Nutty Mango Treat

This is a sweet treat for the coming summer. A fusion of ideas from different recipes I read over years. I don't even remember the authors of the originals. The ingredients and amount of each used here are purely from my trials.


My son likes frozen mango sorbets and ice creams, he was compelling me to make something mangoish(may be I am the inventor of this word). Mr. R prefers some nuts in every bite of his desert- that is what he thinks tasty. So here I tried to satisfy both of them.

Get these items ready:-

Alphonso mango pulp - 1 cup
Alphonso mango pieces - 6
(you get both of them in cans from Indian grocery stores)
unflavoured gelatin - 1 pouch
sugar - ½ cup
heavy cream - 1 cup
grated coconut - 1 cup
cashew nuts cut into very small pieces - ½ cup

Method:-

• Line inside of a 9x4 inch Pyrex tray with a thick layer of plastic wrap. Allow 2 inches of the wrap to fall outside the pan.
• Soak gelatin in 2 tbs warm water for 10 min and melt it using double boiling system
• Beat heavy cream in a heavy bottom dish with a cake mixer adding sugar in 3-4 steps.
• Add mango pulp and gelatin to the heavy cream and beat well for 5min. All the ingredients will come fluffy
• transfer this to a freezer safe dish. Keep it frozen covered for 30 min.
• in a thick flat bottom pan, roast cashew nuts for 5 min. Add grated coconut and roast. Occasionally sprinkle 2 tsp of sugar on top of them and allow to caramelize. Keep off the flame and allow to cool for 10 min. Now you have roasted nuts and coconut with a light coating of caramel. It shouldn't be too hard. Divide it into three portions.
• Transfer frozen mango cream back to a deep dish, beat it smooth again with the cake mixer. Add all the mango pieces to it and beat well until all the pieces get well blend with the cream.
• layer the bottom of the Pyrex tray with one portion of the caramelized nut.
• Top with ½ of the mango cream. Keep in refrigerator (not in freezer) for 10 min.
• Layer with another portion of the nut mix
• top with rest of the mango cream
• sprinkle rest of the nuts on top of it.
• Cover it with the hanging plastic wrap and keep it frozen over night.

Keep the frozen mango treat in refrigerator for 15 min. before you serve. If you pull the plastic wrap from all the sides, you will be able to take the whole mango treat out of the Pyrex dish. Now you can cut it into rectangular pieces of your choice of size using a sharp knife.

This is my entry to A fruit A Month (AFAM) event fruit of the month Mango hosted by Deepa of Recipes N More.

One dish 'Dinner'-Thai yellow curry baptized in Kerala style

I have a habit of trying to make some of the dishes I liked from the restaurants by myself. For that I search all the Internet and add my on expertise and imagination to it. So far most of them came out really good and very few of them turned out be tragic too (tragic because I make everybody at home so excited even before I start cutting the ingredients by telling them about the new dish to be coming out of my kitchen and then if that goes wrong they have to compromise with some dal and rice).

This is a one dish dinner inspired from Thai yellow curry. There is a very good Thai restaurant called White Elephant near my office. I think Thai curries have a close resemblance to Kerala curries (coconut milk wala) except we don't put Basil (Rama Thulsi) and lemon grass (Enji pullu) in our dishes. In is a quick menu for dinner, at the same time it has meat , fish and enough veggies (bad ingredient is the coconut milk if you are really counting on your cholesterol and saturated fat intake).

The recipe follows:

