Yajna Patni

Also, add the youhour to the milk when it has come off a boil, and do not boil the milk, let it sit for a while and then strain out the curds.

I used to make good Rasmalai. My secret was good milk. I cant make it work in the US with store milk. so my tips are: good unhomoginized milk for the paneer. Unhpasteurized is better still. take the milk from the middle of the churn, it shouldnt be too creamy or the paneer will be soft and oily, or too uncreamy or it will be dry and crumbly. Use Yoghourt to curdle the milk rather than citric acid or lemon juice, it makes a softer more workable curd. use a little bit of flour in the paneer, this will make sure if the paneer is not perfect they will hold together, but just a teeny bit, or they will taste doughy. when you boil them, make sure that the syryp is not too thick, or they will not puff up properly. I usualy cook them in a very watery syryp. then soak them in sweetend milk, and THEN pour over the kheer/malai, whatever.. that way they are very juicy. They should squeak when you bite into them. Rasamali is sheer heaven.

I have had great roasted on the spot coffe in Chiapas, wonderful coffee in Hawaii, and no other coffee producing area!

I have been using a little aluminum moka pot for years... can't remember the make, but it makes the best coffee. As a note, if you go to a hispanic store, you will find the same ones as in gourmet/Italian stores at about half the price. I use home ground beans in a cheapy blade grinder and it comes out better than most espresso in nasty badly calibrated espresso machiens that charge 5$ for a cup. The key is getting it to make the coffee before it boils.

potato halavah is really yummy. carrot too, I imagine beetroot makes at least pretty sweets. even cabbage kheer, although i cannot imagine why any one would make it, even if it really is onion. But CHICKEN barfi ???? that sounds nasty and wrong in so many ways. sorry eeeugh eeeugh gross. Although, in European tradtions there are plenty of fruit/meat combos. Mince meat being a perfect example.

They are good stuffed with green mango and sauteed. is green mango ok? I had a friend who used to use green apple if she couldnt get mango, but i think that tasted weird. paneer and coconut stuffing is good too, but i guess fairly bad for you. I love bitter melon, but i think I might have to spit if i got a mouth full of them boiled and mashed with salt and rice.

Worse than mint IMHO is covering everything in powdered sugar. gross. it looks stupid, blurs the colour contrasts and tastes vile.

ME too! esp if it is drowned in balsamic vinegar.

mee tooo.. esp when the dressing is over vinagery and even more if it is over balsamic vinegary

thin slices deep or shallow fried in oil or ghee till crispy is really good too.

It sounds a bit like a Vietnamese coffe maker. a kind of filter through tamped grounds.

I can't comment on Indian Chinese restaurants, so perhaps this is off topic. But I was in Cambodia a few months ago. Cambodian culture is a fabulous very historical mixture of Indian and China, as it was part of ancient trade routes between the two places I beleive. So in the shadow of Angkor, which was built in the 13th Century (I think) as a Hindu temple, with amazing sculpture of the churning of the ocean of milk and other stories from Bhagwatam, and is now a bhuddist temple, I was eating a big bowl of sticky rice and bananas with coconut milk. I was struck by a lightening bolt of inspiration...Very kheer like. In fact, when i got home I cooked up sticky rice and dumped over it a can of evaporated milk, some cardamom, and it was a lot kheer like. The sticky rice soaks up liquid after its cooked. Utterly wrong and inauthentic I know, but it tasted damn good! My chiense/indian/cambodian fusion confusion contribution.

Mishti Dahi has to be one of my very very favorite thigns. I have had great problems with mishti dohi in the US. I tried and tried. I find it hard to get it to set, but also, I don’t like how it comes out with homogenized milk. Not having access to real cows here in Boston, that is what I am stuck with. I found a madhur jaffrey recipe that i think she might have calls Bengali milk custard or something. She sets it in a bath of hot water. That works every time. But it is made with cooked down sweetened milk, and to my mind cooked down homogenized milk is nasty. Any one got any other ideas for making tasty ish cooked down homogenized milk? I just got a bag of somthing sticky that says jaggery/gur. It was in a special place in the refrigerator in the store, so I was guessing it might be gur. But from teh above discussion I am guessing it is jaggery.

yuuum... banoffe...

