The roughest Deepavali ever

Earlier this week, we had plans for a Deepavali dinner, maybe some lights, no fireworks (not a big fan of those anymore), a shot at cultural immersion of sorts ... I go back and forth on these festival days, the nostalgia aspect of celebration is pretty high since we celebrated every festival and puja growing up. However, I'm not too big on any conservative or overly (note the highly subjective usage :)) traditional notions behind festivals - a classic example being Karadiyar Nombu - when women pray for the well-being of the men in the family ... hmm, not be a bad idea, but it does bug me that there are no puja days when the men honor the women!

Back to Deepavali 2007 and what became of it ... wednesday evening involved a reasonably non-threatening visit to the vet - Vodka's had this weird-looking hotspot on his side that was bugging me enough to warrant a trip to Redwood. Well, after a long physical, several needle aspirations and a short wait, he was diagnosed with a mast cell tumor. And he was scheduled for surgery yesterday. I staggered out of the clinic, my head swimming with worst-case scenarios and illogical fears. Well, things seem a little better now - he's out of surgery (looking like he's been through a battle!) and recovering, the next week is going to be long and tedious - as we await the results of the biopsy. *bleh*

Anyway, all this made for a toned down Deepavali - but it did involve food, some of which Vodka sampled :) I was craving something comforting, yet festive - Bisi Bele Huli Anna - roughly translates to hot lentils with tamarind and rice, I believe. There are a zillion recipes for BBB out there, I mostly worked with what my mum told me - one of the big differences about her recipe is the 1.25:1 ratio of rice:lentils - I really like this proportion - makes the BBB a lot more chunky and earthy. The other thing I usually do is bake the BBB at 275 F for about 30-40 minutes -this gets the flavors to soak in quite a bit. Given my sleep-deprived state, I'm probably going to skip posting the details of the recipe since there are a zillion awesome versions out there, like here, here and here and more.


Often, a raita brings out the BBB flavors better than anything else - so that's what we went with. A simple carrot and pomegranate raita - very refreshing.


Well, Deepavali warrants a dessert - that was my excuse for trying out a variation of this walnut barfi recipe that my friend Yamini emailed me about the other day.

Nut Barfi

3/4 cup walnuts
1/2 cup cashews
2/3 cup brown sugar
3 T butter
a few strands of saffron
1/4 cup of milk

Soak the walnuts and cashews in hot water for about 20 minutes.
Drain them and grind into a coarse paste, adding milk as needed to make the paste.
Toss this into a saucepan along with the saffron and stir on low heat for 1-2 minutes before adding the butter. This recipe apparently calls for a whole stick of butter, but I couldn't quite get myself to use that, so I opted for less butter but more stirring to get the barfi to set.
After about 20 minutes of stirring, I ended up pouring this into a pan hoping it would cool and harden. Well, it didn't :( Tasted great, but was all gooey. I finally ended up sticking it in the oven at 300 F for about 30 minutes, I think that was a bit much - about 20 minutes should've been good enough.

Tasted pretty good, but I definitely need to fine-tune the stirring/baking/etc times.


Happy Deepavali!

Navarathri goodies!

Got to love dussehra - dolls, dolling up, socializing, trading stories and catching up (often after a whole year!), eating, more eating ... :)

This year, I chose to experiment a bit with our traditional sundal, snacks and dessert recipes and come up with some variations. I started this post several days ago, but the week has been expectedly packed, I'm glad I'm getting to post about these before Navarathri is actually over! :)


Obviously, we needed a sundal of sorts - can't really do without that! After poking around the stuff we had on hand, I finally decided to make a mixed sundal - green channa, kaala channa, garbanzo and corn! The corn was truly a killer addition - the sweetness totally offset the tartness of the lemon juice and added to the crunchiness of the coconut. Yay for a sundal variation!

Sundal Medley

A zillion servings!

