A Me-Me and a Game

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Filed Under MeMe | 35 Comments

My blogger buddy Cynthia (who coincidentally celebrated her birthday yesterday. Happy Birthday Cyn… ) tagged me for a meme to write seven random facts about me. So here you go…

  1. As a kid, I used to be (still am to a certain extent) a big germaphobe and would refuse to drink/eat anything from restaurants. That lasted till I went to college, hostel food made me a convert. Yeah, and now I live on restaurant food.
  2. I was as thin as a person could get till I was about 21. Then I came to US and within six months went up four dress sizes without me even noticing the change. I blamed my washer for shrinking my clothes, and kept buying new stuff. Not knowing my American size (All my clothes from India were in European sizes…), I had to try out different sizes anyway, so never caught onto the change… My regular lunch used to be Coke and Cheetos and a packet of peanut M&Ms from the vending machine at work, and dinner used to be from McDonald’s (Crispy Chicken Sandwich) or Wendy’s (Spicy Chicken Sandwich) every weekday. Oh and I used to snack on French fries every day too… When I went back to India to get married, Siv was seeing me after three months and almost didn’t recognize me.
  3. I am absolutely terrified of dogs, of any kind, ever since I was bitten by one when I was young. Now I know I shouldn’t run away from them, that will only provoke them more, so my defense mechanism is to bark back at the dogs, a few decibels above their own, and that really scares the bejesus out of them. Try it out next time, it works!
  4. My biggest pet peeve is dinner guests trying to take over my kitchen - if you know of a better way to cut the onions, I will be more than happy to watch and learn, IN YOUR KITCHEN!!
  5. I have a serious problem with gaming addiction. When the Microsoft Sidewinder force feedback wheel first came out, I played Midtown Madness for 12 hours straight and stopped only to throw up. When playing poker online was legal in WA (I mean before it was officially illegal), I used to play for hours on end, four tables at a time, till I literally fall asleep on my keyboard. When we go to Vegas (at least 3-4 times a year), I can go on playing table games for three days straight with as little as six hours of total sleep. When I buy a new cell phone game, I have to finish the whole game and unlock all the levels before I can move on with my life. That is the reason I stay away from Xbox. I am glad I took on blogging this year, I haven’t gambled this whole year.
  6. I have never used a honeybucket (Porta-Potty) in my life, hoping I will never have to. I would rather let my bladder explode than go inside one of those.
  7. I have attended the last baby shower of my life where the mother-to-be is not a close friend of mine. If you are after a gift, I will send you one, but don’t expect me to be there. I won’t smell cans and cans of baby food that looks like poo ever again, I am never ever going to dress another adult in a diaper made of toilet paper, and I definitely will not try and guess the perimeter of anyone’s tummy ever again. Unless of course the mom-to-be is a friend of mine. Okay, I will expand the definition of a friend to someone who has ever had a meal with me (no, other baby showers won’t count), coz if you are a friend of mine, we would have either gone out to dinner, or had been to each other’s house for dinner. If not, please don’t put my name on that invite!

I guess that is pretty random, right? More like random thoughts than random facts, but hey, it is called a Me Me after all!

With that I tag some fellow bloggers. Richa, Musical , Reena , Archana and Sheela , take it up only if you feel like, no pressure! :)

I will be away on vacation till next weekend. Taking my parents to San Diego, Disneyland , Las Vegas and Grand Canyon… It’s going to be a hectic trip, completely devoted to touristy stuff, not my ideal kind of vacation, but it is not about me this time… :)

Until then, try and guess the main ingredient in the below picture… Yes, it is edible. :)

Clues:

  • It is a traditional Kerala recipe, but made with an American staple, readily available in stores here.
  • The recipe is from another food blog.

With that I bid you adieu, for now. See you all next weekend. All my US friends, enjoy the July 4th holiday, everyone else, just enjoy. Ciao!

Update - 05/07/07

And the winner is… Anonymous!!! :) . This is a chutney powder made of Beef Jerky, traditionally made with dried beef in Kerala. The recipe is from My Treasure My Pleasure. Thanks Annita for the delicious tip; I would have never thought of using Beef jerky in place of dried beef!

