Fresh fruit rava kesari

I don't make sweets often, but once in a while something like Cilantro's fruit kesari catches my fancy, and then it's like a craving - so here's my craving, which I made yesterday. It's just a coincidence that it's Deepavali and the kesari is appropriate as an offering. It's even more convenient that I could use up some over-soft soft fruit that I might have thrown away if not for the craving.

Now if only someone would make me thenkuzhal and thattai...

Ah well. Happy Deepavali to everybody, and may light and happiness be ever in your lives.

Recipe for: Fresh fruit rava kesari




Ingredients:

1/2 cup rava/sooji/semolina
1-1/2 cups water
1/8 tsp saffron threads (a pinch) left to soak in 1/4 cup warm milk for 15 minutes
10-12 seedless red grapes, halved or quartered
1 small orange, peeled and segments chopped
1 small ripe banana, chopped
1 small ripe plum, stoned and chopped
1 tbsp raisins or sultanas (optional)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 tsp cardamom powder
5 tsp ghee
2 tbsp nuts (I used walnuts and pecans)

Method:

1. Heat 2 tsp ghee in a heavy-based medium size pan and fry the rava/sooji/semolina on medium heat, stirring frequently, for about 5 minutes till the rava turns a slightly darker shade and smells roasted. Be careful that it doesn't burn. Remove to a bowl till required.

2. In the same pan, heat another tsp ghee and fry the nuts on medium heat, stirring till they are fragrant and turn a darker shade. Remove the nuts from the pan and reserve.

3. Heat the fourth tsp of ghee in the same pan, and add all the fruits, letting them cook on medium-low heat till they are soft and squishy, about 5 minutes.

4. Now add the water and sugar. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat a little and let it simmer for 5 minutes, stirring until the sugar dissolves completely.

5. Add the roasted rava/sooji/semolina now, stirring all the while to mix evenly. Let this cook until the kesari begins to thicken, then add the saffron milk and stir it in. Keep stirring frequently to ensure that it does not burn or become lumpy.

6. When the kesari is no longer watery and has "come together" in a soft mass, stir in the fried nuts along with the remaining tsp ghee. Serve the kesari warm in small bowls. 

Tip: You can also spread the kesari on a greased plate and let it cool, then cut it into squares or diamonds for a more elegant (and convenient) presentation.

Stuffed green peppers with nutty rice

While vegetarian food is not hard to find in most pubs, hotels etc, the choice is woefully limited – usually pasta of some kind, vegetarian chili, bean burger, sometimes a vegetable curry or Mediterranean-veg lasagna chock full of gross aubergines/eggplant and zucchini (because, you know, they’re Mediterranean vegetables and apparently no other veggies are known to ever be used in Mediterranean cuisine). Some places offer two vegetarian options, if you’re lucky. But usually it’s just one of the above, and vegetarians have to like it or lump it.

I should be glad that there’s at least SOMETHING non-meaty and non-fishy to eat in Western restaurants, and I suppose I am... but I still can’t help wishing that their chefs would show just a little imagination for vegetarians. Which is why I like a little pub in Wem (Pete’s hometown), called the Old Post Office (Pete’s home-away-from), which is owned and run by Pete’s business partner Guy, and a couple of his friends. The pub is called the Old Post Office because before it was converted to a pub, it used to be the old post office premises before they moved lock stock and barrel to the new post office premises – well, why did you think the pub’s name is what it is?

Anyway, I like the pub for all sorts of reasons – one, the younger crowd (the noisy, binge drinking, annoying kind) stay away because it doesn’t offer them much in the way of a “hep” ambience. Two, the pub plays good music on an excellent sound system (which Pete set up). Three, the décor is homely (I especially love the squashy-soft sofas from whose hug it’s difficult to get out) but with an exotic touch in the way of beautiful sculptures and paintings and wall-hangings which Guy brought back from his trips to Africa. The effect is casual and comfortable.

And now for the fourth and most important reason - the food. The pub offers a carvery every Sunday, with at least two different choices of meat, which Pete loves. The Sunday carvery has had very good reviews in the local newspapers, because the servings and accompaniments are generous – and all freshly cooked that day, nothing from frozen. I would be happy to eat just the accompaniments that are available – roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, cabbage, peas, cauliflower or broccoli cheese, roast parsnips, carrots, leeks, stuffing balls, Yorkshire puddings - a veritable feast!