get these items ready :-

jumbo shrimp cleaned - 1 lb (the weight before cleaning)
(if you are allergic to shrimp, substitute with cod fish or you can make the yellow curry with only chicken)
boneless chicken thigh - ½ lb
fresh ginger - ½ inch piece
carrots long one - 1 no
snow snap peas - 10 no
red bell pepper(small) - 1no
green bell pepper(small) - 1no
baby corn - ¼ pound
bean sprouts - ¼ lb
mushrooms -¼ lb
bamboo shoots - ¼ pound (a must ingredient, you will get in cans in the Asian section of the famous grocery chains. I here used fresh ones since I have an Asian market nearby)
basil leaves (fresh) - 4-5 leaves
(if you don't like the strong taste of it use the dry leaves. I used dry leaves, because Mr. R doesn't like the strong taste)
dried red chilies - 3no. (optional
yellow onion - 1 small
(easiest way to get a chili paste is to save some from your recent Chinese take-out)
Turmeric powder (divided) - ½ Tsp
Coriander powder - 1 Tsp
black pepper powder - ¼ tsp
lemon juice - ½ Tsp
Coconut Milk - 1¼ cup (1 cup light coconut milk and ¼ cup thick milk)
oil -¼ cup

In my last seven years in US I never been successful getting good fresh ready made coconut milk from grocery stores. In between I was squeezing fresh coconut to get milk . Now I use coconut milk powder as a safe option. Because it cannot go wrong. We get two brands in Asian and Kerala grocery stores - Maggie and Renu. Today I used Renu brand.

Before you heat the pan:-

• Soak red chillies in ¼ cup water for 30min . If you are using red chili paste you can omit this step.
• Clean shrimp.
• Clean chicken and cut it into thin long strips. Marinate cut chicken with ¼ tsp back pepper, lemon juice and some salt.
• Cut red, green bell peppers and yellow onions into 1 inch square pieces
• clean all other vegetables
• Make 1 cup light and ¼ cup thick coconut milk following the instructions on the package
• Make a fine paste of ginger

Method :-

• Heat half of the oil on a thick bottom skillet.
• Add shrimp and saute it very fast occasionally sprinkling salt and a a pinch of turmeric. Keep it aside
• Heat rest of the oil in the pan and saute chicken until it is well done inside.
• Add kept aside shrimp and all vegetables (except the bean sprout) to the chicken. Keep moving everything very fast in high flame for 5 min. Add red chili paste, coriander powder, turmeric and black pepper to it. Saute all the ingrediants in the pan for another 2-3 minutes.
• Add ginger paste. this will give a good ginger flavour to the curry
• Add light coconut milk and cover the pan with a tight lid. Keep it medium flam for 10-15 min.
• open the lid, add basil leaves and bean sprouts to it. Allow to boil in high heat for 5min. more.
• Add thick coconut milk.
• Allow the curry to simmer for just 1min.

Serve hot with steamed jasmine rice. If you already have all the items, then it is an easy one dish dinner.

Mussels stir fry Kerala style (Kadukka or Kallummeka Ularthiyathu)

I had kadukka curry only 3 or 4 times before I come to US. First of all 'Kallummekka' aka Mussels are not very common in my place where I was brought up (Kakka erachi is available in our place, but I didn't like it until my mother found a new recipe for it). It is available in Kozhikod side,but an expensive deal to get it. First time I had this as a pickle. Some of you may be thinking what?.... It was really yummy, but I got only 3-4 pieces at that time. The story goes like this. My uncle was a doctor in Calicut (later on Kozhikode)Medical College and my Ammayi is considered to be a very good cook. We were in Trissur at that time and decided to visit Ammachan and family. For lunch Ammayi served this achar (can you believe I don't like any kind of pickles from my childhood. That me survived in Trichy hostel for three years with only achars and chutney powders. I like achars only with Kanji, it is mouth watering....) and I didn't even bother to try. When she told me it was mussels, I just wanted to know how it looks like. So she showed me the shell. It looked different from usual 'kakka', this one is a longer version of clams. My mother liked it so much and ammayi packed some for her. Everybody lavishly enjoyed it except me. After two days from no where i had an inner call to try the pickle and I liked it. What to say there were only 3 pieces left. Second time it was my maavi specially prepared kallummekka fry for some special guests whom she was expecting, eventually in the last minute the guests didn't show up. Her daughters were visiting us on that day , so she packed a good portion for us too. By the time they reached the fresh taste slowly started going away. Anyway we re-fried it and ate it. When we were in Trichy hostel, I was the only one had this dish before among 17 hungry souls. So we compelled one of our friends from Kozhikode to get it and got a ration of 2 pieces/person.
In US this one seems to be in reasonable price category, so I gave it a try and my hubby liked it. For last couple of months he was keep on reminding me that I didn't make this for long time. Today when I saw this in local supermarket I got 3.5lbs.( since the weight is including the shell you need at least 3 lbs to have some quantity once you clean it).