2 cups green channa
2 cups kaala channa
1 can chickpeas
1 can corn
3 red chillies - finely chopped
2 green chillies - finely chopped
1 T mustard
1 T cumin
1 t asafoetida
1 T sesame oil
1 t turmeric powder
3 T grated ginger
10-12 curry leaves
1 cup fresh coconut gratings
juice from 2 lemons
salt

Soak the channa in warm water for a few hours and then cook them till tender. Heat the sesame oil and add the mustard. Once it sputters, add the jeera, red and green chillies, ginger, asafoetida and curry leaves. Add the channa, garbanzo and corn. Sprinkle with turmeric and salt and simmer for a few more minutes. Finally toss with the grated coconut and lemon juice.

Happy, very happy!

So, we needed another snack - hmm ... poha? We often make poha for navarathri - sometimes like upma, sometimes with lemon or tamarind. But lately, the poha at the indian stores have not been thick enough and get all clumpy - I really don't like that! So, I went back and forth between using poha and basmati rice and finally settled on poha. Well, that was a minor mistake. I wanted to make mango poha - with a ton of grated raw mango and it ended up all clumpy! Minor disaster! After a few minutes of panicking, I figured I could salvage it by making patties out of the poha and baking them. Hmm ... worth a try!

Used-to-be-poha patties

another zillion servings!

1 lb poha (thickest available)
2 red chillies - chopped
a handful of peanuts
1 t mustard
1 t urad dal
1 T channa dal
2 raw mangoes - grated
1 t turmeric
salt
10 curry leaves
1 t oil

Heat the oil in a wok and add the mustard. Once it sputters, throw in the curry leaves, peanuts, urad dal, channa dal and red chillies. Once browned, add the grated mango, turmeric and salt. Cook for a few minutes. In the meantime, add some water to the poha to soften it. This often ends up being tricky - I add a little water at a time, wait for it to soak up and then add more. The poha seemed pretty happy till I added the mango mix and then it seemed a little too clumpy.

*grrr*! Time to bake! Heat oven to 450 F. Grease a large baking tray and make patties out of handfuls of the poha mix and bake these in the oven for about 20 minutes. Flip the patties over, douse them with some oil spray and bake for another 10-15 minutes. Wow! These turned out pretty good. Really, really surprising, but we were pretty kicked about it :)

Ok, we obviously needed a dessert here. I had read about Ganne ka kheer and really wanted to try it out, but I could only land my hands on a can of sugarcane at my fave latino store La Espinola. I proceeded to extract the juice out of the sugarcane stalks (?!!) using a juicer. Well, 45 minutes and achy hands later, I had about a cup of juice - figured that would have to do! Since that wasn't much juice, I decided to maybe make a kheer with nuts as well as the rice cooked in sugarcane. Hmm ... what we ended up with was a lot different :)

Sugarcane-banana cake in cashew-pistachio milk
Many many servings

Sugarcane-banana cake
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3/4 cup of basmati rice
1 cup sugarcane juice
3 overripe bananas
5 green cardamoms
8 slices of white bread

I cooked about 3/4 cup of rice in the sugarcane juice + 1 cup of water for about 20 minutes till the rice was completely cooked and soft. I tossed in the cardamom and bananas and cooked for another 5 minutes, mashing the rice+bananas along the way. While the mixture cooled, I ground up the bread slices into fresh crumbs. The last step here was the mix the bread crumbs with the rice/banana mix, pour it into a cake pan and bake for 20 minutes at 350 F.

Cashew-Pistachio Milk
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5 cups nonfat milk
1 can condensed milk
a handful of unsalted cashews
another handful of unsalted pistachios
2 T saffron

I cooked the nuts in the milk for about ten minutes. Once cooled, I pureed this milk and set it back on the stove on simmer. Next, I added the condensed milk and saffron kept stirring the milk till it boiled and got thicker. It took another 15-20 minutes of constant stirring before the milk was thick enough for the dessert.

Ok, so the final assembly of our dessert involved submerging a piece of the sugarcane-banana cake in a cup of the milk till it completely soaked up the flavors and got all soft and sweet and yummy! Kind of contrived, a little complicated but totally worth it! :)

Ok, Lakshmi has convinced me, this has got to be my submission for Jihva's Festive Series :) Thanks, Lakshmi!