Spicy Sweet Potato Curry...

              I love to eat boiled sweet potato with jaggery. So just thought of buying two sweet potatoes in a grocery store near by and thought of cooking capsicum curry tonight. After coming to hostel, an idea flashed in my mind saying "why not make a sweet potato curry ?" That's how Spicy Sweet potato curry was born...!!

Ingredients Used:

Sweet Potatoes
Capsicum  
Onions
Tomatoes
Green Chillies
Ginger Garlic paste
Garam Masala
Red Chilly Powder
Turmeric
Oil
Cumin Seeds
Salt
Coconut milk (made out of ready-made coconut milk powder)

Procedure:

Heat the oil in rice cooker, add jeera and chopped green chillies to it. Fry for sometime and then add chopped onions. When onions are saught till transparent add ginger garlic paste, salt, turmeric and garam masala powder and mix well.

Let the aroma tickle your nose. Now add chopped capsicum and fry for sometime.

Close the lid and let it boil for 5 minutes. Add chopped tomatoes after the capsicum gets cooked.

Let the tomatoes get cooked. The curry looks like this:

Add salt and chilly powder if required. Now mix the sweet potato pieces and add some water.

Close the lid and let it cook for 15-20 minutes.After sweet potato gets cooked, the curry becomes thicker because of the starch from sweet potato. Now add thick coconut milk and mix well. That's the end of the procedure.

Add some lemon juice to taste(if required). Serve hot with roitis or rice. It tastes spicy,tangy and sweet a different taste altogether...!!

Creamy Dal Makhani.....!

           Dal Makhani is a special Punjabi dish which is very rich in proteins and fat. I tried Dal Makhani in my friend's place today and this is my friend's recipe. It really worked out well. So, just thought of sharing the recipe.

Things I used :

Urad dal (whole black gram)
Rajma dal (Kidney beans)
Tomatoes
Onions
Green Chillies
Oil
Ginger Garlic Paste
Garam Masala
Red Chilly Powder
Salt

My preparation :
  
I took a glass for measuring the quantity of Urad dal and Rajma. In one glass, I took Urad dal and Rajma taking 5:1 ratio and soaked it in a bowl with exactly 3 glasses of water overnight (almost 12 hrs). Today morning I boiled the soaked mixture for 3 hours in an electric cooker (almost 7 whistles in a pressure cooker).See that rajma beans become mashy. I took the mixture and kept it aside.

Now I prepared a tomato paste and onion paste with 4 Tomatoes and 2 Onions.(Onions can also be finely chopped) I chopped green chillies also.

Now, I poured some oil in the rice cooker and waited for the oil to get heated. After the oil is hot, I added chopped green chillies and fried it for few minutes,then added onion paste and fried till the colour changed.Now added the Ginger garlic paste,Garam masala, Red chilly powder and salt.After mixing well the aroma tickled my nose and then added tomato paste.I waited till oil seperated.

Dal Makhani is half ready now. I added the boiled dhal which I kept aside sometime before. After adding some water and mixing well.I added some salt and chilli powder to taste.

In the final stage I added butter and cream to garnish.Yummy Creamy Dhal Makhni looked this way..It tasted best with  Rotis, Phulkas and Rice.

Taj Kuteeram

              One of my friends told me about Nrityagram, "The Dance village" basically a dance school.It was very interesting to know about such a place in Banglore city. So I decided to visit that place last Sunday.It is around 55 km from Hosur Road. I just checked their website for details.Click here for website:www.nrityagram.org

              I have a couple of friends who share my interests in travel. So we all sat together discussed about the place, available routes and time to start. From the website we took contact details on a safe side. On Sunday we started around around 8.30 am and reached Heseraghatta around 10.30 am. On our way we ate watermelon and jackruit which were sold on road.










             
               When we reached the place we saw Taj kuteeram resort which is exactly opposite to nrityagram. To our surprise, Nrityagram was closed. We asked security people at Taj Kuteeram about Nrityagram. We understood that Nrityagram was closed because of summer vacations.

