Chana Masala

Ingredients: Serves 4 easily

3 Tablespoons desi ghee

1 bay leaf

2 cloves

1 black cardamom

2 inch cinnamon

1 dried red chilli

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

2 medium onion roughly chopped

1 inch ginger finely chopped or paste

5-6 slices of garlic, finely chopped or paste

2 medium tomatoes roughly chopped

Salt and red chilli powder to taste

½ teaspoon turmeric powder

3 tablespoon packed chana masala, easily available at any grocery store.

Water as required

2 cups white chana, also known as kabuli chana or chickpeas. Pre soaked in water, overnight is better.

Recipe:

In a pressure cooker, add ghee, cumin seeds, cloves, bay leaf, dried red chilli, cardamom and cinnamon. Fry these till you start smelling their aroma in the air. Keep flame on medium as we donot want our dry spices to burn.

Add onion and fry till they turn pink in color and their raw smell has gone away. Then add ginger, garlic and stir it for another couple of minutes. We don’t want the ginger and garlic to turn brown, just want to remove their rawness.

Add tomatoes, salt, turmeric, chana masala and fry the mixture till tomatoes have turned soggy, and oil starts to separate from the masala. Stir occasionally during this.

Taste the masala and add some chilli powder if it needs a little bit of heat. I personally add around 1/8 teaspoon of chilli powder at this stage.

Now add soaked chana and mix nicely but gently so chana doesn’t break into halves.

Add water till 2 cm above the level of chana. Give a nice stir, and taste the water, add salt if it needs any more. I believe that secret to a great dish is constant tasting at every stage as it helps in understanding how it is turning out and what else does it needs.

Close the cooker with its lid. Turn the flame to its highest level. And after three whistles of the cooker turn the heat to lowest and leave the cooker to simmer for next 10 minutes. Then turn off the flame. And leave the cooker as it is till it releases all the pressure on its own. It may take another 5 – 10 minutes. Then open the cooker, everything should have amalgamated by now, check some chickpea, if they are completely soggy and getting easily squished by hand or spoon, chana masala is ready. If not, put them back on flame and let the cooker whistle again for once only and recheck.

Now all is left is for you to decide on 2 things. One, how much gravy do you want. If you want chana masala to be runny then add more water and bring it to a boil and then chana masala will be ready for you. Two is whether you like your chana a little mashed or not. I like to mash my chana masala a little as it mixes the flavour of chana with masala making it more delicious, preference is yours completely.

Garnish them with some fresh coriander or green chillies or ginger juliennes. Serve them hot with rice/ puri/ bhatura/ paratha or chapatti.

Note:

Longer the chana has pre-soaked in water, lesser will be their cooking time in pressure cooker. I had chana soaking in water for around 3 hours, and it took 5 whistles of the cooker to get perfectly cooked chana.

Cooking time also varies as per the pressure cooker. So please donot blindly follow the above mentioned pressure cooking procedure and adapt it as per your cooker.

Follow the same recipe and make delicious rajma. Instead of chana use rajma, and in place of chana masala add rajma masala. 

Onion Rings with Pineapple Sauce

Ingredients:

For Pineapple sauce:

1 ½ cup pineapple juice

½ inch ginger roughly chopped

3 tablespoon tamarind paste

1 teaspoon sugar

1 ½ tablespoon crushed jaggery

½ teaspoon or to taste black pepper

Salt to taste

½ teaspoon corn flour

For onion rings:

2 onions. Sliced and rings separated.

5 ½ tablespoon maida

1 ½ tablespoon semolina / sooji

1/8 tea spoon of soda bicarb, garam masla, coriander powder and dried mango powder / aamchoor.

Salt and red chilli powder each to taste

1 ½ half table spoon corn flour

¼ cup Drinking soda or as required

Recipe:

For pineapple sauce:

In a pan on medium flame, add pineapple juice and ginger. After it begins to simmer add sugar, jaggery, pepper and salt. Once sugar and jaggery has dissolved add tamarind paste and bring the sauce to a boil. Then strain the sauce through a sieve and pour back into the pan on high flame. Add corn flour and stir continuously. After a boil, shut the flame and strain again. Sauce is ready. Serve when at room temperature.

For onion rings:

Mix well together all the dry ingredients. Add drinking soda just before frying the rings, and mix into runny batter, like the one used for pakoras.

Dip onion rings in the batter and fry them for few seconds till they turn golden in color. Serve hot with the sauce.

Note:

You can add more flavour to the sauce by adding dry spices like cloves or cardamom or star anise or cinnamon. But don’t use in much quantity as they may overpower the pineapple flavour.

Garlic ginger paste can also be added to the batter.

Eggless Chocolate Brownie:

Ingredients:

½ cup maida

4 ½ table spoon cocoa powder

¼ tea spoon soda bicarb

1/8 tea spoon baking powder

6 table spoon powdered sugar

½ cup regular butter

½ cup milk, warm

1 tea spoon vanilla essence

2 table spoon curd / yoghurt

Recipe:

Begin with sifting maida, cocoa powder, soda bicarb and baking powder together, atleast three times. Keep aside.

In a bowl, cream butter and sugar, till light and fluffy. This will be done by whisking them using a hand blender or a whisk.

Add curd and vanilla essence and mix well.

