Roasted Bell Pepper and Tomato Pasta

So my dad is not really fond of pasta and my mom likes it.  So I make pasta whenever dad is not going to be home for dinner.  That way, mom doesn't have to think too much on what to cook for the two of us. (apparently, when you're a mom, the decision on what to cook for lunch/dinner is more important than national security) Today, dad wasn't going to be home for lunch, so we decided on pasta. Of course, like everything else I cook, I had to make some for dad too, because you know, he likes being encouraging sometimes.

Anyway, so mostly I've made arrabbiata sauce which is the simplest. (will put up the recipe sometime) But few days back, sister suggested roasted bell pepper sauce and it had me intrigued.  So I looked up a couple of recipes online and wasn't quite happy with most of them.  I thought that that'll make my pasta dry.  And I like my pasta saucy.  Very, very saucy.

So, here's what I did for lunch today.

Serves 3 (very saucy sauce) or 4 (normal saucy sauce) or 5 (if you're weird and like your pasta dry)

Ingredients

1.  Red and yellow bell peppers (3 each) (you may want to try red, yellow and green bell peppers, 2 each)
2.  1/2 onion (medium) or 1 onion (small) (finely chopped)
3.  3 tomatoes (medium)
4.  6/7 garlic cloves
5.  A bunch of pine nuts
6.  Olive oil
7.  Salt, pepper, red chilli flakes (or any other seasonings you fancy)

Method

1.  Roast the tomatoes and bell peppers on the flame.  Yes, directly on the flame.  You may want to invest in a good pair of tongs before you try this or you may burn your hands. :| So yes, roast them till they smell all nice and burnt. (don't worry, you're going to peel off the skin so you won't taste the burnt thing)

Roasted Bell Peppers

This is how they'll look once they're nicely roasted.  You can now peel off the skin easily. (yeah, good idea would be to let them cool down)

Also, good idea would be to cook the pasta around this time too.

2.  First remove skin of tomatoes and blend them to a paste.  In a pan, pour some olive oil, and add onions to them.  Cook till they become translucent. To this add the tomato puree and let it simmer on low flame for like 4/5 minutes.

This smells awesome

3.  Cut medium/large pieces of the bell peppers and put them in a blender.  Add pine nuts and garlic to this.  Also add a pinch of salt.  Blend well till it becomes nice paste. 

4.  In the pan with simmering tomato sauce, add this sauce to it.  Add chilli flakes and freshly roasted pepper to it.  And salt if required. Oh, and trust me, not a good idea to sniff chilli flakes.

5.   Let it simmer for a while on low flame and serve hot with the pasta!

Saucy, saucy pasta!

This is how the final product looks like.  And it tastes wonderful.  I know it tastes wonderful because mom said so.  And mothers never lie.  And if your mother likes what you've cooked, it is a battle won in the kitchen.  She will be more trusting to let you use her kitchen.

So go ahead, make this pasta and let me know how you liked it!! :D

Tomato Rice

Fresh tomatoes and home grown mint.

When we were kids, my Grandma used to make something called "Ketchup Pulao".  It was nothing but adding tomato ketchup to pulao, which had onion and potatoes.  It has been almost 15 years since I last tasted that.  She wasn't keeping well for a few years before she passed away in 2004.  She never told anyone the recipe (which I am sure was something she cooked up on the go, with whatever ingredients were in the house, without all the fancy herbs.  I'm sure she didn't even know what thyme and parsley is) and so in a way, the dish died with her.  I can still remember the flavour of onion, which had become sweet on being fried in ghee with some cumin seeds tadka.  I once tried recreating the recipe some years back, and failed miserably.

I had been craving for her pulao since sometime now, and though I know I couldn't create what she did, I looked up some recipes online.  Of course, I didn't have the fancy herbs at home, but had the basic tomatoes and onions and capsicum.  Good enough.  Plus, Mom has grown some mint in the garden.  If the peacock, whom I consider my Mom's adopted son, and also inheritor of 1/3rd of the jaaydaat, leaves some mint after feasting on it, we use the remaining for tea.  I felt like putting some mint in my "Tomato Rice" (because pulao sounds too desi, and I'm cool like that) and quickly went and plucked some pretty fresh leaves, as shown above.  An hour of hard work (I'm slow) and burning my hand with super hot tomatoes (a girl can be only that careful) wonderful Tomato Rice was ready to be consumed.

