Homemade Rose milk syrup

I drink lassi almost every day. Yes I am addicted. Some days, I skip dinner and just stick with lassi. I never knew one thing called Rose lassi exist until one day, felt bored and tried adding the rose milk syrup with curd. It was great. From then, no plain lassi J.  That time I made it with store bought syrup.

This time I wanted make my own instant rose milk syrup. I dint make it from scratch. For this we need to buy the rose essence.

First let’s see the ingredients for the Rose milk syrup.

Recipe source : Raks Kitchen.

Ingredients:

·         Sugar – 1 cup

·         Water – ¾ cup

·         Rose essence – 1 tbsp

I have used the essence which already has pink food color in it. If you are buying essence without food color, you may have to buy the food color separately and add while making syrup.

Method:

Heat a thick bottomed pan in medium flame, add sugar and water. Stir it till the sugar dissolves completely.

No need for stirring after sugar is dissolved. Once it is dissolved, let it boil and check for single string consistency.  To check the consistency, take a drop of syrup and check it between your pointing finger and thumb. It should form like a string. It will take about 4- 5 mins to reach this consistency. Switch off the stove.

Add the rose essence. Mix well.

Let it cool down.

Transfer it to a container and refrigerate.

While making Lassi, Add a tbsp of this rose milk syrup to thick curd, mix well. Add ice cubes and serve.

Same process to be followed for rose milk.

Note : Alter the quantity of the essence based on the taste. 

Beetroot Custard

I book marked Carrot custard recipe from Jofy’s blog long back. Last week I tried it. My daughter liked it very much that she finished eating before I took picture for the blog. I took the step recipes, so I thought I will make again and take final pictures. For a change I wanted to try with beetroot instead of carrot as my daughter is not very fond of beetroot. At least she will eat then in dessert form. I liked the beetroot version much better than carrot, as the beetroot has much sweetness in itself.

Following recipe can be adopted both for carrot and beetroot.

Ingredients:

·         Beetroot – 1 small size – Grated. (It was nearly one cup)

·         Ghee – 1 tbsp

·         Boiled and cold Milk – half litre + 2 tbsp

·         Custard powder – 1 tsp

·         Sugar – 4 tsp (Change according to ur taste)

·         Cardamom powder – ¼ tsp

Preparation:

Grate the beetroot and keep aside.

Boil the milk and allow it to cool.

Method:

In a thick bottom pan, heat the ghee.

Add the beetroot and sauté well, till it is half cooked.

Add the half litre milk and let it boil well so that beetroot is cooked well for about 5- 10 mins.

Add sugar and cardamom powder and mix well.

In a small bowl, add custard powder and 2 tbsp of milk and mix well without any lumps. Add the custard milk mix to the beetroot milk mixture and let it get thicken in low flame for 5 mins with constant stirring.

Garnish with nuts. Refrigerate for 2 hrs and serve chilled.

Follow the similar steps for carrot custard too. Replace the grated beetroot with carrot. The color is much pleasant than this.

Sprouts Idli

Sprouts idli is very simple and healthy breakfast choice.

Ingredients:

• ·         Idli batter
• ·         Sprouts – (1 tsp sprouts for each idli)

Method:

I have used the green gram sprouts here. Either you can prepare it at home or buy sprouts from store. Homemade is the best.

Pour the idli batter in the idli plates. Add a tea spoon of sprouts in all the idli plates. Gently press them with spoon. Don't mix them completely.

Steam the idlis and serve hot with sambar or chutney.

Aval Vadai / Poha vada

My mom in law watched this recipe in a TV channel and asked me to try and post in the blog.

Usual paruppu vadai is made with Chenna dal. This vadai is aval  + Chenna dal.

Simple and crunchy vadai.

Ingredients:

·         Chenna Dal / Kadala Paruppu – ½ cup

·         Poha / Aval – ½ cup (Thick red variety)

·         Ginger – 1 inch piece

·         Garlic – 3 pods – finely chopped.

·         Onion – 1 small size - finely chopped

·         Curry leaves + coriander leaves – fistful

·         Fennel Seeds  / Sombu– 1 tsp

·         Red chilies – 2

·         Green chili – 2 (Change according to ur taste)

·         Asafetida – ¼ tsp

·         Salt to taste

·         Oil for deep frying.

Method:

Soak Chennai dal and poha separately for half an hour.

After half an hour , drain the water completely from Chenna dal, add ginger, curry leaves, coriander leaves, green chili, red chili and grind to a coarse paste. Don’t add water while grinding, and don’t grind it smooth. Transfer the contents to a wide bowl.

Drain the water from poha and squeeze well to remove the excess water.

Add the poha to the dal mixture and add the chopped onion, garlic and fennel seeds.

