Chutneys are yummy accompaniments that usually negate any lack of taste that might be there in a main dish. If the salt in your dal is less you make up for it my adding more chutney, if your food happens to be bland you can compensate for it by adding a spicy chutney into it, etc;

I am particularly fascinated by fruit chutneys . Fruits that are naturally sweet n sour like grapes, pineapples and mangoes are excellent ingredients for chutneys. Here is the recipe of a mango chutney I tried a few months ago. I was waiting for a good day to write about it. So sorry that the day has come when the season has gone. Today I made a pineapple chutney which was made following pretty much the same procedure as the mango one. I visited the majestic area (Bangalore) yesterday and pineapple vendors were dishing out chaat every 100 mts. The season is back  so friends who have been waiting to make Gojjus, rasams and other pineapple delicacies, this is the time.

Ginger Pineapple Chutney

Ingredients:

• Pineapple pieces 1 cup
• Grated Ginger 2 teaspoons
• Jaggery 1 tablespoon
• few red chillies (ramnad gundu chilly)
• curry leaves (few)
• hing – a pinch
• Turmeric powder – a pinch
• Dhania / Coriander powder  1 teaspoon
• Oil 2 teaspoons
• water 1 cup

Procedure:

1. Marinate pineapple pieces in jaggery overnight in refrigerator.
2. heat oil. Splutter mustard seeds, add curry leaves and hing.
3. Add ginger, rasam powder and red chillies (ramnad gundu chilly)
4. To this mix add pineapple pieces, salt, turmeric powder, dhania powder, water and cook for 10 mins.

You can follow the same procedure as above with other sweet n sour fruits like mango.

Mango Chutney

Ingredients:

• Use 1 cup of mango pieces. The mango should be partially ripe for best taste
• Use 6-7 Garlic pods
• Jaggery 1 tablespoon
• few red chillies (ramnad gundu chilly)
• curry leaves (few)
• hing – a pinch
• Turmeric powder – a pinch
• Dhania / Coriander powder  1 teaspoon
• Oil 2 teaspoons
• water 1 cup

Procedure:

1. Heat oil. Splutter mustard seeds, add curry leaves and hing.
2. Add pounded garlic and red chillies
3. To this mix add mango pieces, jaggery, salt, turmeric powder, dhania powder, water and cook for 10 mins.

I am also giving you a Chutney Pudi recipe that I particularly like. My friend and neighbor Cecilia gave me this recipe. Its simple to make and is actually quite tasty. I am sending these Chutneys to the Pickles and Chutney’s Event hosted by Mom’s Recipies.

Ingredients:

• curry leaves 5-6
• 1 cup urad dal
• white til seeds – 1/4 cup
• Byadige red chilly 4
• Pinch of Hing/asafetida and Turmeric powder

Procedure:

1. Dry roast each of the above ingredients individually
2. let it come to normal temp and grind into a coarse powder with salt
3. mix with gingelly oil while serving

What do you do on a day like this? Bangalore saw no sun. Even my 2-year old was asking me what the matter was. Its been gloomy and cloudy like an evening 6 pm through out the day! All cars in the basement were intact. That means no one wants to venture out in the cold. I was in the mood to eat something hot and spicy. Given that you cant go anywhere you got to make it yourself. So thats how I decided to make egg curry with parathas and jeera rice for our Sunday Lunch.

Today was not only a cold day but also a terribly windy one. It was impossible to take any pictures in my terrace. I usually like to shoot in natural light but the wind was blowing harder than ever. I had to use some pillows to hold my backdrops and the chart paper was just swaying in the breeze leaving crinkles everywhere. I felt like the wind was challenging me and finally it would just blow the curry on my face for thinking I was smart enough to get away with a snap or two.

Thankfully I got a picture and the dish turned out well too. My hubby and critic – Mayank liked it, so it has passed the litmus test. Although I am an eggetarian I dont like to eat food that smells of egg. Typical reasons why the smell remains:

1) If the egg was not boiled to completion : yes, this will definitely leave a smell behind. If you accidentally under cooked the eggs while boiling please ensure you cook it enough along with the curry

2) When egg whites are used in any dish – typically as a glaze over bakes, the whites need to be beaten well else the baked product will smell of egg.

Ok, one last tip  (I promise this is the last one). When you make fried egg/omelet/any other form of egg , please ensure that you dont use the same gauze to clean the pan as you use for all the other dishes. You need to wash it directly with your hands or a disposable gauze else all the dishes will smell of egg.