So what went into creating this masterpiece? And how I created the magic? ZOMG. I am so modest! Please read the rest of the post so that I can rub some of my awesome cooking skills to you.

Awesome Tomato Rice garnished with Fresh Mint

Basically, to cook something, you need to love food.  Unless you can differentiate between the sourness of tomato and that of lemon, you should only do one thing with food: eat.

So what I used as ingredients.

1.  7-8 tomatoes (I used 7, blanched, removed skin and then made puree with a blender, super easy)
2.  3 Onions (finely chopped)
3.  1 Capsicum (chopped in thin slices - now, I only had 1 green capsicum at home.  You may want to add yellow and red for colour)
4.  1 cup rice.  (basically, 7 tomatoes make roughly 1 cup puree - you need as much rice as you make puree. ok?  Also, I used basmati rice.)
5.  1 cup boiling water. (yeah, ratio between rice and tomato puree+water = 1:2/2.25, depending on how much water it needs to cook your rice.)
6.  Bunch of fresh mint leaves.
7.  1 spoon olive oil. (it adds to flavour, really)
8.  Salt (स्वादानुसार ) and chilli flakes (3 spoons, or again स्वादानुसार )
Now, I wanted to add corn in it too, because I love corn, but there was no corn at home. :( Some recipes I looked up online also added fancy herbs like thyme and parsley and basil. Didn't have any, so meh.  But add herbs if you like the flavours, I wish I had basil though. <3

How I cooked?

Wash rice and soak them.  You'll need them in about half an hour.

Blanch the tomatoes - bring water to boil and drop in the tomatoes.  Once the skin starts coming off, remove and put them in cold water.  That will ensure you don't burn your hands while trying to remove the skin.  Also, you may want to let them cool down.  I don't have patience, and my palms feel little raw right now. Anyway, once that's done, use a blender and make a puree.

In a pan, put some olive oil.  Once it heats up, add onion and capsicum, and let them cook.  Also add the herbs.  Enjoy the flavours and smell. <3

Add salt, and chilli flakes and mix well.

Remove water from rice and add to the pan.  Now, mix slowly.  You don't want to break the rice, especially if you're using the long grained basmati rice. <3  Enjoy the smell.

Add the tomato puree and boiling water to it and mix well.  Bring it to a boil and then cook it on a slow flame while covering the pan.  Should take about 6-7 minutes.

Now, you may want to check it after 4-5 minutes to ensure the rice hasn't stuck to the pan.

So while I was cooking, the rice was still little uncooked but it was sticking to the pan.  I panicked.  So I put the rice in a microwave safe bowl, and cooked it in microwave oven for about 4 minutes with a closed lid.  After sometime, I could still see it looked little liquidy, and I worried it may end up being some disgusting soupy rice. :(

Kids, this is where mothers come to your rescue.  She told me how it was okay, and sprinkled some magic water (it was plain water, but I'm sure there was some magic element to it - mothers are awesome that way) and microwaved it for another 5 minutes.  AND IT WAS DONE!

You may want to let it rest for a while, like 10 minutes or so before serving.  Because I don't like things served piping hot - it burns the tongue and you can't feel any flavours after the first spoonful.

So that's it - my tribute to my Grandma's recipe.  My Tomato Rice was awesome, even if I say so myself, but it was still nothing compared to her "Ketchup Pulao". :'( I MISS HER!

Tough Cookie

Lately I've discovered the joy of baking.

I started out with a disastrous attempt at chocolate chip cake, which tasted more like burnt chocolate pieces in baked floury brown coloured something a few months back, and have now turned into a more confident baker, having successfully made choco lava cake with awesome molten chocolate oozing out and cookies.

There are thousands of recipes available online for the eggless cookies and cakes, and it would not make much sense if i were to write one more recipe. But one annoying thing i found in such recipe was no one told me where i could go wrong. or what do i do if the dough is not firm enough? and if they said, they've tweaked the recipe a bit, they never mentioned how they tweaked it? or if they're giving tweaked recipe, which was the original? what nonsense, i say. not everyone here knows how to bake. if we knew, we wouldn't be looking at your damned recipe, no?

So i'll talk about my three attempts at cookies, and how differently they turned up. First the ingredients. This was mostly passed on to me by DesiKhichdi

1 measure butter (i used regular amul butter, you could use white butter)
2 measure all purpose flour (today i substituted this with whole wheat flour)
1/2 measure cocoa powder (add more if you like more chocolatey)
1 measure sugar (i used brown sugar for chocolate ones and regular white granulated for other cookies)
1/2 spoon baking powder

now, what i did was, i reduced butter quantity. i used about 70 percent of required quantity. instead of 2 measure flour, i used little over 1.5 measure. and sugar too, i used about 70 percent of said quantity.