35 Comments

Isn’t it great when you set out to make one dish and it gets messed up, but you realize that your mess can be called something else? That is what happened to me last night. I intended to make a sorbet, but it never quite became one, the texture was too coarse, and looked very much like granita. I have never made a granita before, so I wasn’t really sure if I can call my creation by the name. An online search brought up the following in WikiPedia.

Granita (in Italian also granita siciliana) is a semi-frozen dessert of sugar, water, and flavorings from Sicily, Italy. Related to sorbet and italian ice, in most of Sicily it has a coarser, more crystalline texture.

Technically this is not a granita I guess. By definition, granita is frozen solid overnight, then scraped or ground to form ice crystals. I didn’t freeze the liquid solid, I scraped the semi-solid frozen ingredients every hour or so at least four times, and then froze the contents overnight to form the final product. To make a sorbet, I should have been processing the mixture in the food processor. My food processor was in use at the time, and being too lazy to wait and clean it. I ended up using a combination of hand blender and a fork to process the ingredients. Guess that caused the granita-esque texture. May be it is time to invest in an ice cream maker if I want to make smooth sorbets!

Well, call it a granita or a sorbet, this was well worth the effort. There is nothing more refreshing than an ice-cold sorbet granita on a hot-ish summer day. My hint of ginger unfortunately didn’t come through, due to the strong orange flavor. You can either omit the ginger, or try increasing the quantity. All of us loved the taste, though my dad complained that he could taste plain ice, I guess he was expecting an ice-cream like texture and taste, the only frozen dessert he is familiar with. Guess I need to educate my parents on the subtleties of fine food, as soon as I get a handle on simple things like difference between granitas and sorbets myself.

 Ingredients

  • 2 cups fresh blueberries
  • zest from one orange
  • 1 tbsp grated ginger
  • 2 cups water
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 cups orange juice
  • 1/4 cup lime juice
  • 3 tbsp Triple sec or any orange flavored liqueur (optional)

Method

In a sauce pan, add blueberries, water, sugar, ginger and orange zest and bring to a boil. Cook on medium heat for about 10 minutes.

Pass this mixture through a strainer, while pressing down on the blueberries with a wooden spoon to get as much liquid out as possible.

Once the strained liquid is cool, add the remaining ingredients and mix well to combine.

Pour the liquid into a shallow dish and freeze till it is semi solid. Take it out of the freezer and scrape it with a fork. Repeat the process every hour or so till the contents are crystallized. Not sure how long it can be kept in the freezer, it kept the consistency and the texture even after a day.

This is my last minute entry for A Fruit A Month - Orange hosted by the much talented Sharmi of Neivedyam. AFAM is the brainchild of Maheswari of Beyond the Usual.

I am also taking this frozen delight to gorgeous hostess Meeta’s for her Monthly Mingle; this month’s theme is Scream For Ice Cream. It is going to be one cold party… brrrrrrrr….

Technorati tags:
27 Comments

Growing up, all the breakfast dishes at my house fell into one category - Spicy! Dosa + chutney, idli + sambar, puttu + kadala, appam + egg curry, kappa + fish curry, poori + chicken curry, the list goes on…  Don’t think I grew up in a weird family, these are the typical breakfast dishes of a Malayali.

But after moving to US, breakfast- if it ever happens- is normally cereal or yogurt. My body doesn’t even need breakfast anymore, the two cups of coffee I have in the morning can normally sustain me till lunch. Siv and I are used to eating when we are hungry. Sometimes dinner is at 7:00 PM, sometimes it is at 10:00. But now, my parents are here, and everything is on a timetable. 8:00 am breakfast, 1 PM lunch and 8:00 PM dinner, hungry or not. It is good to eat a nice heavy breakfast, I tend to eat a light lunch, and have much more energy throughout the day. The only issue is that my poor body will have to relearn the breakfast-free diet after three months, since I know I am not going to stick to the habit after they leave. But I am enjoying while I can.