get these items ready

Mussels shelled uncooked - 3lbs
red onion- 1 no.
Ginger - 1 inch piece
green chilies - 6 no.
mustard seed - 1/2 tsp.
red chili powder - 1/2 tsp
coriander powder-1/2 tsp
pepper powder - 1/2 tsp
garam masala powder - 1/4 tsp
turmeric powder - 1/4 powder
garlic paste - 1/2 tsp.
tomato small - 2 no.
curry leaves - few
salt to taste

Before heating your pan :-

warning :- If you don't have enough time don't even try to make this. It takes lot of time to clean mussels

When it comes to non-veg, I am a maniac to clean it a lot, use separate knives, separate spoons and pans etc ..... etc....

The fresh mussels shells are usually closed from its mouth. You need a big pan to steam it. Wash mussels thoroughly and put it in deep pan, add water to the level of the mussels. Allow it to boil for nearly 15 min. the mussel mouth will be wide open now. Drain water, open each shell scoop out the flesh, take out the black mud like thing on its back and hair like thing inside. ( This entire process took me around 1.5hrs to complete)

split the green chilies lengthwise
cut onions into 1/2 inch thin long pieces
cut ginger into thin long pieces ( I really love fried ginger pieces in each of my bite)
dice tomatoes into small pieces

Method :-

heat oil in a pan, add mustard and splutter, add green chilies, cut onions, and ginger pieces and saute in for 5 min until the onions are tender but not fried, add garlic paste, saute it for 1 more minute. Add all the powders ( chili, coriander, pepper, garam and turmeric), keep the flame in low and fry it for few more seconds. Add diced tomatoes. Close the pan with a tight lid, keep it in low flame for 3-5 minutes until tomatoes get cooked properly. Open the lid and mash the tomatoes with a spoon. Add all cleaned mussels to it, add salt, mix all well together, close the pan with lid again and keep it in medium flame for nearly 10 min or until all mussels get cooked well in masala. Open the lid, add curry leaves and keep saute it until the mussels are well coated with masala and almost fried ( it takes another 10 min.). Don't over fry it,otherwise all mussels will turn out to be in a rubbery consistency. If you feel the curry is not spicy enough, you can add more black pepper power on top of it.
Serve hot...
It is very nice with hard drinks and cocktails
for non drinkers......
it is good with rice and curd (oh! I forgot Americans don't understand the term curd...say yogurt)
My preference
Have this nice spicy mussels stir fry with curd rice

An easy Yellow Tomato curry

On Wednesdays I go to church after my work for a short session of prayer. Since our Jacobite church is closer to my work and far from home, I find it more convenient to attend an evening prayer every week.(otherwise we are occasional visitors to our church). While driving back I was thinking what is for dinner. Anyway I am not going to make chapati today, I don't have the mood for that. I need to make something easy. In my mind I scanned the reserved veggies in my refrigerator(of course I was driving in 65miles/hr. I had lot of time to think and scan because it is 37 miles drive for me to home).
Tomato curry popped up in mind because I don't need to waste lot of time to cut vegetables and one of my favourites dish when I was growing up in Kerala. My mother used make it very often. Very few ingredients and takes only very less time. Tomato curry , rice and pappadam is a real luxury for me. Usually I try to reduce coconut in my cooking to keep a control over my loving hubby's cholesterol. He likes this curry so much (he had this for the first time when I made that for him). Our 5 year old ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) doesn't care what he has for dinner as long as I feed him keeping his favourite channel on.

