Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 9:15PM The recipe is not new.
Also, San was nice enough to do the videotaping when I made this for tiffin this evening and was able to upload without having to do any editing.
It is not difficult at all and you can make 5-6 dosai's by mixing 1 cup rava, 1 cup rice flour and two cups water in under 35 minutes.
Hope you have fun making Rava Dosai!
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Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 7:26PM Theratti paal, is very popular as a Deepavali milk sweet and is usually made on a large open vessel (Kadai style) where large quantities of milk are slowly stirred and condensed while simultenously adding sugar and ghee (clarified butter) to make a very small volume of this delicacy!
The recipe shown in this videoblog is a quick cheat way that my pittsburg Manni (SIL) taught me some 15 years ago. If I remember right, the original recipe she refined was from Mallika Badrinath who in my opinion should be given an honorary doctorate or Chef title by graduate students trying to satisfy the longing of their taste buds.
Very simple:
- get sweetened condensed milk (Nestle preferred over local brand names) one 14 oz can
- put in large glass bowl (get pyrex or corning lead free microwaveable glass). Do not do this in plastic. Have seen reports of high fat containing substances microwaved in plastic containers forming carcinogenic dioxins.
- soak some saffron in little water
- add 15-20 drops of lemon juice into condensed milk, stir thoroughly and microwave for 5 minutes under constant supervision. If the whole thing overflows, stir and put back in microwave
- then add 3-4 spoons of Ghee, add saffron, a few sprinkles of powdered cardamom for flavoring, stir vigorously , put back in microwave for 2-3 minutes and make sure you don't burn it.
Hope you enjoy making this sweet.
ps. The microwave time will be ~6-7 minutes total if you use only one can. For two cans it might be 11-12 minutes total.
pps. you have to try this a few times to figure out the final total time for a given microwave power and volume of condensed milk. The condensed milk is $2.19 a can. So you can do a few tries with single cans before graduating to volume production!
Just found that they spell it "thirattu paal" (we call it theratti paal!! go figure..)
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 9:20PM When we see comments like "you have way too much time on your hands" after watching the mysore pak or vadam videos, cannot help but smile.
The whole idea behind doing the videos was to show folks that
a. you do not need a lot of time to make it
b. it is not that difficult to make these things
That is why the time was mentioned in the videos. The mysore pak was done in 1 hour and 4 mins (and if the ghee was premade it could be done in 50 mins.) The time it takes for you to drive around to an Indian Restaurant and find mysore pak(you can find Soan Papdi and Haldiram stuff here in stores but not MysorePak), stay in line, pay, come back home is almost an hour plus.
It will also cost you 1$ per piece + gas for that while it costs you 10 cents to make it at home!
The vadam making started at 12:42 and we were done by 1:08, in under 30 minutes! We got 72 pieces for ~$1.5 total! Your other options are to wait for closest friend or relative to get you some from India or buy 20 pieces for $3.99 from the local Indian store.
It would have taken the same time to make 4 times that quantity of the gel and another 10 minutes to spread it out!
Was telling Sangeetha earlier today "Has cooking ones own specialty items become that unfashionable that only people with time to waste or too much time on their hands can do it?"
Is this a phenomena with the younger generation? Eating fast food or buying your food is somehow supposed to be a "time saver" and therefore a cheaper option?
Just think about it!
We cook every night and we take our lunch with us to work. (San always packs my lunch.. also everyday I do call her at lunchtime to have a chat, if not about the food, at least we have a chat). We cook for the kids anyways, so it is a no brainer to spend the 10 minutes to pack lunch. One can always argue that if you get paid enough, the cost of that 10 minutes is more at an hourly rate and therefore buying food is cheaper.
So many recipes are going to be lost. It has been ages since I even smelled some of those divine smells that would come from the kumuti aduppus (charcoal stoves) when my grandma and her aunt would team up to make sweets for the family on a whim!
Just wish I could replay those smells like we replay youtube videos! It doesn't have to be lost. We don't have to rely on MSG and complicated carbonates and coloring agents to add pep to the food we eat.
On a similar note, when we pulled potatoes grown in our backyard and made a simple curry, the smell and taste were orders of magnitude better. It was like being transported to my 10 year old phase, and I was sitting on the floor and my mom was sliding more curry on to my plate from the "ilupa chatti"!
The potatoes looked ugly and gnarled, but the taste was out of this world. The picture perfect potatoes from the local grocery store are practically bland compared to this. We as a consumer would rather have our food look good than taste good.
A lot of the younger generation prefers to buy food than make food and the convenient excuse becomes "you have way too much time on your hands if you are cooking!"
By the way, bloging and videoblogs are easy, especially if you can type 70+ words a minute and you have been doing this a lot.
We all have 168 hours a week. If you spend 42 hours sleeping, 14 hours driving to and from work and running errands over weekend, that leaves you with 112 hours.
If you work 11 hours a day, 5 days a week and another 10 hours over the weekend that takes out 65 hours and you have 47 hours. You spend ~2.5 hours a weekday with your kids and 12 hours with them over the weekend and that is another 17 hours and you still have 30 hours left for eating breakfast, dinner, watching movies, doing dishes, grocery shopping, making that once a week cooking video,etc. no?
Jr., after watching the "Making of Vadaam" video, decided to make a cooking video earlier today (aka irritating your mother video). I did not know about this till San told me. It was hilarious to hear her commentary and the videography.
She adapts, refines, starts this one at the beginning of the Dosai making cycle..Watching this brings happy tears! My little girl is already an expert videographer and cooking aficionado!
You see how a 7 year old can do this by observation (between watching food network and her dad). Next thing you know she will be collecting advertisement money.
Kids today!
ps. You have to have the audio on high to really hear her comments.
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Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 12:34AM If you have guests for dinner and you are still cooking, one thing you can do is to get some papads, or Javarisi vadam's (made from Sago or Sabudhana), pop them in the microwave and give them as an appetizer of sorts.
This is a videoblog of how to make Javarisi VadAm from scratch.
Ingredients (or proportions)
For 1 1/2 cup Sago, 7 cups water, 2 medium size Indian (or Thai) short Chili's, 1 spoon salt, 1/4 spoon of Asafoedita (aka Hing), one small lemon
Also required : Saran wrap or plastic sheets, some oil to smear on the sheet if you are not using Saran wrap.
You can have fun giving the kids squirrel/Crow watching duty while the Vadam's dry in the sun.
Hope you enjoy making and eating Vadams!
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Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 4:59PM Any South Indian Materials Engineer worth his salt (or sugar) will know that Mysore Pak is derived by going through many a tie line on the Besan-Sugar-Ghee ternary phase diagram, with many solid phases, liquid phases in equilibrium, non-equilibrium, etc. etc..
But you eventually get to that sweet spot after an hour or so of stirring the mix in various proportions!
For those who are not materials engineers, it might be a daunting task to get to this sweet over that one hour period.
To specially help those, the two videos below show you how to make the south Indian delicacy.
Take heart. If I can do this you can.
Couple of Notes:
1. Make sure you put some Ghee on the pan where you pour the mix finally. (My camcorder did not record that part)
2. If you are not used to touching hot objects, do not touch the pan or tong and try to lick off hot mysore pak. You will get burnt.
3. Indian stores sell pre made Ghee. Expensive, but can save you time.
Hope you have fun making and eating Mysore Pak.
Do post your experience, notes, suggestions in the comments.
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