Normally I don’t get time to photograph the breakfast dishes Amma makes before I leave to work. But I’ve been meaning to blog the Kadala curry recipe for a while now, since it is one of my favorite dishes. Puttu and Kadala curry is a common breakfast item in Kerala. Puttu is a dish made of rice flour and fresh coconut, steamed in special puttu makers, tubes made of bamboo. I wanted to link to a puttu recipe and did a search and looks like all the popular mallu blogs have a recipe for Puttu. Check some out here.    

Kadala is Malayalam for Black Chickpea, also known as Bengal gram or Kala Chana in Hindi. Most of the puttu recipes are accompanied by a kadala curry recipe as well, but everyone has their own version of this popular dish. Here is my mom’s version.  

Ingredients

  • 2 cups Kadala soaked overnight
  • 1 cup sliced onions
  • 1/8 tsp turmeric powder
  • 1 cup fresh/frozen grated coconut
  • 1 tsp red chilli powder
  • 1/2 tsp coriander powder
  • 2 cardamom pods
  • 3 cloves
  • 1 star anise
  • 5 whole black pepper
  • salt to taste
  • 1/4 tsp oil
  • To Garnish
    • 1/2 tbsp oil
    • 1/4 tsp mustard seeds
    • 1/4 tsp sliced shallots
    • a few curry leaves
    • 1 dry red chilly

Method

Mix the soaked kadala with sliced onions and turmeric powder. Add water to cover the kadala and cook till soft (or pressure cook for about 15 minutes).

In a shallow pan, heat oil and add cardamom, cloves, star anise & black pepper seeds and fry for a minute or two.

Add coconut and fry till brown.

Add red chilli powder & coriander powder and fry on low heat till brown.

Dry grind the fried ingredients in a spice grinder. The oil from the coconut will help form a smooth paste of all the ground ingredients.

Add this paste along with salt to the cooked kadala. If there isn’t enough water in the kadala, add a cup or two and mix well. Bring this to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for a few minutes till the gravy is thick.

To garnish, heat oil in a pan and add the mustard seeds. When the seeds start to splutter add shallots, curry leaves and red chilly and saute till brown. Pour this over the cooked kadala.

Serve hot with puttu or appam or steamed rice.

This is my entry for WBB #12, the popular Weekend Breakfast Blogging event started by my favorite celebrity blogger Nandita of Saffron Trail. The host this month’s WBB is another celebrity, Trupti from The Spice Who Loved Me. She picked the theme Spice It Up! for this month, and with all those spices in this curry, how can I not send this one?

Technorati tags: , , ,
40 Comments

RumRazz - Raspberry Cocktail

Monday, June 18th, 2007

Filed Under Berries, Cocktails, Recipes | 25 Comments

I can’t resist picking up some of fresh berries on my market runs in summer. When I see the colorful berries I get so many recipe ideas- desserts, sauces, salads etc. I pick up a box or two while daydreaming how beautiful the dishes are going to turn out, but I get too lazy and end up just eating those as such, or adding those to the morning cereal, which is not a bad thing, just that I don’t get any pictures out of those. 

Another way to make sure that the fresh fruits don’t go waste is by mashing them and mixing in alcohol to make beautiful summer cocktails, you can never go wrong there! it is not like you need an excuse to have a cocktail, but adding summer fruits will make you feel even better about drinking.

This Friday night I made a raspberry cocktail for me and my mom on our regular Friday night happy hour session. It looked and tasted like a perfect girly drink, just the way I hoped it would! My mom prefers the margaritas that Siv makes though, she loves sour and salty more than sweet and tangy which is what this drink was. I like sweet drinks, and this tasted refreshing with a wonderful intense fruitiness, and the deep red color from fresh raspberries, a true visual treat!

Ingredients

(For four drinks)

  • 1 cup fresh raspberries
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 1 tbsp lime juice
  • 2 oz orange juice
  • 2 oz baccardi razz
  • 4 oz light rum
  • ice

Method

Muddle the raspberries and sugar together in a cocktail shaker.

Add the rest of the ingredients along with ice and shake well.

Strain into chilled martini glasses.

