Bajra Roti

Bajra Millet

After registering for the Marathon, I decided to eat healthy but cornflakes or plain oats aren’t my kind of food. I’ll go for poha, idli, upma any day (Of course they need to be prepared nicely not the hostel-food kind).  So I started looking for other options and that reminded me of bajra rotis which are usually prepared around Sankranti time. They are an awesome food esp during winters.

One thing I totally love about the healthy food fads is millets are back in style. Bajra/Pearl millet/ಸಜ್ಜೆ is one of them. It is a gluten -free grain and comes with a plenty of other benefits.

Here is how to make some tasty rotis. They are made the same way as Jowar/Sorghum rotis. For better pictures and a more detailed recipe check this out and just replace jowar with bajra. In this recipe, I have added some jowar with bajra and also some more spices to make the roti tastier.

Ingredients:

• Bajra atta – 1/2 cup
• Jowar atta – 1 tbsp
• salt – to taste
• red chilli powder – to taste
• turmeric – to taste
• white sesame seeds/till – to taste
• Hot water for kneading the dough

Ingredients

Method:

Bring the water to boil.

Start kneading with the spoon. You can use your hands and cold water once you add hot water and mix

• Don’t put all the water at once. Keep adding a little every time. Also, use a spoon to mix the water as it is very hot.

knead the dough properly to get nice rotis

Take a small portion of the dough and make it into a ball

Use a rolling-pin or flatten the roti using your hands

Once rolled out, put it on hot tawa.

• Make sure the tawa is hot for good rotis. In the next few seconds, as the roti gets a little dry, use a clean muslin cloth and apply a thin layer of water on the upper surface.
• Let it remain till water evaporates a little and flip it over and press slightly with a soft cloth to make sure it is done properly on all sides.

Roti flipped over

You can eat it with any subzi, but I can’t wait these rotis so I am eating it right away with cucumber slices, sprouts, channa dal/ಪುಟಾಣಿ chutney and awesome curd.

Hot bajra roti ready to eat 🙂

Palak Paratha/ Spinach Paratha – recipe

Palak Lachcha Paratha

The first time I thought of this dish was on the Irish festival Saint Patrick’s day. To say that we don’t celebrate it here even would mean that people know of this. But my Facebook wall was flooded with green pictures from my friends staying in North-America. Rivers colored green, people wearing green and even rivers dyed green. I wanted something green too. I couldn’t dye a river nearby but surely I could cook something green. Who better than Sanjeev Kapoor for a recipe. His recipe calls for only salt and ajwain but I have added a few more ingredients of my own to get a different taste in paratha. Hope you like it.

Goes without saying, it is healthy, wholesome and green :P. I have paired it with green coconut chutney to suit the green theme. You can have it with pickles, sabzi, curds or just a thick layer of butter. Also, the method used here for folding the parathas makes it a lachcha paratha. You can use any style you prefer.

This requires you to make blanch the palak/spinach. Blanching enhances the color and the flavor of the spinach and also makes it soft. After blanching, grind and make a paste of the spinach.

Ingredients :

Spinach/Palak – 1 small bunch
Whole wheat flour – 2 cups
Cumin seeds – 2 tsp
Ajwain/carom seeds – 2 tsp
Red chilli powder – 1 tsp
Till/ White sesame seeds – 1 tsp(optional)
Garam masala powder – 1 tsp
Salt – to taste
Milk – to knead the dough

Method:

• Blanch and grind the Spinach to make a paste.
• Add all the dry ingredients with the dough and mix them well. Later add the Spinach paste to it and mix.

Ingredients for palak paratha

• Use milk to knead the dough. And let it settle for 20-25 mins.

Dough

• Pinch a ball-sized dough and flatten it and start rolling it out using a rolling-pin

Ready to be rolled out

Rolled out

• Once rolled out now sprinkle a bit of flour and oil on the paratha. And start to fold it in the Japanese fan style. Then fold it to make it round. Sorry I couldn’t describe it any better. Please see the pics to get an idea.