A Rainy Day Creation

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs (boiled)
• 1 Table spoon oil
• Bay Leaf 1
• Star anise 1
• Shahi jeera / Kashmiri Kala Jeera 1/2 teaspoon
• Cinnamon sticks -2 small pieces
• Cloves – 5
• Big Elaichi / Cardamom -2
• Onions 2
• Tomatoes 2 (puree fresh tomatoes)
• Ginger – 1 small piece
• Garlic – one whole
• Tomato Puree 1 cup (readymade puree – optional)
• Garam masala 1/2 teaspoon
• Dhania powder 1 teaspoon
• Haldi powder 1 pinch
• Amchur powder – 1/2 teaspoon
• Red Chilly powder – 1/2 teaspoon
• Jeera powder – 1/2 teaspoon

Procedure:

1. Heat oil in a wok. Add shahi jeera, bay leaf, star anise, cloves, cinnamon sticks and Big elaichi. Saute for a few minutes.
2. Grind onions along with ginger and garlic and add this paste to the mixture. Fry for a few minutes.
3. When the mixture turns brown add pureed fresh tomatoes. Fry for 10 minutes.
4. Now add the dry masalas, ready-made tomato puree and salt. Mix well and cook on sim till the mixture thickens and starts to leave sides.
5. Now slit the boiled eggs and cook in the curry. Dont move the eggs too much else they will break. Cook by pouring gravy over the eggs.
6. Serve hot with naan/ parathas and jeera rice.

Please Note:
The store-bought tomato puree is optional in this dish. I used it to add body and color to the gravy.

Yes! I saved two bananas. They were very ripe and were fast approaching their expiry when I decided to use them up. Usually I make  banana cakes or Deep fried Dumplings (Gulgule) when I find very ripe bananas lying in my kitchen. However this time I wanted to try something different so I decided to go with Banana Icecream. It was simple and easy to make, not to mention the difference in taste and price as compared to the store bought ones. These ice creams use fruit preserves hence taste synthetic and are non-nutritive. On the other hand the ones made at home have that natural taste of fruit like the one you enjoy in freshly prepared milk shakes. I am eagerly waiting for the mango season to make my next favorite ice cream.

You can enjoy this ice cream with a biscuit fudge. I had a pack of digestive biscuits that had been lying on my kitchen shelf for way too long. I just blended the biscuits into a powder and made a simple fudge. Thanks to Jayasree of Kailas Kitchen for giving me this idea. I spread two fat layers of fudge on a small plate and so I got these cookie-like pieces. To get a nice, neat swirl like Jayasree’s you need to spread a thin layer of fudge on a big plate. The biscuit fudge can be eaten as such or as a part of an ice cream sundae.

For the ice cream:

Ingredients:

• 2 small , ripe bananas
• 2 cups milk
• 3 TB sp sugar
• 2.5 TB sp milk pwd
• pinch of cmc , gms
• 1/2 tsp banana ice cream
• 1/2 tsp cornflour powder
• Few drops of vanilla essence

Procedure :

1. Boil the milk. Separately make a paste of sugar, cornflour and milk powder with a small quantity of milk.
2. Continuously stir the milk while putting the paste in.
3. Mix the 2 chemicals CMC and GMS with little milk in a cup. Pour this into the boiling milk mixture.
4. Add one teaspoon of liquid glucose separately in a small quantity of the boiling milk mix. Once you get a lump-free liquid, mix it back into the boiling milk mix.
5. Cool this mix and pour into an ice cream box. Increase temperature of freezer. Freeze the mix.
6. Once it becomes hard. Take it out and leave it outside for few minutes so that it can come out easily.
7. Break it and churn a bit. Blend into a paste in a mixer jar.
8. Add cold fresh cream, mashed banana and essence into the paste and churn well. (Should not be watery, only pasty!)
9. Put it back in the ice cream box and reduce the freezer temp to normal.
10. After 1-2 hrs check if ice cream has crystals. If so, churn it again and increase the temperature of the freezer.
11. While serving place ice cream on biscuit fudge and with garnish chocolate sauce.

Please NOTE :

You need to mix liquid glucose well in the hot milk otherwise it will form lumps. If you want you can mix it first in a small amount of hot milk and then mix that into the boiling milk.

Finally I made them! Thanks to my sister who baked cookies and inspired me to follow suit. My niece goes to this fun activity center called Hippocampus. Its a place where kids can read, learn and play at the same time. The center conducts cooking classes for kids from time to time -  involving them in making simple things like sandwiches, muffins and cookies. Thats where I got this recipe from. I personally love the idea of involving kids in cooking as it encourages them to eat better and also serves as a good distraction for mommy and baby.