But I get a special entree just for me as the only vegetarian who goes there for Sunday lunch. The two lady chefs make it a point to try out a new recipe  for me, even though – or perhaps especially because – vegetarian food is not their comfort zone. It’s not even as if I’m a guinea pig… apparently they try out their new recipes during the week on the regulars (the pub makes it a point to provide sandwiches and other finger food on the house, in the evening), asking them for feedback. And then, on a Sunday, the recipe makes its formal debut – just for me (or any other vegetarian, assuming any comes along. It hasn’t happened yet, they say.)

Since I know that there won’t be any aubergine in anything (the staff all know of my loathing for this gross slimy-when-cooked vegetable), I’m always delighted to try whatever they've made – and so far, every single thing has been a hit. It's really nice of them to take the trouble to make anything, just for one person, especially when they've got their hands full catering for all the regular guests.

One time it was peppers stuffed with a really nice rice mixture, and since I had peppers at home last Sunday (when Pete and Bex were having a Sunday lunch at home), I decided to make my own main course and share the accompaniments (called “trimmings”) with my husband and stepdaughter for our family meal. Pete served everything in a giant Yorkshire pudding - yummy!
Recipe for: Stuffed green peppers with nutty rice

Ingredients:

2 green peppers (capsicum/bell pepper)
1/4 cup paneer, diced into 1/2 cm cubes

1 cup cooked basmati rice
1 green chilli, sliced into thin rings
4 tbsp shredded methi leaves (optional)
1/2 cup shredded coriander leaves

1/2 tsp cumin powder
2 tbsp mixed nuts (peanuts, cashewnuts, pecans), chopped
2 tsp raisins or sultanas
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/4 tsp garam masala
2 tsp oil
Salt to taste

Method:

1. Slice off the tops of the peppers and carefully remove the seeds and pith. Make sure the peppers can remain upright; even up the bottoms if required so that they sit flat. Reserve the tops, don't throw them away.

2. Heat the oil in a pan and add the chillies, paneer and chopped nuts. Stir fry till the nuts and the paneer are pale golden brown.

3. Add the coriander and methi leaves and fry till they wilt.

4. Add the sultanas/raisins.

5. Now mix in the rice, garam masala, black pepper powder and salt to taste. Heat this stuffing thoroughly, then turn the heat off and let it cool.

6. Spoon the filling into the prepared peppers, pressing down with the back of the spoon to get as much of the stuffing in as possible,

then put the tops of the peppers back on.

7. Place the stuffed peppers on a baking tray and spray them with Pam on the outside, or brush them with a little oil. Bake in the oven at 200C for 15 minutes or so, or till the peppers are a soft and wrinkled. Don't overcook them.
8. Serve the peppers hot as a main course with a selection of vegetables, and vegetarian gravy.



RECIPE: STUFFED GREEN PEPPERS WITH NUTTY RICE

Ingredients:

2 green peppers (capsicum/bell pepper)
1/4 cup paneer, diced into 1/2 cm cubes
1 cup cooked basmati rice
1 green chilli, sliced into thin rings
4 tbsp shredded methi leaves (optional)
1/2 cup shredded coriander leaves
1/2 tsp cumin powder
2 tbsp mixed nuts (peanuts, cashewnuts, pecans), chopped
2 tsp raisins or sultanas
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/4 tsp garam masala
2 tsp oil
Salt to taste

Method:

1. Slice off the tops of the peppers and carefully remove the seeds and pith. Make sure the peppers can remain upright; even up the bottoms if required so that they sit flat. Reserve the tops, don't throw them away.
2. Heat the oil in a pan and add the chillies, paneer and chopped nuts. Stir fry till the nuts and the paneer are pale golden brown.
3. Add the coriander and methi leaves and fry till they wilt.
4. Add the sultanas/raisins.
5. Now mix in the rice, garam masala, black pepper powder and salt to taste. Heat this stuffing thoroughly, then turn the heat off and let it cool.
6. Spoon the filling into the prepared peppers, pressing down with the back of the spoon to get as much of the stuffing in as possible, then put the tops of the peppers back on.
7. Place the stuffed peppers on a baking tray and spray them with Pam on the outside, or brush them with a little oil. Bake in the oven at 200C for 15 minutes or so, or till the peppers are a soft and wrinkled. Don't overcook them.
8. Serve the peppers hot as a main course with a selection of vegetables, and vegetarian gravy.

Honey cake

If someone gave you an orange, an apple, some brewed coffee, cloves and some honey, would your first thought be: “Oooh, now I can bake a cake!”? No? Thought not.