Folding the paratha

Japanese Fan

Fold it to make it round

Lachcha paratha – Ready to be rolled out

• Now roll it out again using a rolling-pin. I couldn’t get the round shape. Swalpa adjust maadi(Please adjust). Knowing I couldn’t get a circle even with a compass in hand, I keep my expectations low w.r.t the shape 😛

Rolled out

• Put the paratha on a hot tawa.

Paratha on tawa

• Fry the parathas with oil/ghee by flipping and frying on both sides. Once done, take it out and serve hot 🙂

Palak Lachcha Paratha

Channa/Chole Masala – Recipe

If you ever find somebody who doesn’t eat Indian food, make them taste a Punjabi dish and you have a convert. Punjabi cuisine is food from the Punjab region of northwestern India and eastern Pakistan. Punjabis are large-hearted, and known to live life to the fullest. Their food reflects this attitude too.

Channa/Chole Masala

One of the world-famous Punjabi dishes happens to be Channa Masala/Chole Masala. This is usually teamed with Batura but you can also eat it with any Indian bread like roti, naan or kulcha. Tried it out at home and it came out wonderfully. We had it with whole-wheat paratha. Just sharing my experience and the recipe here.

Batura

The recipe requires channa masala powder which can be brought from stores. I didn’t have the masala powder neither did I have amchoor powder and Pomegranate seeds to make it at home so I used Garam Masala powder + Coriander powder + cumin powder instead. And tamarind paste + lemon juice instead of amchoor and pomegranate for tanginess. The result turned out to be pretty good so I think I can repeat the process whenever I don’t have the channa masala powder

The main ingredient here is the channa/chickpeas which needs to be soaked overnight or upto 6-8 hours.

The Channa soaked over-night

Pressure cook the Channa. You can also add a tsp of tea powder/ 1 tea bag in the cooker to get the nice dark color. You need not throw away the water after draining. You can use the same while cooking. My drained water looked like this.

Water drained after cooking the chole.

Ingredients:

Calcutta Channa/Chole/Chickpeas – 200 gms
Onion(finely chopped) – 2 medium
Tomato(finely chopped) – 3 medium
Green Chilli(finely chopped) – 2-3
Garam Masala – 1 & 1/2 tbsp
Coriander powder – 1/2 tbsp
Cumin powder – 1 tsp
Cumin seeds – 1 tsp
Turmeric powder – 1 tsp
Hing/Asafoetida – a pinch(optional) – Hing is an essential ingredient in our kitchen
ginger garlic paste – 1 tbsp
lime – 1/2 medium
Salt – to taste
Oil – for tadka
Fresh Coriander leaves/Cilantro – for garnishing

Method:

Heat oil in a deep sauce-pan and add cumin seeds. Once they splutter, add hing and ginger-garlic paste and sauté. Add Onion and green chilli and sauté till the onion turns golden brown.

Tadka with onion

Now add turmeric and tomatoes. Let the tomatoes cook nicely. And then add salt and all the other dry powders to it. Saute for a minute.

Tomatoes added

Now add the channa to the above and mix. Later add the drained water to the mixture. Add tamarind paste and lime. Cover it and let it cook for 5-6 minutes. Once it is cooked take it out in a serving bowl, garnish with fresh coriander leaves and a dollop of cream.

Channa Masala – ready to eat

Tips: Make sure your channa is cooked properly in the cooker. If it is half done you wont be able to cook it properly later.
You can also garnish with chopped onion and a wedge of lime as it traditionally done.

Happy Eating!

Beetroot Paratha

Just a few months back cooking used to be my Bête Noire but lately I have started to fall in love with it. The more I cook, the more I love it. The best part is creating stuff everyday. Being creative to make the same old dishes more appealing and getting them right every time. Fortunately for me, I have my Mom(who just loves cooking) to help me out with new recipes and lend her experience.

