Life without Maggi

Maggi is an inherent part of our diet right now! The Nestle made noodles are a favorite evening snack for kids at least once a week and also a dinner option for daddy and the kids at least once a week! 

Daddy is the Maggi expert and can make it in many different ways with any combination of vegetables, as a soup, just with enough water or cook it so that the "noodles don't stick to each other", depending on what the kids feel like on any given day.

When we come home after any all day outings, dinner is always Maggi, as it can be done by the time kids go take a shower. 

So it is a rude shock to see headline news that Maggi has lead and a lot more MSG in it than it is supposed to. Given Nestle is an international brand, the expectation was always that there will be "some" quality control. 

One good thing I do is to not use the Masala packet that comes with the noodles. Instead I use a combination of :

Salt + Sambar powder (made in India with my Grandma or mom's recipe) + turmeric powder + a small pinch of asafoedita (kids like it, I skip it)

and we save the masala packets. Think I have posted on this earlier as well. 

Given all the Maggi consumption, we have a drawer in the kitchen just dedicated to noodles and masala. Today I decided to go clean out the Maggi drawer and this is what I saw..

poured it on the ground and counted the packets to clear it out..

That was 670 packets of Maggi Tastemaker masala! This is just from Jan of this year. 

Going by some crude math, we would have possibly injested enough lead to make us brain dead for the next seven generations if the reports are true!

Then again, we do not know how much of the stuff is in the noodles. Will watch the reports. Maybe the New Jersey Nestle that imports it from India will do some spot checks?

It is also true that noodles (be it Maggi or Ramen) have a lot of wax in it.. so I do boil the noodles to remove the wax on occasion or dry roast it to get rid of the wax before using the noodles. 

Given the data, we are not an occasional noodle family! So we should take this seriously. In the meantime, we are going back to adai, dosai, kunukku for "tiffin" where possible.

Coconut Burfi - a do it yourself video

Diwali came and went. There was no time to make any special sweets. San did make some delicious Badam Kheer to celebrate at home. 

Diwali felt incomplete unless some raw material is convereted to a finished product in the kitchen with some contribution from me.. just kidding..

There was a coconut that was part of the Lakshmi pooja that had to be grated. It is not "auspicious" to let that special coconut get spoilt. So, over the weekend, I decided to convert that into a coconut burfi. Please note: What you see below is not a normal sight in our house.. it is an anomaly. 

The last time I made this was almost a decade ago, in the pre video blogging days. 

The kids helped make the video. Apologies for the "uncut" version. 

Recipe is simple : 

Grate coconut. Eyeball how many cups of grated coconut you have (say 1 cup). Add same measure of sugar to same measure of water and stir to get sugar syrup thick enough. Don't let it caramelize. 

Add coconut to sugar syrup and stir like no tomorrow. Then add cashews roasted in excess ghee (clarified butter) to this and stir like there is no day after tomorrow either. 

When the whole thing becomes thick enough to roll like a ball off the vessel, pour it out. Add some powdered cardamom to the mix just before pouring out. 

Then cut into burfi's when cool. 

I love eating it even before the burfi has cooled down. 

Used to try this with coconut that is frozen and grated already. That does not taste good. You can also add some condensed milk or milk powder to this. It tastes better but also gets spoilt faster. 

My grandma makes it this way. Brings back memories.

Hope this motivates some fresh off the boat grad student who is longing for grandmas cooking to get that coconut and start grating.. 

Cashew Burfi (sweet) - A do it yourself Video

Made Cashew burfi for Deepavali sweet this year and it came out great!

Have been refining this recipe over the years with different results but we are locked into this final recipe.

Turns out the 4:3:2:1 ratio for select burfi's that my Lalli chitti taught me 20 years ago works for Cashew burfi as well!

We got a 100 pieces or so. 

Some notes before the video:

1. What you don't see in the video is that I doubled all quantities. (you see 200 grams of cashew or 2 cups of broken cashew being ground.. there was another identical batch added to the mix before heating)

2. This process is very very labor intensive. There is a lot of stirring almost 40 minutes of stirring on low heat and the last 10 minutes is extremely challenging. The thing is so thick that stirring it is difficult, but stir you must or it will start browning. 

3. It is more art than science when it comes to realizing "pour time". If you pour too early, it will be like a Halwa and will be a little gummy to eat. If you pour too late, the whole thing is hard and tastes like brittle candy or it has pieces of brittle hard stuff embedded in a matrix of the gummy stuff. That will taste good but kind of like having the almond noughats in chocholate texture.. The minute you start seeing the entire thing stick to your ladle and come off the pan as one blob, pour it! That is the secret.

The thing has to be just the right mix of crystallite stuff in an amorphous matrix..if you are a fab guy like me, think 550 C amorphous silicon! 

Here is a video explaining how to make this delicious treat! 

The ratios are 4 cups broken cashew : 3 cups sugar : ~2 cups milk (do 1 1/2 or even 1 and it will work) : ~ 1 cup Ghee which is added while heating and mixing

Think 4-3-2-1 and go easy on the milk and ghee.

Also made some thenkuzhal (did it with the right flour mix this time!) and San made some delicious Gulab Jamuns. 

The litlte one doesn't like "nuts" except when converted to burfi's or Halwa's. 

Next year we will do a Badam Halwa. 

Hope you have fun making this sweet.