HAGALAKAI/KARELA/BITTER GOURD CHUTNEY

This is a wonderful tasting chutney, a combination of bitter, sour and sweet. Goes very well with hot rice and ghee and can be a good accompaniment with chapathi etc.

Ingredients:

Bittergourd                        1/2 kg

Onions                              4-5 medium

Salt                                   4 level teaspoons

Sarina pudi                       4 teaspoons (heaped)

Tamarind                          1 big lemon sized or 1 1/2-2 tablespoons thick paste 

Jaaggery                           1 cup (powdered) or ¾ cup thick syrup

For seasoning:       

Oil                                     4-5 tablespoons

Mustard seeds                  2 teaspoons

Curry leaves                     8-10

Ingu/asafetida                 ¼ teaspoon

Turmeric                           ¼ teaspoon 

Procedure:

Chop bitter gourd into about 1” pieces and slice the onions. Let the volume of sliced onions be about half that of chopped bitter gourd.

Run them in the mixer along with salt and tamarind into a coarse mixture.

Now heat oil in a thick pan. Add mustard seeds. When they sputter add curry leaves, turmeric and asafetida. And immediately add the ground paste. Fry till the mixture does not smell raw any longer and it leaves the sides of the pan.

Now add jaggery and mix well. Add sarina pudi and mix well again and cook till it thickens and leave the sides of the pan.

Allow it to cool and store in bottles or steel boxes.

Will stay good in the fridge for months.

WHOLE WHEAT BREAD

I started baking bread more than 15 years back.

We like bread, but we prefer whole wheat bread to that made using maida/refined flour,

It is very difficult to find whole wheat bread in the market. Even the ones we get with the label `Wheat bread’ are also a mix of maida and wheat flour, I guess.  Because if it is only wheat bread, it feels heavy to handle whereas the only maida or wheat-maida mix bread is lighter. A local baker even told me that one has to add 50% maida or else the bread will not rise!

Once I came across a recipe for whole wheat bread in a news paper.  And that was the take off point for my bread making! I tried it and on repeated trials, succeeded in getting a perfect loaf of bread! And it does rise without adding maida!

If you go through the recipe, you may feel that it a difficult task. But it is not so. It is time consuming that is all. In the sense, you will have to wait for at least two to three hours for the flour to rise and nearly about half an hour for baking. Including the preparation time, the process takes about four to five hours.

Here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

Whole wheat flour                                             4 cups

Dry yeast                                                           1 teaspoon

Jaggery powder/honey                                      2 teaspoons

Salt                                                                    1 teaspoon                  

Warm water                                                       About 1 ½ cups
Sesame seeds (optional)                                    2 teaspoons

Procedure:

Add salt to flour, mix well.

Dissolve jaggery in about ¼ cup of water. Heat this to a lukewarm temperature.  If you take honey, add lukewarm water to it and stir well.

Add dry yeast granules to this and mix well.  Allow it to rise. It takes about 15-20 minutes to rise.

Next add this to the flour and mix well.

Now add required amount of warm water and mix well. Let the consistency be a bit softer than the flour you mix for making chapathis. Now you have to knead this very well. The more you knead, the more it rises. I knead it for about ten minutes. 

After kneading, cover it with a warm cloth, keep it in a warm place and allow it to rise. If the room temperature is not warm, I keep this in the oven and turn the oven on to about 20 degrees Celsius and leave it for 2 to 3 hours. The flour should rise to nearly three times that of the original size.

Baking:

Keep a greased baking trey ready.

Now knead the flour again for one or two minutes. Better dip your hand in water once before you start kneading since the flour might stick to your hand and make it difficult to knead. Now roll the flour with hand to fit into the trey and then transfer this to the trey. 

Now again cover with warm cloth and allow it to rise in the trey for about half an hour.

Next sprinkle sesame seeds uniformly on the flour. These seeds give a good taste to the bread when they get roasted during baking. 

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius for five minutes. Bake for about 25 minutes at this temperature.

To check if the bread is done, insert a knife in the middle of the loaf. If it comes out clean it means that it is done. To check further, take out the trey and knock on the bread lightly with fingers. If it gives a hollow sound, it means the bread is done.

Now reverse the trey and transfer the loaf to a plate. Wrap the bread with wet cloth for about 10 minutes so that the bread crust doesn’t get hard.

Cut the bread to slices when cool.