When I made these cookies I didnt have chocolate chips so I used broken chocolate bits instead. I searched all over but Bangalore doesnt seem to provide you with chocolate chips that easily. Finally found them at the Nilgiris on Brigade road.  I also got many other ingredients from there like chocolate vermicelli, liquid glucose and doughnut baking molds – stuff thats hard to find around here.

Ingredients:

• 90 gms flour
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• pinch of soda
• 40 gms butter
• 25 gm Brown Sugar powder
• 2 TBsp Honey / Golden syrup
• 60 gms chocolate chips
• few drops of vanilla essence
• some milk

Procedure:

1. Sift dry ingredients
2. Add cold butter – mix to make crumb-like mix
3. Add sugar , chips, essence and honey syrup.
4. Add milk to form soft dough.
5. Roll to about 1/4 inch thickness on floured surface
6. Bake for 12 – 15 mins in an oven preheated to 180 deg C.

My Sunday morning started off with scanning the Mint newspaper supplement. It was fully loaded with ideas for Diwali Gifts and some interesting recipes from Top Chefs. I particularly liked Tarla Dalal’s ideas for Low-Fat paneer and Khoya that can easily be made at home. Low fat khoya is made by steamed a dough of skimmed milk and water. This dough is then mashed and flavored with sugar and essence of choice. I wanted to immediately put this idea into action but I didnt have enough skimmed milk so I used the badam milk powder that had been chilling in my fridge for way too long.

Since the mix already had sugar I skipped the sugar adding part and used an orange essence to flavor half the halwa. I think this sweet dish is really easy to make because all other halwas require constant stirring and monitoring. When I was making this one, I was watching a TV show as the halwa steamed itself to completion. As good as it gets…

Here is a picture of the Moon on Kawa Chauth. One of the most clear appearances the moon has ever made on this occasion. Every year we spend our time playing hide n Seek but not this time. I was delighted to see that the moon was beaming its bright face in the sky even before my Pooja Thaali was ready.

Karwa Chauth Moon

Photograph by: Mayank

I am sending this entry to the Sweet Series event hosted by Mom’s recipes.

Ingredients :

• 1 cup badam milk powder
• 1 TBsp skimmed milk powder
• 1 cup fried gram powder
• Few drops of Orange color and essence (optional)
• Cashews and Dry Dessicated coconut for Garnish (optional)

Procedure:

1. Knead the milk powders with water into a dough. Add fried gram powder and stiffen the dough further.
2. Tie this dough in a muslin cloth and steam for 15 mins.

Steam Milk Mix

1. Allow the mix to cool and empty it in a bowl.
2. Divide the mix into two halves. Add orange color and essence to one half.
3. Grease a plate and spread the plain halwa layer on it.
4. Over that spread a layer of orange flavored halwa.
5. Garnish with Cashews and Dry dessicated coconut.
6. Freeze for 2 hours until set. Cut into desired shape and serve.

Please note:
Before making halwa please check the Sugar quantity in your Badam Milk mix by tasting it. Sometimes the mixes are very sweet making the halwa inedible. If you find excessive sugar in the mix you can cover for it by increasing the quantity of regular milk powder in the recipe.

The lighting was poor so the video didnt turn out that great. A big thanks to Anu for patiently choreographing and conducting rehearsals for two weeks.

On 21st Sep we left for Bombay by train. The Pune-Bombay stretch is really awesome!!

Udyaan Express

Lonavala Station

Finally we reached home at Kalyan and witnessed a heavy down pour which lasted nearly 24 hours.

A Train in our garden at Kalyan

During our stay we had a chance to visit Matheran – a small hill station, near Kalyan. It was about 40 mins by local to a station called Neral. From there a 30 min cab ride up the hill and then another 2 kms by a hand-driven cart. Matheran has a small and pretty reasonably priced market. After Bangalore I find all places reasonable, really! Especially if we are talking about clothes or footwear.

I tried taking a horse to visit the view points but got really scared so we went sight seeing in a hand driven cart again. Its feudal. I really wish they would make provisions for vehicles to drive inside someday. Anyway, the view points were awesome, I specially liked the lake that was flanked on both sides by mountains. There was a bed of yellow flowers on one side with a house. A Lucky chap lives there.

Lake at Matheran

Flanked by Yellow flowers

Louis Point - Matheran

Railway Colony - Kalyan (Mumbai)

We returned from Matheran in about two days just before our festival of Naumi. We had a nice puja and delicious prasad on Naumi – kheer, puri, vada and sweets. Above is the picture I took of the railway quarters near our house (just one evening before we left). I simply love the rustic look they wear.

