Sunday, May 12, 2013

Cooking

Caramel Custard (Using cooker)



Ingredients:

1 cup milkmaid
2 cups milk
2 Eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 tbsp sugar for caramelizing.

Method:

Beat eggs in a bowl. Add milkmaid and mix well. Once it is mixed, add milk and vanilla essence. Mix the contents well with a beater.
In a saucepan, put sugar and heat on a low flame till it gets caramelized into light brown color.Stir constantly. Pour the mixture into this bowl
Take a pressure cooker. Fill it with water and put a ring. Keep the bowl over this and close the lid without whistle(weight). Put on high flame for 20 minutes.Make sure you fill the base of cooker with enough water.
Open after 20 mins and once it is cool, keep it in fridge.
To unmold, run a knife around rim of bowl and invert onto flat plate so that the caramelized part comes above as shown below.Cut it into pie and serve.

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Kela Podi (Banana fritters)

Kele in Konkani is banana and Podi is fritters.

Ingredients:

2 big ripe Kerala banana(nendra bale)
1 cup besan
2 tbsp rice flour
1/2 tsp chilli powder
A pinch haldi
salt to taste
Water
Oil for frying

Method:

Mix besan, rice flour, chilli powder, haldi, salt and water to make smooth batter( not watery, but not too thick).
Peel the banana.Slantly cut banana into pieces with 1/2 inch think. Dip each piece into batter and deep fry in hot oil till it is done. Serve hot as evening snacks or with pova chutney.

PS: Do not put more chilli powder. This is not a spicy snack. Banana should be ripe and sweet enough.


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Easy Tomato Fry

Ingredients:

1 big onion cut length wise
1 and half medium tomato cut lengthwise
2 tbsp ginger chopped
2 tbsp garlic chopped
2 tbsp green chillies chopped
1 handful curry leaves
1 tsp mustard
1 tsp turmeric powder
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp coarse pepper powder
2 tbsp oil
Salt to taste
half cup water

Method:

Heat oil , allow mustard to splutter. Fry green chillies, ginger and garlic for a minute. Add onion and required salt and fry till it turns pink.Add curry leaves at this stage and fry for another minute. Add tomato and add turmeric powder, chilli powder and pepper powder and fry till tomato is done and till oil seperates. Add half cup water(if gravy is required) and boil.Serve with hot rotis or dosa.

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Baked Bell Pepper sauce Pasta

Ingredients:

1 cup pasta (any shape)
Chilli flakes and Oregano as required
Grated cheese

To make sauce:

1 cup each bell peppers or capsicum (Red, Yellow, Orange and Green) chopped in big pieces removing seeds
1 medium onion chopped
10 garlic pods chopped
1 small tomato chopped
1 tbsp Olive Oil
2 tbsp pepper corn
Salt to taste

Method:

For sauce, first take a pan and heat oil. Fry capsicums ,garlic, onion and tomatoes adding salt for 2-3 minutes. Once cooled, grind it into paste adding pepper. This can be stored in fridge in a tight container.
To boil pasta, fill a large vessel with water. Make sure you have enough water level as pasta sticks when cooked in too little water. Allow to boil. Once water starts boiling add pasta and keep on stirring. Depending on pasta the packet instruction, time can be adjusted. Once it is 75 percent boiled, drain the pasta in colander and remove as hot water.
In a baking dish add boiled pasta and toss it with chilli flake and oregano. Add required bell pepper sauce depending on taste and finally add grated cheese.Microwave it for 2-3 minutes till cheese melts. Mix and serve hot.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Creatives


Few creative works:)




Flower vase 
I bet none can tell me what the decorative flower the below vase contains. It is nothing , but a spiny stem of a tree branch. It is an unwanted tree in our farm. I do not know its name. It has lots of spines in the body of the stem. It is normally a very dry tree. I collected few twigs of it when it was cut in our farm. To this I just put thermocole shaped into small cubes which I painted before with different poster colors. This made a different flower stems that can be placed in a vase. To keep the twigs in place I filled an old glass jar with sand. I also adorned the glass jar with little bit paintings too.






Wind chime
Wind chimes were at one time so popular and this inspired me to try this out in making when I saw its very simple to do. All that is needed was to produce a light chim-chim sound. For this my Dad gave me an idea. He somehow helped me to cut old antenna rod into pieces and here I used the antenna rods and very thin thread to hang it. An old small steel plate is used at the center that will help to produce sounds when the antenna rods shakes in the air. For any message there is smiley and hence I made a smiley as the main object that hangs at the center 


Fabric Painting



Fabric Painting





I love doing fabric paintings. This is the one in which I first tried doing shades for the petals. Both are  simple patterns for table cloth.


Wall Hanger


Here I used golden and silver thread plus silver sequences. The idea of putting background adds beauty to the picture. I used black cloth for this and the threads and sequences are just pasted using fevicol. 














Jeans Bag-Front side
Nothing is waste!!! I was about to throw my old jeans. But just then got an idea and suddenly removed the whole stitch and just made an hand bag. The full credit in stitching without wasting a single material goes to my mom's aunt who actually helped me in this.







Jean Bag-Back side
 We even used the zip as it is and made it as side pockets for the bag which can be used to put mobile. We did not removed the brand name and stitched label also to give it originality. The long unwanted piece is used as handle. 




After this is done, we were left with a small pocket piece. With this We made a small mobile pouch too:)
Jeans Mobile Pouch



Mobile Pouch
Very simple thread pattern. Pattern just came into my mind and tried over a cloth which I later used to make mobile pouch.
















Jewelery pouch and a smaller pouch with cutchwork designs. These types of pouches are easy to stitch and also they are washable after long use. Used sponge inside to make it little stiff