The recipe follows:-

get these items ready

Tomato (small firm ones) - 3 nos.
Red Onion (small) - 1 no
Green Chillies - 4 nos.
Ginger - ¼ inch piece
Garlic - 1 small pod
Cumin seed - ½ tsp
Turmeric powder - ½ tsp
mustard seeds
curry leaves
dried red chillies whole - 3 nos.
grated coconut - ¾ cup
salt - according to your taste.
before heating your pan

Cut each tomato lengthwise (approximately into 6 pieces). Split the green chillies lengthwise. Cut red onions lengthwise into thin pieces.

Grind coconut, cumin seeds, ginger and garlic into a fine paste (if your grated coconut is frozen, add some warm water to it and keep it aside for 10min. The coconut will be soft when you grind it)

Method:-

In a pan cook cut tomatoes, chillies , onions with turmeric powder and ¼cup of water. Cook it covered, don't overcook tomatoes (around 5-8 min). Keep the flame in the lowest point of the burner. Add the ground coconut mix. Turn the flame to 'medium' point and allow to boil the mix enough that bubbles come from all sides of the pan. Transfer the curry to a bowl. In the pan heat 2 teaspoon full of oil, add the mustard seed and allow to splutter, add dried red chillies and curry leaves. Garnish the curry with this.

Serve hot with Cooked Jasmine rice(white rice), achar and pappadam

My Kitchen or your Kitchen

Dear newly weds, give at most attention when you pack your stuff from India. Keep in mind once you are here, you get almost all masala powders ( almost all famous brands) but you don't get most of the special patrams (like puttukutti, Appa Chatti, Kadai for Meen curry etc) to make your favourite dishes (even if you get them, you will be paying triple the amount of money in US to get one like that). Then you wait for your next trip to India or to depend on somebody coming from India.

So pack the following.........

• A small pressure cooker (it will be useful to cook dal (parippu) for two of you)


• A medium size pressure cooker with idli lid fitting for that


• To save space and weight of your luggage get a puttukutti which fits on top your pressure cooker
  
• Appa chatti


• Chatti for Mean curry (only if possible, I managed to bring two of them)


• a small deep frying pan


• A chappthi Thava


• A Dosa thava (don't think you can use one for both. If you are doing it, you will spoil one of your dish)

(Thava's are optional. You get very good thava's here)

If your mom or mom-in-law gives you 'kudampuli' don't forget to bring it. It will take sometime for you to find a store which sells Kudampuli. ( When I was coming to US for the first time ( one year before 911 and increased security checking) I packed two big packets of kudampuli. In Bombay I had to rearrange my luggage and somehow the kudampuli packet ended up in my hand bag. At customes they asked me what's that and I said to them it is a well dried fruit. At that time they agreed to take it with me. Now I have no idea what they will do. Keep it in your check-in bag. After that I did bring puli twice by keeping it in my check-in bag)

NOW YOU ARE HERE......FIRST WEEKEND......READY FOR YOUR FIRST SHOPPING?

Do you have a long list of items to be purchased.

-Don't forget to get a good set of knives (You should keep separate ones for meat and veggies)

-Cutting board (That also one for meat and one for Vegetables)

-set of pyrex bowl

- A mixer -grinder (hi...hi.. here you don't get that, you get only blenders. Ostrizer is the best. Select one with glass bowl)

I did burn 3 blenders in 3months before I get settled down with my present ostrizer. Since there is a 6mon. return policy we didn't loose money. But I am not alone. I know at least 10 Indian ladies who burned their blender in first month of stay here. Rule of thumb you cannot grind things the way we do in India with our mom's 20-25 year old still in good condition Sumeet Mixy(am I correct). We need to put more water in Ostrizer. So forget about grinding black gram (uzhunnu) for soft vada. You have to find other ways to impress your hubby with vada. What I do is gring uzhunnu in small lots adding a little bit extra water to it and then add a spoon full of Rava to thcken it. If you can afford to buy a US version of sumeet it will be good purchase (it will cost around $ 180). My friend is still using with no problems

If you can manage to get this (Edi Kallu) it is a sure asset to your kitchen. Now a days most of the Indian grocery stores has this for just $10. You will also find metallic version of them same thing. You will find it easy to crush coconut, ginger, garlic or spices in small amounts with this.