We took the early morning flight back to Bangalore yesterday. Saw plenty of news channel vans on Mumbai air port covering the Air India Strike that was on. Now we are back home running around doing the usual. This festive season was so action packed and memorable.

Town Square is a feed Aggregator launched on 1st July ‘09 with the intention of getting bloggers together. I wanted a place where any kind of blog could join- whether cookery or business, photography or personal. A place where I could easily find posts on a given tag or topic across blogs and preferably with a preview of each post along with it. With those many thoughts in my head I started off the ground work on Town Square.

The making of Town Square -

1) March ‘09 I decided to create the site. At that point of time I did not really know any language or platform using which I could make such a site. All I knew was that I was going to call it Town Square I had tried my hand at Google’s App engine earlier and remember going completely blank on seeing the tutorial video. I dropped the idea for sometime but found myself thinking a lot about it. Soon I got back to App engine and decided to create a small application which would do no harm to anyone. I wrote a sample application which would just repeat whatever you typed in.

2) Mayank got me a book on HTML and CSS. Being the supportive hubby and an excellent mentor he would always know how to motivate me. I read the fat book called ‘HTML & CSS- Head First’. It was an amazing book, very useful for beginners. (It also has the perfect pillow height if you fall asleep over it )

3) After having written my first dummy application on Google’s app engine framework I felt sorted. I thought that I just needed to learn a bit of python, html, css and I can past the test. However there was a little bit of knowledge required in other fields too – like Django, ajax, java scripts and jQuery. The funny part was that sometimes while coding I would forget exactly which of these languages I was writing in. Thats when Hubby dear would walk in with his stick and wacked me so I remembered

4) Town Square code evolved gradually. Initially it was a site that just had a form for registration and un-registration. If I remember right, form validation was the toughest part of the coding. I was stuck for days on the topic. What if the member enters his home url and it fails? What if the Feed URL also fails? What if ? What if ? Seriously I was sobbing my the head over it, wishing I never got on this ride.

5) There is a little picture of Ganeshji whom I look at for help when I’m really stuck. Also, there is Mayank who jumps in to help when I’m struggling too much. With everyone’s help the form section was done. People could automatically be registered and unregistered with no intervention from me. I had a home, contact and about page. I was happy. Thats when Mayank pointed out that everything was done except for the most important part- the Feed Aggregation! Oops! I almost forgot

6) I picked up a few feed links and started working on the parser. The feed aggregator was not such a difficult part. The universal feed parser was readily available and I just had to put it to good use. The back end work however was of database management. There was also certain information that was unavailable in the feed parser output and needed to be located using local search functions. Soon the feed aggregation started working on my development environment and I was ready to deploy it on the server.

7) By June ‘09 end Town Square was ready. Thats when I started decorating the site a bit. I sat down with some snaps that best fit each page and edited them to go with the overall look of the site. Most of the photographs used were the ones I shot while I was in San Diego. It took me nearly two days to shortlist, edit and upload the snaps. The whole site was ready and now I didnt want to go ahead. Again – what if it didnt work when people joined ?

8 ) Final push came from Mayank. He told me that I could continue adding features even after I deployed Town Square and took up registrations. I chose the date of July 1st for the launch and thankfully by 10pm we made it happen- Town Square was on!

Srivalli Jetli was the first member to join Town Square, she also helped me spread awareness on the site. When I woke up on 2nd morning I was thrilled as 8 people had joined Town Square overnight. Happiness lies in these small things.

The few weeks right after the site was launched were full of fire fighting. Basically all my testing was done on the local development setup so I was unaware of the problems that could crop up once the application was deployed on the server. Also, the testing was done with a handful of feed files and the application was not prepared for different types of feed files that started pouring in suddenly. With some amount of bug fixing the code was stabilized in a couple of weeks.

Town Square has completed two months and has already registered 100 members. This was the membership count I was expecting after one year of launch. Thank you all for being supportive and encouraging towards the endeavor. Thanks Mayank for being such an excellent tech lead right through the development of the project. I’m grateful to Google App Engine for providing an awesome framework for developers like me.

Today we had the second meeting of Sharp Shooters – the Photography club of our apartment. The workshop started with Shubhada giving us a presentation on composition of pictures. Coming from the background of an architect she was able to easily explain the importance of colors, shapes, geometrical symmetry, etc; in photography.

