No cheese... please

My brain is getting a little crispy at the moment. I believe it is the time of the year to be blamed. Not just the heat but also the pace at which deadlines seem to hurl themselves at me around this time. Combined with the fact that I am not a born multi-tasker, it seems like a toil that will last till mid-May. After that you are gonna hear me ROAR......

I have slowly weened myself out of the urge to bake bread or pizza as the unpredictability of the yeast behavior is hardly encouraging. Nilgiri's ready made pizza bases are a decent substitute for homemade ones. And finally I have found a great substitute for cheese also. A cup of steam cashews, ground with 4 tsps of sesame oil, 3 tbsps (or more) of vinegar, 3 pods of garlic, salt and pepper. A thick paste which I sometimes flavour with mint leaves or/and tulasi leaves. It stays for a week easily in the fridge.

BEFORE ..............

......... AFTER. 

Appearances matter

The only thing [I think] that I still possess from when I was in class 7 [more than 25years ago] is a loose page with a recipe of chocolate cake. Says much about my lack of sentimentality or my love for food and its documentation. Otherwise I find it hard to explain why I take these pictures when in the background I can clearly hear "Amma, what are you doing...... I am so hungry.....let me eat!"

Barota with Jerk Chicken

Non-dairy chocolate tart: a sample of what we talk about when we run...... 

There is nothing like a fresh fruit salad to brighten your mood   

Thai soup with flat noodles and fried tofu. Love the net for the awesome recipes that are just a click away.

Strawberry Cake

Was a bit disappointed that strawberries imparted absolutely no colour to the cake and was wondering if the amount of strawberry I used (3/4 cups of pureed fresh strawberries in a 2 and 3/4 cups of flour cake) was too less. But the cake tasted so darned good, and so flavourful! 

Flavour of last week

I still remember on our farewell day at school, most of us had come equipped with a little diary. A diary with multi-coloured pages with some cute picture lightly printed in the right bottom corner of each page. As we sat together as a class the very last time, these diaries circulated and their pages filled rapidly archiving our emotional outpourings for years to come. I can still recall how I struggled to write something on each diary that was short but personal, that captured the essence of my interaction with that particular diary owning friend of mine, thinking that with some of them perhaps this would be my last interaction. Finally when my own diary made it back to me, I flipped through all the messages, the only message that I can still remember, "Life is an ice-cream, enjoy before it melts." "How cliche!" was my reaction then but now I see the point. You got to identify the ice-cream like bits of life and enjoy them because the melt is inevitable. When the servings are in short supply, you can make some of your own ice-cream like moments.
  
There has been a relapse of the banana-ice-cream craze. The latest flavour: bananas and oranges.
Two of each fruit. Peeled, chopped and frozen. Here is how they look after coming out of freezer:

A spoon of sugar per fruit. Zip in a blender. Pulse it, so that all pieces break down evenly.

Though avoid blending till it is perfectly smooth, some chunkiness is highly recommended.

The saturday bake

For us it was more out of necessity than anything else, that we started baking our own bread. Now every weekend, typically on saturdays, that is one of the most satisfying aspect of mornings: rise and bake. It helps to have this particular batch of active dry yeast which has been consistent in doing its job of actively doubling the dough. Next the dough gets a good doze of pounding until the air is all punched out, it is rolled into a loaf  and pinched at the seam before getting dumped in a lined tin. Some time is given for the loaf to double up again and just when it starts looking all pompous and puffed up,  it is shoved inside the oven that has been kept hot and crackling ready. The oven door of course then has to be banged shut if the whole bread-making process is to be experienced at its therapeutic best. By late morning the aroma of freshly baked bread fills the the entire house, can't believe it is me who is saying this because  I used to find such statement hugely 'naika'. But I can be pardoned because then I used to be naive and yet to be breadly-wise. The acquired wisdom though is yet to include a good technique to slice it thin without losing half the bread in form of crumbs. Is it a special knife or is it the timing after the bake or is it just practice? Any ideas? Otherwise of course we live on hope that is internet :).

Non-dairy icecream

In my quest for recipes which are non-dairy, easy to make and great to taste, I never thought I will come across one for an ice-cream. And yet in an email from my father was a link to just that. Diced overripe bananas. Frozen. And finally zipped in a blender. As simple as that and it is absolutely unbelievable how overripe banana which used to be considered good only for baking or binning transforms in to this very ice-creamy avatar. We have been having it almost everyday and RRJ's favourite is the one flavoured with fresh strawberries (well, we freeze them prior to blending).