Garnish with fresh raspberries and lime zest.

Technorati tags: ,
25 Comments

Catfish Curry - Kerala Style

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Filed Under India - Kerala, Mains, Recipes, Seafood | 40 Comments

It’s been a few days since my last post. My parents finally arrived last weekend, so as you can imagine I’ve been busy with the onboarding process. Its been almost five years since their last visit, also we weren’t living in the city last time they were around, so it took a bit of orientation time. Even though we have less space now, it is less boring for them now that they have places to go to when Siv and I are at work. Today they walked down to Pike Place Market and bought some catfish all on their own. It was a big accomplishment for them. :) It is nice for us too, to come home to hot yummy food every night.

Here is my mom’s version of Catfish curry. This is not the typical red Kerala fish curry with Kudampuli. This version is less spicy and has a thicker gravy, but very yummy nonetheless.

Have you ever had to ask your mom to describe a recipe? If you have, you’ll know how hard it is to get it out of moms in a way that can be translated to a format you can publish!

Amma, can you describe the recipe while I type it up?

I took a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and did this and that… Oh btw I forgot, I had to do this one step before adding this to that, and I just used a pinch of that other thing in the middle… 

Hmmm… that is very helpful, thanks amma! Now can you describe that a little slower and if you can start from the beginning and describe the step by step process in the exact order that you did it, it would be a little more helpful!!

Okay, so you take a little bit of this and …

So all the measurements here are guesstimates, adjust to suit your tastebuds.

Ingredients

  • 2 lb catfish filets cut into medium pieces
  • To Grind
    • 3 tsp red chilli powder
    • 1 tsp coriander powder
    • 1/4 tsp turmeric powder
    • 1/2 tsp ginger paste
    • 1/2 tsp garlic paste
    • 2 tbsp sliced shallots
    • 1 tbsp tamarind paste
    • 2 tbsp grated coconut
  • 1/2 tsp thinly sliced ginger
  • 3 cloves garlic sliced
  • 2 tbsp sliced onions
  • a few curry leaves
  • For the seasoning
    • 1/4 tsp fenugreek seeds
    • 1/4 tsp mustard seeds
    • a few curry leaves
    • 1/4 tsp sliced shallots
  • 1 tbsp oil
  • salt to taste

Method

Grind the ingredients to a smooth paste.

In a deep pan, combine the ground mixture with the sliced ginger, garlic, onions and curry leaves. Pour enough water to cover the mixture, add salt to taste and bring to a boil.

Add the fish pieces and bring to a boil again. Reduce the heat to medium and cook for a few minutes till the fish pieces are soft.

In a separate pan, heat the oil and add the mustard and fenugreek seeds. When the mustard seeds starts to splutter, add the curry leaves and shallots and fry well. Pour this over the prepared fish curry.

Serve hot with rice. We had it with rose matta rice, parboiled red rice from Kerala.  After my parents’ arrival, we have switched to this rice at home, and I have to say I am loving it. It is healthier than white rice, and really Kerala fish curry tastes so much better with this than regular rice.

 

Technorati tags: ,
40 Comments

Kerala Prawn Fry

Thursday, June 7th, 2007

Filed Under India - Kerala, Recipes, Seafood, Shrimp or Prawn | 45 Comments

Has this ever happened to you? You find this interesting recipe in a cookbook. You check the fridge and pantry and see that most of the ingredients are there. You put your chef’s hat on and get cooking, adding your own special touches to the recipe. The dish turns out to be a masterpiece, tastes wonderful, looks great! You are so hungry you could faint, but you feel it is your duty to share this gem with the world! So you transfer the food into a serving dish, click some pictures in a hurry. Then you go about devouring the dish like there is no tomorrow.  Once the food is polished off,  you get to the PC, download the pics from the camera, and oh the horror! The pictures  are way off! None of these tell the story that you wanted to tell. It used to happen to me a lot when I first started blogging.