No surprise, it would certainly never have crossed my mind that these were actually ingredients for a very special cake, had I not come across these items in a recipe on the Net, led there by a series of blog hops (starting with Shankari & Rajesh’s blog, Sacramento Spice, where she has a regular feature called “Sundays with Marlena Spieler”, showcasing Jewish recipes).

Eventually I moved on to google for general information on Jewish culture and Jewish food traditions, and pretty soon I was goggling at a cake recipe that called for the apparently random selection of ingredients I'd mentioned earlier. This cake is traditionally baked on the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, and symbolises a sweet start to the year.

When I made the cake, even knowing that it was from a tried and tested traditional recipe didnt stop me wondering how it would turn out. I had to use a small can of mandarin orange rather than the whole fresh orange (peel pith and all) the recipe called for (because I didnt have it), and I substituted strong instant coffee for the brewed stuff (because ditto)... and decorated the top of the cake with whole pecans, but those were the ONLY changes from the original.

The cake was surprisingly good - surprising to me, because I couldn't help considering the combination of ingredients somewhat outlandish - very moist and with deep flavours, and it stayed that way for the couple of days that it survived before being demolished.




It's too late - or maybe too early? - to offer good wishes for a happy Jewish New Year (because it occurs around September)... and it's wee bit too far into this new year 2010 as well for new year wishes, but I'll take the opportunity to wish everybody many happy cake experiences, both baking and eating, for the year and the decade to come. I can do that, can't I?

Recipe for: Honey cake



Ingredients:

1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup dark honey
1 egg



1 small orange, left unpeeled and cut up small (I used a small tin of chopped mandarins without peel)
1 small apple, cored and chopped (no need to peel)
1/2 cup strong brewed coffee (I used instant)
1-1/2 cups flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 cup raisins
15-20 whole pecan nuts (optional)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350F/180C. Spray a nonstick 1.5 pound loaf pan with Pam.

2. In a large bowl, combine the oil, sugar, honey and egg.



Beat till mixed. (I used a manual beater).



3. In a blender, combine the orange and apple, add the coffee



and puree the mixture. It doesn't have to be very smooth.



4. In another bowl, place the flour, baking soda, baking powder, spices and salt.



5. Add a third of the fruit and coffee mix to the oil-honey-egg mixture, stirring well.



6. Add a third of the flour mixture, stirring again.



Continue adding in this manner till all the ingredients are combined.



7. Add the raisins and stir them in.



8. Pour the batter in a loaf pan. Arrange the pecan nuts on top, pressing them very gently into the batter.



Bake for 35-40 minutes, or till a cake tester or toothpick inserted in the cake comes out clean.

10. Let the cake stay in the pan for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely.



Serve at room temperature.

Apple pecan snack cake

Hello to my readers, bloggers and non-bloggers both, on the first day of the new year, and the new decade! Here's hoping that the year brings everybody only the best of everything, and lots of love and laughter too.

I thought I'd start the first post of 2010 with a recipe for something sweet - a simple snack cake, chunky with tart apples and crunchy with toasted pecans. You can't go wrong with it (fingers crossed as I say this, though, because I'm a prime example of someone who can make a disaster of success!) and it's good just by itself, or for a more decadent dessert, serve warmed, with a dollop of thick organic Jersey cream, sprinkled with glittering demerara sugar, if you like.

Recipe for: Apple pecan snack cake



Ingredients:

3 tart apples, cored and chopped
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup raisins
1/4 cup pecans, toasted lightly and chopped + 10 or so whole toasted pecans for decorating cake (optional)
1/4 cup oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg, beaten
2 cups AP flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon powder
1/2 tsp cardamom powder (optional)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350F/180C. Spray a 7" round cake pan (I used a bundt pan) with Pam or other spray.

2. In a large mixing bowl, combine the apples, sugar, raisins and chopped pecans.



Mix well and let stand for 30 minutes.



4. In a small bowl, add the oil. vanilla and egg.



Whisk till well combined.



5. Pour this mixture into the apple mixture and stir in.



6. Sift together the flour, baking soda and powder, cinnamon and cardamom powder (if using).



7. Stir the flour mixture into the apple mixture about a third at a time. Stir just enough to moisten the wet ingredients - dont over mix.



8. Pour the batter into the pan.



Arrange the remaining whole pecans decoratively on the top. Push them in only very slightly.

Bake for 35-40 minutes or till a tester comes out clean and the cake has pulled away from the sides of the pan.



Let the cake remain in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool.



