. As I am all about shortcuts, I place it in the freezer for about and hour and a half and shifted it into the fridge thereafter.Remove the rim of the springform, arrange any manner of fruits on top (I chose bananas) and serve. Tada!

What we didn't realise while buying the huge oven...

.... is that we have nothing big enough to serve what we make in it.. :)

The the cutting board was used for the huge non-conform rectangular pizza.

Just two basic toppings and very little cheese. The mushroom browned beautifully and the flavour of roasted  crushed garlic wafted through our heads when we bit in. Recipe yet to be perfected. Look out for the post on the most straight forward pizza.

Tangy potato curry

First things first, I thank Mrs. Mridula Baljekar for this recipe from her book called "CURRY". It gives a westerner an insight into sub-continental (mainly Indian) cuisine. The entire publishing team is based in the UK and the book is very pretty and photography really mouthwatering.

That said, this book would be better off if read strictly by westerners or Indians who are novices in the kitchen. I'm not being negative about the book but, it's a really large country with just too many varied cuisines that the author is trying to claim expertise on. As expected the south Indian section has taken the heaviest blow as regards authenticity and it is precisely a recipe from this section that I have adapted in this post. "Adapted" in this case really means adapted and is not the blogging word for "copied".


So, this "south Indian" curry is a semi gravy (as you see in the pic above) that pairs well with most north Indian rice dishes like pulav (pilaf) or Jeera rice. You will need:


400 gm Potatoes (baby potatoes are suggested, makes no difference)
5-6 dried Red chilies
4-5 Tomatoes (quartered)
3/4 Tbsp Tamarind paste
1 Tsp Fennel seeds (Saunf/Perunjeeragam)
4 cloves of Garlic
1/4 Tsp Asafoetida (Hing/Kayam)
7 Curry leaves
1/2 Tsp Sugar
Green Corriander
1 Tbsp Ghee/ Unsalted cooking butter
1-2 Tbst plain Yogurt (optional)
Salt

Peel and dice the potatoes. Put them in a pot of water and set it to boil. Meanwhile in a jar of a blender, add the red chilies and two tablespoons of boiling water to soften them. (You could take some from the pot of potatoes). Add all the other ingredients except the ghee (or butter) to the blender jar as well. Make sure the boiling water for the chilies has cooled down and blend.
Keep an eye on the potatoes, remove from flame when still a little uncooked.
Heat the ghee in a wok. If using butter, heat it till it has clarified (not just melted). When butter clarifies, it smokes considerably. That's when you know it is done. To the fat, add the contents of the blender and stir. If  using butter, there would be more sputtering. Stir for about five minutes on medium flame to reduce the sauce. Taste it to check the spice and adjust salt if needed. If it is too spicy, stir in the yogurt else leave it out. Reduce the flame to minimum and add the potatoes. Stir well to coat the potatoes and let them simmer in the gravy for about 3-4 mins more until they are now fully done. Take off the heat, sprinkle green corriander to garnish.