Chindian

 Chinese cabbage!

Chinese cabbage and brocolli fried with garam masala. Eaten with store bought aloo paratha!!

Herbs, Spice & Rice

Rice steamed and then fried with cloves, fennel seeds, red chili, onions, capsicum and garnished with basil and mint leaves.

Aubergine Cream Dream

Brinjal steamed and fried with olive oil, garlic, basilicum and cream. With cucumbers and jeera rice.

Mummy's Touch

Tomato rasam, rice and beans fry with Mummy's touch to it - scraped coconut.

For the fear of reruns

After yesterday's hit, I was just about to make the same dish again. Midway through getting the ingredients ready, I realized that it was for this specific reason that I had started this blog - to stop rerunning every hit dish I made over and over again. It happens too often in the solo-cook's kitchen because you have to buy a whole cabbage, a whole coconut and use the whole thing. When I tried to use the whole thing in one dish it resulted in gigantic failures like this one: link. So I sometimes stick to a winning recipe for those ingredients and then get so bored with making it that I make it badly and then I hate it. So the only way to stop that from happening is to force yourself to make something different every time!
Oh and I realized when I looked up that link above, this blog is one year old! Yay!!

So today's meal: moar kozhambu (with no vegetables in it) and cabbage fry eaten with rice. Don't you think both the dishes have a fluorescent look to them?

The Watched Pot

Red cabbage, spring onions and garlic fried with a ground mixture of coconut, mint leaves, red chilies and tomatoes and a pinch of garam masala. With the 9 ingredients in garam masala, the total goes to 16 in all!! Of course not including salt and water. Why have I noticed all this (and counted the number of ingredients on the garam masala packet)? Contrary to the prevalent popular belief that I am jobless, I am actually very impatient and cannot allow the watched pot to boil. I have to occupy myself with something or the other while the dish cooks entirely. Or I tend to do something silly and spoil the meal. By putting in some out of place ingredient in or not allowing stuff to cook completely. So that's why the watched pot never boils in my kitchen.
This cabbage thingy was one of the tastiest dishes I have ever made or eaten. Doesn't it look great!

Loaded Lunch

 

I have a lot on my plate now.

Lemon rice on top, mixed vegetable fry (cabbage, carrot, bean sprouts, spring onions) on the right, rasam rice on the left.

Softies!

Soft, really soft chapatis! And endive poriyal. Haha! I don't think those two words have ever been used in the same line before. Baked endives with salt first and then fried it with butter and pepper. Tasted bitter but nice. Went well with the chapatis too! Did I mention the chapatis were soft? Really really soft? Haha!

Pumped

Pumpkin poriyal and rice. Just boiled pumpkin and garnished with red chili.

Salt as a preservative

Salty okra - store bought but great chapatis - home made.

Not so Souperb

Cucumber soup! One chopped cucumber, fried lightly with crushed garlic in olive oil. Then pressure cooked. Mixed with some corn flour. Then cooled. Then ground in the blender. Garnished with dried spices.
As tasty as it sounds, it wasn't very. I think I added a little too much corn flour.

Which colour do you choose

Pasta with tomato, red bell pepper, parsley, garlic and cream.

Treats from Leftovers

Wheat flour-corn flour dosa with cabbage-spring onion- tomato (with basil leaves and garlic)  fry. The cabbage fry was supposed to be the main dish, the dosa was an after-thought. A record number of ingredients today. And as always, the reason was simply that all these ingredients were getting old and needed to be used up fast. But by  no means was this a bad meal!

I Ate This

Katrika poriyal (Aubergine fry) and rice, with tomato-onion-cucumber-curds salad.

I wonder why I provide translations. You know katrika poriyal. (Nutty face. You have a question mark face I can see. With you know what.)

The easy way out

Salad: chopped cucumber, chopped mozzarella, pickled olives. Seasoning: oregano, pepper and olive oil. Yes, that was dinner followed by a large glass of milk and some fruit.

Purslane, aubergine, capsicum

Lunch  = keera sambhar and rice. This is supposed to be something called "purslane". It was slightly bitter but bitter good.

Peas rice with one aubergine fry and one capsicum fry.

Pasta Properness

So. I followed a recipe that I read online. Almost to the dot. That is I replaced an ingredient with another and I didn't really pay attention to the time for which stuff was to be heated, boiled, fried etc. And no attention whatsoever to the quantities.
Here is the (modified) recipe: Boil pasta of your choice according to the pack instructions and keep aside. Heat some oil (recipe said to use olive and I did, but I am not sure it is absolutely necessary to stick to this) and add crushed garlic into this till it is cooked. You can check if it is cooked by gently pushing a spoon into it; it must feel soft. To this, add one chopped tomato and keep the heat on medium till it is cooked. Check with the same spoon test. Add the boiled pasta to this with some chopped fresh basil leaves(<-link). Finally, add in some "cooking cream" and turn off the heat. The recipe said to add cheese, which I had run out of. Add salt. I am glad I made the switch, because I think cheese wouldn't give this dish the creamy texture that it had.

I was really delighted with the taste and flavour that was mainly from the garlic and the leaves of course. Basil leaves are of the family of tulsi. The leaves that I have here smell like tulsi but do not have as strong a flavour, much larger in size and have a different shape.

The recipe is so very simple, does not need any skill at all. It does need some special ingredients, but they are not too hard to get. The total preparation + cooking + eating time was a little under 35 minutes! Well it might take you a little longer because I think I gulped the whole bowl down in less than a minute !!

Going Pro!

Woohoo! I have made something that I don't think has been made even by Amma!
Try and take a guess.



Badam katri !!

I made this for a friend who just graduated and will be leaving here soon. It is so simple to make and I enjoyed making it so much. Just sugar, water, badam(almonds) and heat. It is unbelievable! I wish I could have made it into diamonds, the way it is usually made. But I didn't have a large plate into which I could pat the thing. Also, I think my proportions were a bit off.
I am not very sure it tasted like the real thing, because I tasted it while it was hot and while I was a bit hungry, so it may not really count. Well, basically I am just gushing. From days of eating instant noodles and bread endlessly, I don't even know how I got here!
Yay again!!

New look blog!

Stuffed capsicum - stuffing made of beans, tomato and cheese blocks. Eaten with homemade bread croutons.

Enjoy the new background of this blog made by the resident artist of Riot of Colours.

Food Looking

Rice fried with vegetables (carrot, cabbage, spring onions) and a curry made of potato, onion, tomato, chili and mint leaves.
Talk about good looking food! Any time I am tired of cooking for just myself and wondering why it is that I love having so much variety, I just have to look at these pictures and tell myself, it is worth all the trouble to be able to enjoy food and cooking in this way!