               With lots of dissappointment we were about to start to Bangalore. But I just asked security people whats inside Taj Kuteeram, They said its a resort with spa and restaurant. We decided to go in and relax for sometime as we were tired of journey. Resort had a restaurant which gave an ancient feel.

              We explored all around the resort. There were double rooms and suits in the resort.There were spas outside suits.

           
               We had coffee and juice in restaurant.The view was really awesome from restaurant with a clean pond (with some rocks decorating it)

                                       
We found a mysterious tower in the middle of the resort...

               We enjoyed ample time in the resort and started back to Bangalore. On our way we stopped at a small mushrooms shop and had hot mushroom soup. We reached Hyderabad House in Koramangala around  2 pm and had spicy delicious Chicken Dum Biryani. This was the weekend getaway to  Heseraghatta....!

This is what I call Half cooking...!!

              I cooked mushroom curry in my friend's room a week before. We planned a small get-together where my friends brought rice, chapathis, daal and some cool drinks. I just had an idea of cooking some curry. I bought a ready mix curry called "Mappas Gravy".

               
             I tried cooking this chicken curry by replacing chicken with mushrooms. So I bought butter, green chillies, tomatoes, Onion and  Mushrooms. I used a rice cooker to cook this curry. My friends helped me in chopping all the vegetables. I heated the butter and fried chopped green chillies,onions and tomatoes.It was like a feast to my senses (both colour and smell)

After frying for few minutes, I added chopped mushroom.

 
                 I left this undisturbed by closing the lid for 10 minutes. Now added the ready made gravy and sufficient water. I let it to boil and waited till the oil separated....Delicious "Mushroom Mappas Curry" was ready.

                 I served it with chapathis and rice. Only half the actual recipe was cooked because of the availability of ready made gravy.So I only called this is "Half cooked" delicious mushroom curry.

              We spent a great time last weekend with delicious food, interesting gossips, Music and I learnt to make a "half cooked" mushroom curry....!! Its a great time to spend with a small and close group of friends.

Kodagu District, Karnataka

             Kodagu is a district of Karnataka in southern India. It is often called by the anglicised name of Coorg. It occupies about 4,100 km² in the Western Ghats of southwestern Karnataka.It is located 250 km away from Bangalore and 120 km away from Mysore. Coorg is also known as "Scotland of India" because of its coffee estates and misty mountains.

           I visited this place with my family last week. We started at 11 pm in Bangalore and reached Madikere (head quarters of Coorg District) at 6 am in the morning. We had reserved Yedamakky Cottage at Hegela village,Virajpet (40 km from Madikere) for our stay for 2 days. We reached Virajpet, had breakfast and took a bus(Coorg Union) to Hegela village. Some of the pictures in  Homestay are..

This cottage was surrounded by coffee plantation and pepper plantations

           By the time we got ready, it was afternoon. So we decided to visit Dubare Elephant camp which is located at 31 km distance from Virajpet. Here we went to fresh water rafting and saw Elephant feeding and training.

Elephant training camp at Dubare

              We spent our time here till evening. We started at 5.30 pm and reached our cottage around 7 pm. We had dinner, spend some time at campfire and slept early.The next day we decided to explore the cottage and coffee estates around. We woke up around 8.30 am in the morning. We cooked Maggi for breakfast in the living room.

We then moved around the cottage and clicked some pics

Stages of a coffee bean...!!!!

We spotted a cute kitten....!!

              We then drove to Virajpet for sightseeing.We saw St. Anns Church,Clock Tower and Perumbadi lake.

              We then started to Bangalore and stopped in Mysore for dinner.We reached the city by 10 pm in the night. The trip was great.We were not able to see all the places because of season and distance from Virajpet. It is not safe to be outside after 6 pm in these places.My overall experience was great and learnt many things about flora and fauna here...!!