Method

Mix butter and sugar together. Sift the flour and baking powder 2-3 times and cocoa powder (if you are making chocolate cookies) Mix all ingredients to make a firm dough. if you are making plain cookies, don't add cocoa powder, and add 2-3 drops of vanilla essence instead) If you have used less butter like me, you may need to use some 3-4 spoon of milk to make the dough firm.

Now put the dough in cling wrap or ziplock bag and refrigerate it for 30 mins. Roll the dough.. about 1/2 cm thick. cut with cookie cutter and bake them. Now since i used microwave with convection option, i'll tell you the temperature there - 200 degrees for 15 mins.

The first time i made, the dough was too soft, and the cookies spread :| and i kept it for 40 minutes because, i read everywhere 40 minutes. Well, the OTG takes 40 minutes, but microwave takes lesser time. The cookies were charred and there was no way to eat them. I was disheartened. Also, since the dough was so soft, i could not even cut it properly. But then i looked up some youtube videos, and i realised, if you couldn't roll the cookies, you could just make small rolls of the dough and put it at some distance in the tray and eventually, it will spread itself because of the heat and well, it will take a proper round shape of a cookie. this happens when the butter is more in the dough.

in my second attempt, i used less butter, and some 3-4 spoon milk to knead the dough. Hence, the dough was firmer, and i was able to roll it properly. and was also able to cut the cookie properly. Yeah, my Dabangg cookies :-) I kept them in for 10 mins, but later realised they could do with 3-4 mins more, and about 15 minutes was the time required in my oven. You may want to have a trial and error with this.




In my third attempt, my mom said she wanted to taste plain cookies, without any chocolate flavour (i know, how can anyone choose anything else over chocolate) so this time, i used whole wheat flour, white granulated sugar and vanilla essence (i may have put in more than 2-3 drops because i almost dropped the bottle, so they smell very vanilla-ey, but 2-3 drops should be good) 15 minutes of baking later, i felt the cookies didn't look as brown as i'd like them to be. so i put them in for 5 more minutes, and came out just perfect :)

I'm not a cooking expert, and so I am not very sure of substitutes of ingredients, and i do look up the internet quite often for all my queries. You may want to look up other places before you try them out!


At the end of it, I was very happy with the outcome. My mother was never into baking and is a bit possessive about anyone cooking in her kitchen. But over past few months, she has come to let go of her inhibitions and is being supportive in my cooking adventures. The plain cookies were her 'farmaish' :-) I was really happy when she asked me to bake them, almost served as a seal that she not only trusts me with cooking, but likes it also. When your mother appreciates food cooked by you, it gives you a tremendous high. :-)

Oh, and next on her wishlist is an apple pie. :-)

Cooking Lessons 1

So I decided to make Rajma for dinner tonight. You can easily find out the recipe from the internet and so I am not going to repeat it here. Also, I've altered it a bit because I forgot the sequence of ingredients to be put into the pan, but then again, since it turned out to be awesome, I concluded that I am definitely a good cook.

But as they say, everyday there is a new lesson to be learnt. I have learnt a few things today. No, none of that learnn from water how to blend into surroundings and learn from mustard seeds how to be small but powerful. No, none of this school assembly shit. What I have actually learnt are some awesomely important lessons, like :

1. It is insanely difficult to get rid of garlic smell from your fingers. Wash your hands repeatedly with dettol to get rid of the smell. Your hands will smell all hospital-y, but at least, you wont smell of garlic.

2. Crushing green chillies, garlic and ginger together is an awesome idea. But after using your hands to clear off the mixture, wash your hands thoroughly (read repeatedly with dettol) before rubbing your eyes with the same fingers. Trust me, you do not want to experience that. ow.

3. Always have your mom nearby. Only she knows where the ingredients are. So when you run out of some masala in the middle of your cooking, refill is just a yell away. Mothers are also a peculiar character. They have this feeling of ownership to the kitchen and feel threatened by your presence in the kitchen, and may try all sort of tactics to discourage you, be strong. You are up against a powerful force, but patience is all that is needed. Remember, you might be in her place someday.

Thats all in the cooking class today, more later! :D I'm going off to gobble down what I've cooked :D