Serve warm by itself, or with some cream if desired.

Choc chip banana bread

So, sometimes I can be quite slow at picking up on things – like the fact that chocolate chips in banana bread really do work quite well. I guess since I’m not overly crazy about chocolate, I've not bothered to try banana bread recipes that specified chocolate. This time I added the semi-sweet chocolate chips because they were just past their best-by date and any more time on the shelf would have only seen 'em off into the rubbish bin. The choc chips added moistness to the bread (an unexpected plus) – or at least I think they did. The bread might have been moist anyway because the bananas I used were almost at the liquid stage of ripe.



Anyhow - Pete loved the banana bread (he’s not much of a fan of this, most other times), and I found the choc chips in it surprisingly nice too. Who knew that chocolate and bananas would work well together...! (apart from the millions of others who’ve already tried and tested and written about the combination, that is.)

Recipe for: Choc chip banana bread



Ingredients:

2 cups flour (I used 1 cup AP and 1 cup wholewheat)
1-1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
4 overripe bananas
3/4 cup sugar
4 tbsp unsalted butter/margarine, melted and cooled
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cups mixed nuts, chopped (I used walnuts, pecans and brazils)
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F and lightly grease a 9x5-inch loaf pan.

2. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and salt.

3. Mash 2 bananas with a fork in a small bowl. They should be a bit lumpy.



4. In another bowl, whisk the remaining bananas and sugar together till well combined.



5. Add the melted butter/margarine, eggs, and vanilla and beat well.



Stir in the reserved mashed bananas.

6. Add the mashed bananas to the flour and mix till just incorporated.



7. Fold in the nuts and the chocolate chips



then pour the batter into the prepared loaf tin.



Bake for about 45 minutes or so (but start checking after 30 minutes), until the loaf is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the middle of the loaf comes out clean.



8. Cool the bread in the pan for 10 minutes or so, and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely before slicing.

Strawberry-vanilla loaf cake

There was a small surprise in my garden when I got back from a holiday in Croatia – slightly over half a dozen little strawberries on a plant that I didn’t even know I had (I thought they had all died over the winter), which had survived in a small clump of nettles. Picking those strawberries was an exercise in caution, because nettles are nasty plants, raising painful welts if they touch my skin. And no, dock leaves don’t do much good – remember that Enid Blyton statement where, according to her, dock leaves and nettles grow nearby each other because the former help soothe the stings of the latter? Well, I’m here to say that one half of that is true – dock leaves CAN be found near nettles but they aren’t much help with the stings. Not for me, anyway.

I was surprised that the birds and insects hadn’t got to the strawberries, because they certainly looked ripe and red (the berries, that is - not the avian and insect life). But when I tasted one of the berries, it was quite sour. Not much fun eating those unless drowned in sugar – and not worth doing that for half a dozen strawberries.

So I decided to make a strawberry cake with them – adding a few more strawberries which were going cheap at the supermarket and which, therefore, I had bought. For no real reason I decided to make it a loaf cake – I like slices of cake rather than chunks, I suppose.

The texture and taste of the cake were perfectly fine, but since I had used pureed strawberries in the batter, I was expecting a flavour more redolent of strawberries than was the case. The flavour came through better on the second day, however. I also was hoping for a more pink cake, but I guess the whole wheat flour made the batter more brown than pink. I would have happily improved on Mother Nature by using some red food flavouring in the batter to “pinken up” the cake… it was just a pity I didn’t have any!


Recipe for: Strawberry-vanilla loaf cake



Ingredients:



1 cup pureed strawberries (depending on size, between 10 and 20)
3 tbsp butter, softened
1/4 cup non-fat vanilla yogurt
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup wholewheat flour
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tbsp chopped walnuts, almonds or pecans (or a mixture)

Method:

1. Combine butter, yogurt and strawberry puree in a large bowl. Mix well.



2. Add eggs, vanilla, sugar, salt, baking powder and baking soda and stir well.



3. Add the flours and stir/fold in lightly until combined.



4. Spray a 1-1/2 pound loaf pan with Pam or grease lightly with oil. Pour the batter in the prepared pan, level it with the back of a wet spoon,



then sprinkle the chopped nuts on top.



6. Bake in an oven at 180C for 40-50 minutes or till done (I start checking at the 30-minute mark).

7. Let the loaf cool in the pan for 5 minutes,



then turn carefully out onto a cooling rack and let cool completely.



8. Serve sliced as is,



or warm it slightly in the microwave and serve with strawberry compote and whipped cream.