1. She showed us a color chart with the help of which we could appreciate the color combinations that would result in snaps that are pleasing to the eye. Warm colors are like red/yellow/orange and cool colors lie in the yellow/green side of the spectrum. Its necessary to create a balance of these colors to make the end result appealing. White is a safe color for crockery, backdrops,etc; while photographing food.
2. Shapes of crockery should be intended to break the symmetry of food. Round cookies in round plates, for example dont quite add up. The food needs to be placed at an angle that leads the eye.
3. Its at times tempting to decorate our food with ornamental or high contrast objects. However, its important to let focus remain on the food and not let the surroundings get too  distracting.

Thanks Shubha, for those useful tips.

After the presentation we had an exercise session where Shubha gave us a fruit juice tetrapack each. She also gave us the corresponding fruit and asked us to take pictures for an Ad campaign. No, wait. This is just for fun, Tropicana has not hired us So we were asked to shoot pictures of the beverage with an intention of advertising for it. It was my first time at such an assignment and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Anu balancing her lemon drink

Hope you feel thirsty enough to buy this drink when you see it next…

We had the most memorable Ganesh Chaturti this year. Preparations started nearly 3 days in advance. Shubhada (my neighbor) and I went to Gandhi Bazaar on Friday to do some street photography as the festive time makes the market place really colorful. As expected Gandhi Bazaar was in full bloom. I took snaps of vendors selling idols, flowers, mango/ plantain leaves, bangles, etc; soon they were all smiling at us and wondering if I was going to buy anything after all. I felt like a tourist in my own city.

I started shopping for the pooja along side. Soon I was clicking photographs along with balancing kilos of fruits and tall plantain leaves (which I was sure I would forget somewhere in the bazaar). Finally I bought flowers, mango leaves, plantain leaves, apples, bananas, chaklis- all at reasonable prices. I found a way to preserve these for 2 days. Plantain leaves (ones that we get for decoration, along with stems) can be placed in water. Mango leaves can be preserved by immersing them in a tub of water. Flowers can be kept fresh in tupperware dubbas. What a way to beat the inflation during festive times : )

Saturday I cleaned the house to set it up for the upcoming pooja and made laddus. I was very confused as to what laddus I should make. So I decided to come up with my own recipe. Thankfully, they came out well. I’ll blog about the recipe another time. A big thanks to Mayank for creating a suspension that served as the basic structure for the mantap. It was creatively done using table mats and baby’s building blocks. Next year we can use baby’s tent house I guess

Sunday- the day of Ganesh Chaturti, started with my baby singing ‘Happy Birthday to you’ to Ganeshji. It was the sweetest thing, I dont think I can ever forget it. Soon after that I started running about making Prasad and getting the pooja thali ready. Mayank and baby were making the mango leaves and rose strings to decorate the entrance of the house and the mantap. In an hour’s time our pooja was over and we all had prasad for breakfast. By then I was hungry enough to savor every bit of it.

In the evening we had family and friends over to our place for prasad. We had people come over from 4pm to nearly 9.30 pm making our evening really fun filled. I was so happy that almost everyone could make it. Festivals are really about spending this quality time with each other that you otherwise can not find.

Towards evening we noticed a pretty rainbow outside our terrace. One of the brightest I have ever seen. Wonder if there was actually a pot of gold at the end of it.

These last three days have been so action packed. Friday we had our Janmashtmi puja. I managed to fast all day with Mayank. When I woke up in the morning I didnt have an intention to but I thought it will be ok if I ate some fruits and had juice every 2 hrs. I remember last Janmashtmi I over slept in the afternoon and my empty stomach made me pay a price. I was throwing up till the puja actually began. Thankfully this time it was a piece of cake (?) ohh! I mean this time it was relatively simpler. I had a big glass of lassi along with Makhane(Lotus seeds) and groundnuts for lunch. Very filling indeed! We did puja and broke our fast around 9.30 pm ! (the longest time I have ever taken to break my fast)

Turn Up the Volume & Enjoy the Video

In the afternoon we had a Rangoli competition in our apartment to kick start the Independence day celebrations. I was there trying to catch all the action as it happens. What can be more delightful than to shoot vibrant colors and artistic patterns. The Ladies of our apartment used a variety of ingredients for their rangoli: salt, grated vegetables, rice flour, rice soaked overnight and ground into a paste. Lots of variety from dry rangoli to liquid alpana from stencil-based ones to edible rangolis Well, I had a fine time capturing their concentration thru my lens although I think I distracted them a li’l bit in the process.

Please Note :

Flickr now has Pictures of the Independence Day Celebrations at my apartment.