Boiled cans of condensed milk are yummy. But it takes more like two hours, and it certainly can explode. You have to make sure that the water covers the can at all times, otherwise the pressure of hot stuff inside it will make it explode. Put it in a big pot with a lot of water on top. I have never made kulfi from it, but i have eaten a whole can with a spoon . . . . other important issue... dont try opening the can until it is quite cold. the milk inside is under a lot of pressure when it is hot, and will all squirt out of a tiny hole, and quite possible a. burn you, and b. waste your whole can by squirting all voer the place. Probably only for those people who dont mind risking personal injury for food. the can says not to do it.

We used to try and make 108 preparations. Not too practical for a home janmastami, i guess. Important were preparations made from milk. lots of milk sweets, kshira, often with camphor. Pushpanna rice too. Yamuna has a recipie for that, but i think she uses balls of paneer, if you do that, soak them for a minute in whey with a little salt. It makes them juciy. Kachoris or samosas, pushpanna rice, kshira that is what is coming to my mind right now.

You are bringing back so many memories. bubbling enormous woks of kitchere, and innumerate sadhus lined up with banana leaves. And radha ballabha katchoris.... those are so so good. I haven’t had them for years. I can see this will be a cooking weekend. I never knew Kurma, but i did know Yamuna quite well. We cooked in the same kitchens in England for several years. Also I think she has a recipe for malpua that is not so difficult. The heat and humidity and general strangeness of Bengal really overwhelmed me. I came home with rolls of photos, but I couldn’t even remember what they were of when I got home…it was the poha and sukta that i can still taste in my mind nearly 20 years later! I really like eggplant and neem, but I never make it. I have never seen Neem for sale here. I will see what i can come up with for recipes, but I am not great at that. I learned to cook watching people, and tasting stuff and figuring it out, so I am not very good at writing it down. Yamuna is the only book I have really used, ( starting with a typed draft of her first book many years ago), except for Aroona Reejingsahni, and she doesn’t really give recipes as much as general ideas... cook it till it is done, a nice amount of maida etc. See, I talk too much! But food is one of my favorite topics, and you are all making my mouth water!

How wonderful! What wonderful people your family members sound like! I have never cooked in Mayapur, the last time I was there I was 17 or 18, in 1982. I remember chopping a lot of vegetables. I was going to post on the earlier Poha thread, the big mind blowing event of that trip, aside from being an Irish teen in the middle of India, was a huge plate of poha with yogurt, banana and mango and gur. I ate it at a big festival with kirtan and it was the most sublime mixture I had ever tasted. That and Sukta, which took me much longer to appreciate! And luchi.... mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. I try really hard not to fry anymore, as it tends to stick to my hips. But luchi and sooji halava is a very wonderful combination. Thank you very much for your warm welcome.

They do eat bananna flowers in Cambodia and Thailand. You can find them in cans a lot in southeast asian grocery stores. Perhaps not as good as fresh, but better than sad and wilted.

I am in Boston. I am Irish/English, and live in the US. I was a cook in Hare Krsna temples/restaurants in England, Ireland, & Caribbean for 15-20 years. So I learned to cook from Indian people, mostly from Bengal and Gujarat. Its what I am used to cooking and therefore my comfort food. At the moment in my house is a big bubbling bowl of iddli batter, and I cant get wait to get home and eat it. And that’s about all I can say for myself.

Although travelling ANYWHERE with local people and local knowledge is better, I went to Delhi on my won when i was 18, 22 years ago, and loved it. It is a big city, and as such you need to use some common sense. But then again, I am quite happy in Bangkok on my own too, so perhaps our comfort levels are different. But i certainly have never had any kind of harassment or fear in Delhi.