Here is one of the recipes that I tried. As I was talking a few friends here I realized not many knew this recipe so I am posting it here. It is simple, easy, looks great, very healthy and great fun to prepare and eat. My Dad who hates beetroot also loved these parathas.

Yummy Beetroot Paratha

Ingredients:

1 medium-sized grated Beetroot
2 cups wheat flour
1 tsp Red chilli powder
1/4 tsp Ajwain seeds (ಅಜಮೋದ/ಓಮಾ)
1/2 tsp cumin seeds (ಜೀರಿಗೆ)
1/2 tsp white sesame seeds/till seeds ( ಬಿಳಿ ಯೆಳ್ಳು)
1/2 tsp garam masala(optional)
salt to taste
water – to knead the dough

Method:

Mix all the ingredients above and knead to make dough with the same consistency as chapathi dough

Dough

Let the dough settle for about 30 minutes
Take small balls of dough and roll it out to make nice round parathas
How you fold is entirely up to you so have fun with the shape of your Parathas! Below are the pictures of how I have done it.

Sprinkle some oil and flour on rolled paratha and cut it as shown

fold it to make a cone

fold it to make a cone

Cone ready

Cone pressed and ready to be rolled out

Once rolled, put on a hot tawa and fry till evenly browned and well cooked.
Serve hot and enjoy with curds, pickle and fried green chilli 🙂
Hope you have making and eating this dish!

 

English Memsaab

Major languages of India. Image courtesy: mapsofIndia.com

Staying away from your home and hometown teaches you a lot! One such important lesson is communicating in sign language or broken sentences in an unknown language to get your point across to the other person. Esp. in a country like India where language changes every few hundred kilometres. If I take just one example of Karnataka state, the languages spoken are mainly Kannada, Tulu and Konkani ( later two by minority population mostly in coastal Karnataka).  Even the Kannada spoken is not similar throughout the state and dialects are so different that people find it difficult to understand each other at times. Again the Konkani and Tulu are spoken differently by different sects who speak the language. As a country we have so many languages and dialects that WordPress dictionary shows them as spelling errors as I type most of the names here. 😛

I remember, having to ask directions in Trivandrum, where people understood English but the problem was they couldn’t get the way we pronounced the names of the places and ended up giving wrong directions and sending us, at times, in the exact opposite direction of where we intended to go. We would finally manage to get hold of one person who spoke and understood ‘our English’.  It is one of those unfortunate moments when you thank the British for having ruled us (at least they have given us a common language:English) 😐

Now I stay in Bangalore, which is the capital city of Karnataka. My mother tongue being Kannada, I thought, now I am done with broken communication but life has other plans. My PG owner is a Tamil native and hence most of the cooks who come to our PG to cook are from small distant villages in Tamil Nadu and know only Tamil. If you happen to drop by on one of the weekday mornings into our PG, you will notice an earthling v/s alien like situation. Two people blabbering away at each other and looking at each other in wonder. And they part ways again talking, this time to themselves. One of these people is our cook and other could be any of the other inmates. 😕

Fortunately we have a couple of girls who speak Tamil, who come to our rescue once in a while. On one such occasions our cook exclaimed to my other PG-mate(in Tamil of course) while pointing at me, “How is this girl going to manage after marriage, She doesn’t know Tamil, does she intend to speak in English with her husband and in-laws?” 😯 I have faced “What is this girl going to do after marriage?!” many a times before but this time it was for an entirely different new reason. The innocent gal doesn’t even know other languages are spoken in India or that B’lore is in Karnataka whose official language is Kannada or that so many non-kannadigas also stay here and it is ok to be so.  She has also taken upon herself the responsibility of teaching the poor me some Tamil and kindly extended the invitation to attend her brother’s marriage in her home town. 😉

Yesterday, was the icing on the cake. She told me another assumption she had made about me and another friend of mine. That initially she thought we were ‘foreigners’ 😀 I couldn’t respond coz I was busy laughing.

Of all the confused identities this one takes the crown!  😀