 

 

Work has been very hectic these days, so I haven’t been cooking much lately. Tonight I felt this sudden urge to blog, so I was browsing through my picture collection for anything that might have gotten overlooked, and came across the above picture. I still remember the taste of this one, one of my favorite preparations with this ingredient. But looking at the picture, the ingredient is unrecognizable. I decided to post it anyway, since it really is blogworthy. Before I publish the recipe,  I want to see if anyone can guess what the main ingredient in this is…

Recipe coming up soon…. Come on… Guess away…  The first one who guesses the ingredient right will be very lightly rewarded. :)

Update 06/07 - Kerala Prawn Fry

Game over… Thanks everyone for playing along… 

And the winner is…. Madhuli.  

Raji, Anonymous and Archana got it right too :)

Yes, it is Prawn Fry. The white lump you see in the middle is indeed a prawn. Can you see a small black object to the bottom right of the white lump? :) That is Kudampuli aka Malabar Tamarind or Fish Tamarind or Gamboje as it is known in English. It is very similar to, but not the same as Kokum, but some of the Kerala cookbooks in English translates kudampuli to kokum. See what it looks like here.

Kudampuli is used in most traditional fish curries in Kerala in place of tamarind. It tastes different from tamarind, it has a very peculiar sour taste that adds an extra oomph to seafood. I don’t use kudampuli much, since Siv is the seafood guy, and his recipes are all using Tamarind. In fact, this is one of the few recipes where I use Kudampuli, and it makes a big difference to the taste. One of my favorite prawn recipes.  

This recipe is adapted from Flavours of the Spice Coast by Mrs.K.M. Mathew

Ingredients

  • 1 lb prawns, shelled and deveined
  • To Grind
    • 1 tbsp chilli powder
    • 1 tsp coriander powder
    • 1/4 tsp pepper powder
    • 1/8 tsp turmeric powder
    • 1 tbsp ginger slices
    • 1 tbsp garlic slices
    • 1/4 cup button onions
  • 3 pieces of kudampuli
  • a few curry leaves
  • salt to taste
  • 1 tsp ginger, thinly sliced
  • For the seasoning
    • 1 dsp oil
    • 1 tsp mustard seeds
    • 2 cups thinly sliced onions
    • a few curry leaves

Method

Wash and soak the kudampuli in one cup of water

Coarsely grind all the ingredients in the To Grind section.

In a pan, mix the prawns, ground ingredients, kudampuli, ginger slices, curry leaves and salt with 1 cup of water. Cook covered until the prawns are soft. Uncover and cook on high till the water evaporates.

In another pan, heat oil and splutter the mustard seeds

Add the sliced onions and fry till translucent.

Add the curry leaves and cooked prawns and fry well.

Serve hot with rice.

Now, the reward I promised to the winner. Madhuli, Your blog gets to be the very first Blog of the Month, a new section I added to the sidebar. Well, I told you it is going to be a light reward. I believe a blogger’s biggest satisfaction comes from looking at the visitor stats and this might send some more visitors your way. :)

45 Comments

Tomorrow is our Ninth wedding anniversary. We’ve known each other for eleven years now!

Do you know the best part about getting married really young? You grow up with each other, you mature into adulthood with each other. You know every small thing about each other… You can sense what each other is thinking without having to utter a single word!

Now, do You know the worst part about getting married really young ? You know every small thing about each other… You can sense what each other is thinking without having to utter a single word! :)

We have been through it all, through sickness and health, through richness and poor, we loved and cherished each other. Well, most of the times.

There has been fights, there has been tears! There has been moments of extreme intense emotions that I never knew even existed!

But the summation of the past nine years is just pure HAPPINESS!

Baby, I am so lucky I found you! You made me what I am! Happy Anniversary my sweetheart! 

Some snapshots from our life, one for each year from 1998 to 2007. Click on the thumbnails to view the pics.

60 Comments

Mistral

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

Filed Under Belltown, European, French | 10 Comments

After I wrote about Mistral in my Fave Five Seattle Restaurants post, I’ve been craving Mistral food. So for an early wedding anniversary celebration, instead of going to Herbfarm as planned, we headed over to Mistral to check if the food is as good as we remembered. We had it right, the food was as good or even better! Haute cuisine at its best.