Add salt and asotifida and mix well.

Make them 10 equal sized balls and make into patties.

Heat the oil in a pan. Once heated fry them well golden brown flipping the sides in 2 batches.

Serve hot with coffee / tea.

Granola Bar

 

Granola is breakfast / snack made with oats, nuts and honey. For my family Granola is not just enough for breakfast. I prefer to have little heavier breakfast. So I make it for snacks. I make them as bars unlike the cereals, so it is easy to carry and eat in snacks box.

It is very handy and healthy guilt free snack to munch on. How much ever I make, it will get over in couple of days. The culprits are my husband and daughter. 

I referred the recipe from sharmi. This time for a change, I use Jaggery instead of Honey. It was little different in taste, but we liked it.

Ingredients:

·         Oats -  1 cup (Quick cooking oats)

·         Butter – 1 tbsp

·         Jaggery – ½ cup (Or little less)

·         Water – 2 tbsp (For the jaggery to dissolve)

·         Vanilla Essence – 1 tsp

·         Corn flakes – ¼ cup (crushed with hands)

·         Dry fruits – ¼ cup (Roughly chopped - Dates / dried figs / raisins any choice of yours)

·         Nuts – ¼ cup (Roughly chopped - Almonds / walnuts any choice of yours)

Method:

Line the butter paper in tray. This will help us to easily to handle the bars. I used my Tupperware lunch box for this.

Dry roast Oats, jaggery, dry fruits and nuts in a pan in medium flame. Just for couple of minutes will do. Keep it aside.

In the same pan, add butter. Let it melt.

Add jaggery and water.

When the jaggery melts completely and starts to boil, add the dry roasted oats and nuts mixture.

Add vanilla essence and mix them well. Vanilla is for flavoring, you can also skip it. Switch off the stove. If the mixture is very loose, add some more oats.

Transfer the mixture to the tray lined with butter paper.

Let it cool for a while; cut them into bars with sharp knife.

While removing the pieces, lift the butter paper out of the tray and pull out the pieces.

If you find the butter paper, tray, cutting, pulling process a headache, just make them into small bite sized balls.

Store it in refrigerator in an airtight container.

  

Thambittu

I planned to make something sweet as well as healthy for my daughter’s snacks box. On Fridays she is allowed to take sweets or cakes.  Roasted gram laddu strike my mind. It’s called maaladu. Its mix of roasted gram powder, powdered sugar and ghee.

But I planned to replace sugar with jaggery so, googled for the laddu recipe with jaggery and bumped into Thambittu recipe here. It’s Karnataka’s authentic recipe. This has not only roasted gram, it has other ingredients which enhances the flavors. So tried this. In just 15 mins, the laddu is ready.

Here is the recipe for Thambittu, roasted gram jaggery ladoo :)

Ingredients:

·         Roasted gram  / Pottu kadalai – 1

·         Grated coconut – ¼ cups 

·         Sesame seeds – ½ tbsp  (Original Recipe calls for 1 tbsp, but the flavor is so dominating, so I reduced the quantity)

·         White poppy seeds  - 1 tbsp (khus khus)

·         Cardamom powder –1/4  tsp

·         Ghee -  ½ cup

·         Jaggery – ½ cup

Method:

First we need to dry roast few ingredients separately.

Dry roast roasted gram for couple of minutes. Let it cool. Then grind it into fine powder.

Dry roast, grated coconut till it is little brown.

Dry roast sesame seeds till it splutter

Roast the poppy seeds too.

Heat the ghee in a thick kadai. Once heated, add the jaggery.

Once the jaggery is melted, switch off the stove. No need to wait for any syrup consistency.

Add the raosted ingredients and cardamom powder immediately and mix well.  

It will little semi solid. Once its warm enough, make into ladoos.

Mango Oats Kulfi

 

One more Mango dessert. This is purely for weight watchers like me. (I simply watch... but do nothing about it. It’s a different story).

I referred the recipe from here.

Ingredients:

·         Ripe mangoes - 2

·         Quick cooking oats – ½ cup

·         Milk – 1.5 cups

·         Sugar / Honey – as per the taste

·         Nuts (almonds, pistachios) – fistful – chopped roughly

·         Saffron – few strands

·         Cardamom powder – ¼ tsp

Preparation:

Take about half cup of oats and powder it.

Peel and pit 2 ripe mangoes and cut into pieces. In mixer puree the mango pieces.

Soak saffron strands in 2 tbsp of milk.

Method:

Heat a pan, add oats powder and milk and cook till the oats is well cooked. Switch off the stove.

Add the mango pulp, sugar, nuts, saffron strands, chopped nuts, cardamom powder and milk well.

Transfer into kulfi molds and freeze them.

Freeze it overnight and serve.