My experiments with intuitive and improvised cooking -V - the making of the Kashimiri 'Kahwa'

sometimes, I drink some tea in the afternoon. I have a stock of some mildly flavoured tea bags so the effort is minimised to heating up water and adding sugar and dipping the tea bag into the hot water.
Today afternoon, I was watching a movie on TV at teatime, and was contemplating having some tea. I glanced up at the kitchen cabinet and saw almonds which reminded me of Kashmir and the kashmiri Kahwa. I have lived in Srinagar for a couple of years during my childhood and remember the first time I drank that wonderful flavoured tea. I really love good aromas of food and drink, and what can be better than freshly brewed Kahwa with the aroma of Cinnamon? And the mild flavour of cardamom and saffron along with blanched bits of almonds and pistachios in the brown-green liquid!
So instead of drifting, I made some kahwa for the slow, lazy afternoon.
Here's how its made

for a pot of tea:
Ingredients:

1. Green tea leaves. I think the Kashmiris use some specific type of tea, but I don't know which.

2.cinnamon powder (dalchini)- maybe 1/3rd teaspoon or a little less (or 1 stick of cinnamon bark)

3. saffron - 3 to 4 pinches (I didn't find where it was hidden in the kitchen, so I didn't use it)

4. cloves - 4

5. Cardamom - 2 - mildly crushed with peels

6. Few almonds - maybe 6-8

7. Few pistachios - maybe 6-8 again

8. water... 4 cups

9. sugar as required. maybe 3-4 teaspoons.

To make the tea, boil water along with the cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and sugar. take the water off the fire and add tea and leave it standing for 5-10 mins. Strain the tea and add saffron
Heat over a low flame and add chopped pistachios and almonds.
And you have fragrant and delicious Kahva!

The new one!

The new one!
Originally uploaded by DraconianRain

Yes! I finally bought a new macbook Pro 13". Wo bhi Karz me dub ke!
I hope I can repay my creditor on time!

my experiments with intuitive and improvised cooking IV - 'Makai kadhi'' (Corn curry)

We've been eating some really heavy traditional food and sweets lately. So Today I decided to make something a bit different for lunch.

I looked around the house and found two corn cobs and decided to make some sort of corn curry.

So I found this nice recipe for corn kadhi, but its not like the kadhi we make with dahi.

Ingredients:

Corn from 2 cobs

1 cup onion

1 cup grated coconut

3 cups milk (also depends on how thick you want it to be)

4 teaspoons khuskhus (poppy seeds)

a few cloves (maybe 4-5)

4 green chillies... more if you like your curry hot!

Dalchini (cinnamon) 2 sticks or 1 tea spoon.

2-3 small cardamoms

1 1/2 table spoons oil

2 tea spoon lemon juice

6 garlic cloves

2 teaspoons grated ginger

chopped dhania (coriander leaves). depends on how green you want the curry to look, but i used almost half a cup.

So here's what I did:

Step 1:

Boiled the corn cobs till cooked and separated the corn grain from the chaff. That is a lot of corn!

Step 2:

Take the chopped onion, grated coconut, green chillies, ginger, garlic, poppy seeds and coriander and grind it to make a paste.

This is how the paste looks like.

Step 3:

Heat some oil in a vessel and fry the above made paste in it.

Add the cinnamon, cardamom and cloves. Then add the lemon juice and stir well. And finally add the cooked corn and milk and mix well

Add salt.

You might want to add some more water or milk.

While cooking, the whole house is filled with the subtle aroma of cinnamon.

It looks equally appetizing and tastes really good!

How is it possible...

that everyone I know likes the movies 'before sunrise' and 'before sunset', but me?

Backup shackup

After the 4 gig flash drive, the logical progression was to go for something bigger - a 1 TB western digital external hard disk drive! after spending so much money on it, I would like to think that my data is finally safely backed up (even if it really isn't)