-Then your Atta (fine wheat flour), rice , masalas etc

( My favourite brand of Atta is Lakshmi, Rice Basmati- Tilda, Jasmine Rice and I also get Kerala Nirapara rice for regular use. For our usual spices periyar brand is my first choice then Eastern. I select periyar brand puttu podi, appam podi. Idli and Appam, most of them time I grind rice.)

Here is the funny part of my first grocery shopping. I got all masalas from India and it lasted for more than one year. I went to a Punjabi grocery store to get Atta and we saw different forms of atta, fresh ground wheat flour etc. I didn't know what to buy neither my Rajasthan brought up hubby. But we both remembered our moms used get wheat from stores, get it ground and make soft chappati's. So we decided to buy wheat flour (not atta). I made poori with it and turned out to be pappadam (very hard). Made chappati, it didn't come blown. So it was also a disaster. Then my northindian friend showed me the atta and also gave directions to make good chappati. Now after seven years I am an expert in making both poori and chappati (after getting job I am a little lazy to make it daily. Myhubby has to remind me each and every time)

PS: Those who are in philadelphia area

My best choices for Kerala grocery shopping are The new house of spices on Rhawn street( they bring fresh fish, mutton and beef on every Thursday. Owner is friendly and helpfull). Kavitha Groceries on Welsh Rd (in Welsh Shopping center). They also bring fresh fish on Thursdays and Fridays). JJ Groceries between Market street and 69 street.There are a number of other malayalee grocery stores in and around Roosevelt Blvd.

Thinking Process

Even though I am a trained software professional and have a well equipped, net enabled computer in front of me, i never been a blog reader or didn't even get fascinated by this medium of freelancing. A couple of months back I was searching something in Google starting with 'Syrian Christian Jacobite' and ended up reading Sarah's blog Daughter's of Tomorrow. This gave me an inspiration to write something ( I used to write a nice diary in my high school days until my parents read it. I even won a second price in college for short story writing). In my days of deeper desperation, I did write a number of articles about life as a single child, a child looking forward to get parent's affection and attention rather than getting scolded for not reaching up to their expectations, how to be bold and stubborn for what you think right, waiting for love, thinking of lost love etc... etc. Later on when I turned back to my old writings, i find myself a cloumnist than a story teller. I thought of creating a blog with an undisclosed identity and rewrite everything....but I am not too bold to write things with the same intensity and my limitations in English language made me to give a stop to it. If I get the same courage to write again, i will do it in Malayalam. This is a short background of why I started a blog. Once I deleted my old blog, I was still motivated to write something.
Then I found lots of blogs about cooking. I struggled in this country craving for some of my favourite foods and later on compromised with close substitutes...but my search for best substitutes took more than 4 years and here I created my blog to help some of the new Kerala brides shifting to US, to cook some of their home land specialities in US kitchen.

Gearing up

I am in US for more than six years now. When I moved to here with my husband (we are in Philadelphia and now we have the luxuary of 5-6 kerala grocery stores and a number of other Indian grocery stores. But we are 30 miles away from center city where we have all these grocery stores), we had nobody else to get some advice about what to buy and from where to buy stuff for the kitchen (Philadelphia has the second largest population of Malayalees after Chicago. Most of these people are first immigrants, don't even mind to try new stuffs coming in to the kerala stores and love to cook very blank food. Most of them didn't even try other asian grocery stores to get the stuff they used to get in Kerala) . In the last six years I had to go through a lot of trial and error methods before I settled down with specific brands of curry powders, frozen kerala delicacies. Obviously I had to go through a lot of trials to finally end up with some really good fishes for frying, broiling etc.
A number of my cousins and friends moved to US after me and they all used to seek help from me to get bacic groceries and occassional recipes (all my cousins and their wives are good cooks). This made me to think about starting a blog which may benefit lot of my friends and more brothers and sisters who are ready to move to US( this blog will be specifically dedicated to young new malayalee immigrants in US).
P.S. I am in Philadelphia, if anybody needs to find a particular stuff, I may me able to direct you to a specific store with directions. Others please get help from your friends.