Now to this, add half of flour and half of milk and mix well. Add remaining flour and milk mix well.

Now finally whisk or blend the batter till air bubbles start to form on the top.

Grease a microwave friendly tray, and pour batter in it. Microwave it for 3-4 minutes on high setting. Check after 3 minutes by inserting a toothpick or knife in brownie. If it doesn’t come out clean, microwave for another minute. Check again. Once knife is clean, take the brownie out and leave it to rest in its container for 5 minutes. And then de mould it.

Serve it hot with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Spicy Red Chutney: Momos accompaniment

Preparation: Soak 6 dry red chillies in water for 5 hours.

Recipe: Blitz together 1 medium onion, 2 medium tomato, 8-10 slices of garlic and 6 red chillies along with its water into a fine paste. In a pan add 1/2 tablespoon oil and cook this paste till raw smell of onion tomato and garlic goes away. May take around ten minutes on low flame. Add salt and red chilli powder to taste. In end add one table spoon vinegar. Chutney is ready. 

Note: There are many ways to prepare this chutney, some people blanch vegetables before blitzing them, others just grind the vegetables together without any cooking. I prefer the above recipe more because i think it tastes better and also due to the addition of oil and vinegar it is preserved and stays edible for a longer period of time.

Sindoori Cutlet

Ingredients: Makes 12-14 cutlets

1 cup rice flour

1 carrot shredded

2 cups water

½ cup curd

1 ½ tablespoon corn flour

Few strands saffron

Salt to taste

Red chilli powder to taste

Pinch each of garam masala, coriander powder and aamchoor.

1 tablespoon kasuri methi

4 slices of garlic finely chopped

Oil, to deep fry the cutlets.

Recipe:

In a sauce pan, add 1 cup water and bring it to a boil and then lower the heat to minimum. Add rice flour, stir it continuously. Flour will absorb the water instantly, but still keep stirring it. When water has been completely mixed with the flour, mix half cup of water and curd together and add to the flour. Stir again till this thin curd is absorbed by the flour nicely. After a couple of minutes, the flour will start to come together and will bind into dough. When that happens, turn the flame off and take the dough out into a bowl.

In the same pan add remaining half cup of water and heat it. Add saffron and let it simmer for a minute. Then add this to the dough. With the help of a whisk mix the dough nicely.

Now add all the remaining ingredients together and mix nicely.

With the help of spoons make small cutlets and fry them till golden brown.

Serve them hot with cold mint chutney.

Note:

Dry the shredded carrot onto a kitchen towel before adding to the dough.

Preferably use a non-stick pan to prepare the dough.

Be innovative and use these cutlets as koftas in the gravy of your choice.

Spiced Caramel Pineapple

Trust me it tastes so good that I was not able to stop myself from eating it, not that I have any grudges about it especially since making it turned out to be more arduous than I thought. I was rattled already enough with the thought of cooking this without a barbeque or a griller, and then came along the task to cut the pineapple into slices. It seems facile on television, but it’s tough like gymming on the first day, you manage to do it but regret it afterwards when the muscle pain kicks in. I also somehow managed to cut the slices out of it and was left with a couple of scratches from pineapple thorns. But all the pain was worth the taste.

Ingredients:

1 pineapple sliced

2 inch cinnamon stick

½ teaspoon black pepper powder

4 tablespoon sugar

4 tablespoon roughly crushed jaggery

2 tablespoon butter.

3/4 cup water

Recipe:

Add butter, sugar, jaggery and water in a sauce pan, and leave it to simmer on low flame till sugar and jaggery dissolves.

Now add cinnamon stick and turn the heat on. After the syrup has boiled once, turn the heat off, and leave it to cool down for a couple of minutes after which add pepper powder and mix nicely.

Now soak pineapple slices in this syrup for at least ten minutes.

Then in a frying pan on low flame, fry these slices. Don’t add oil or butter in the pan. Just take the slices out of the syrup and lay them down one by one in the pan. The juice from the pineapple and syrup will scatter around the pan. Don’t worry; this scattered juice is what will help the pineapple get nicely caramelised.

After 2 minutes of frying on one side flip the slices and gently dab the syrup again on the slices with the help of a kitchen brush, and again fry for 2 minutes on the other side. Also during this step, keep collecting the juice scattered into the pan and pouring it back on the slices. Repeat all of this once again, and then take them off the pan.

Technically, this kind of recipe is cooked on a barbeque, but since I don’t have one, I roasted them for few seconds on nude flame on both sides, once the frying was done. This helped them get that charred flavour which naturally comes in a barbeque.

Serve them hot along with the leftover syrup.

Dahi Ke Kebab

Ingredients: Makes 5-6 small kebabs

1 cup hung curd

Handful of fresh coriander leaves

4 tablespoon corn flour

1 medium onion finely chopped

1 green chilli chopped

¼ inch ginger finely chopped

Salt to taste

Black pepper powder to taste

Oil to shallow fry the kebabs

Recipe:

In a bowl, whisk hung curd lightly.

Add corn flour and whisk again till nicely mixed.

Add all remaining ingredients together and mix well.

In a pan add oil, and form small kebabs of the mixture with the help of a spoon. This mixture is very wet in texture and will stick if hands are used directly. Shallow fry all of the kebabs on lowest flame possible on all sides till nicely brown.

Serve with any dip you like.