Baby corn Capsicum curry...

             I tried this curry recently when I was feeling bored at home.I modified the procedure given in microwave recipe book with my imagination. It is a milk based curry.It tastes a bit sweet,creamy and spicy.
Things needed are:

Capsicums                            2 No.s

Baby corn                             200 gm

Onions                                  2 No.s

Chopped garlic                      2 tsp

Milk                                      1 cup

Cashew nuts                            few

Peanuts                                  2 tbsp

Tomato puree                         1 cup

Ginger garlic paste                  1 tbsp

Dhaniya (Coriander seeds)      1 tsp

Turmeric                                 1/2 tsp

Red chilly powder                   2 tsp

Salt

Oil                                          4-6 tbsp

Eggs (optional)

Procedure:

I will explain the procedure with pictures rather than writing each and every step.Cut the vegetables into pieces.

               

First cook the baby corn in a rice cooker for 2 whistles. Then take a pan, heat the oil and fry onions,garlic and capsicum first.Saute till onions turn golden brown.

Now add boiled baby corn, salt, Ginger garlic paste and turmeric.Mix well and close the pan with the lid for 5 minutes.

                   

Now add tomato puree, dhaniya powder, red chilly powder and mix well. While this gets cooked, Grind cashewnuts and peanuts with milk. Add this mixture to the curry in the pan.

Let this boil for sometime with stirring in between. Oil separates and gravy becomes thick and creamy.

                          

This curry can be garnished with coriander.To make it rich, I used egg scramble to decorate it. It enhanced the taste.

This curry can be served with hot rice or chapathis. I served this curry to my family with rice.They all liked it very much...!!

Mahabalipuram trip

                  Happy New year 2013...!!!! I went to Mahabalipuram last week with my family and I want to share my experience with my readers... Mahabalipuram is also known as Mamallapuram. It has a great history.It acted as a foriegn trade centre and  as a port in Pallavas(a southindian dyanasty)  period. It has various monuments built between 7th and 9th centuries. Now its one of the popular tourist attractions near Chennai.

                        We had booked a resort for our stay in makemytrip.com. We reached the beach resort (SilverSands) in the evening. It provided us a decent room and vegetarian food tonight. We sat on the shores and enjoyed the early dinner. The next morning we started exploring the place around us.....

   The restaurant where we had breakfast is this..

                 
                  This resort was pretty close to sea. Then we went to beach to play.Though we didn't see the sunrise, but still beach looked beautiful in the morning.It was very clean and scenery was awesome...Apart from beach there are also other activities in the resort.

                     
                    After enjoying in beach and having breakfast, We went on to see other major tourist attractions like arjuna's penace, pancha rathas, shore temple etc.,We first went to Arjuna's penace which was made with single stone rock.It is a beautiful sculpture.It looks like this...

                    There were many mandapas around this Arjuna's penace. They are Krishna Mantapa, Trimurthy Mandapa, Varaha Mandapa etc., We saw a big rock which stood on the hillslope for several thousands of years without rolling down, this is called 'Krishna's butter ball'.

                   Then we started to panchrathas and shore temple. On our way we had some snacks on the road. I observed an intresting thing on roads. There were shops making sculptures based on the order of their customers. Government of TamilNadu is encouraging the sculpture by running a college of arts and sculpture.

                   Panchrathas means five chariots. The imagination behind this sculpture was that pandavas used these chariots in war against kauravas. It was very sunny when we reached this place..There were five similar mantapas. The mantapa was made of one piece stone. One them looked like...

                   Last but not the least we saw was famous Shore temple.It was built by pallavan king, Narasimhavarman-II who lived in 700 A.D.There are two shrines inside the temple (kshatriyasimheswara and rajasimheshwara).

                      After this we went for shopping. Then we went to resort to check out. We had lunch in ECR daabha on our way..I enjoyed a lot and learnt many things. I am proud of my country which has a very rich and civilized history.