During dinner, we did a cost-to-value analysis of Mistral versus some of our other favorite restaurants in town. The seven course chef’s tasting menu at Mistral costs $75 per person. So that gives us just seven varieties of dishes (since both of us get the same dishes) for $150. If we go to a regular small plates restaurant like Lark or Crush or Harvest Vine, we can get about ten or so small plates for $150, which gives us more variety for the same price.

But this is really not a fair comparison. The dining experience is quite different at Mistral. You get the complete formal fine dining experience here, where all the fancy silverware is spread out, the courses arrive one by one in the right interval in perfect sizes. The whole dinner lasts for at least three hours. The perfect setting for a romantic dinner, if you are the type who like to hold hands through the dinner and whisper sweet nothings while longingly gazing into each other’s eyes. But Siv and I, we are not that kind of romantics, we like the noise, we like to watch other diners and make up stories about complete strangers from what food they order and their body language. We have more fun at a crowded place, compared to Mistral which had only four tables of customers when we were there. The settings force the romance to come out and shine though! :)

But coming back to the food, it truly was as amazing as ever! Each dish has this wonderful array of flavor combinations which sounds strange but go along wonderfully. As I said before, we went for the seven course chef’s tasting menu, where we have no idea what we are going to get. It is all upto the chef.  The waiter explains what the fresh seafood and meat they have for the day and ask if there is anything we don’t eat (not really). After that we just sit back and relax and the plates keep coming. Siv went for the wine pairing with his courses. Wine pairing costs $100 etc, but since the cheapest bottle of wine here is $90, it is a pretty good deal. Also, the dishes were perfectly paired, especially the foie gras! I stuck with Pinot by the glass, there is no way I could enjoy the food if I had seven glasses of wine :).

Our amuse bouche was a piece of Hamachi (yellowtail) sushi with celery foam and spiced micro greens salad. Just perfect for an amuse bouche. I don’t know how this foam is made, we thought probably using a latte foam attachment. Who knew air could taste so good!

Then came our first course. A pan seared scallop in an English pea soup with basil puree and topped with carrots and tangerine foam. Yep, another dish with foam. This is an example of the different flavors coming together to make that wonderfully unique taste. The soup with the slightly spicy basil and the sweet carrot foam went just so perfect with the scallop.  The wine pairing was a sauvignon blanc.

Second course was a seared black cod with cauliflower puree, with sauteed cauliflower, pinenuts and mushrooms. The cod was just so fresh with a butter like texture. I loved this with cauliflower puree, though I didn’t care much for the sauteed cauliflower pieces. Siv loved the sauteed veggies, but thought the puree was a tad too sweet. But all-in-all this was a great dish too. Went nicely with the chardonnay.

Next came the foie-gras course. Hudson Valley Foie gras seared and served on a champagne rhubarb vanilla puree, served with apple crisp. As usual, the perfect accompaniment to foie gras. 

Then came the main course. Oregon lamb chop served on top of fingerling potato puree with a side of sauteed chard and mushrooms , caramelized onions , pinot noir reduction and a tamarind sauce. The young lamb chop was so tender and succulent, and all the flavors together worked magic in our mouths.

Fifth course was a cheese plate. Five artisan cheeses with increasing strength were served. I never remember the cheese names, but thoroughly enjoyed it all. The last one was the strongest, but I normally love strong cheeses. Siv just picked on each one, and left most of it on his plate, he is not a cheese lover.

Then came the sorbet course- to cleanse the palettes. I always thought the sorbet came between the seafood and the meat courses. What is the need to cleanse before the dessert? But obviously the chef knows better, and this trio of pineapple, pear and passion fruit sorbets was as good as a dessert, and looked beautiful!

Finally the desserts. We were both pretty drunk by then and the pictures turned out kinda out of focus. These pictures do not do any justice to how these tasted! We both got a plate each of the first plate. Mixed berries served on top of almond-flour cake and vanilla ice cream. Then we had the second one in the middle to share, raspberries and vanilla. Perfect desserts for the season, and wonderfully light. We had some coffee with this course to offset all the sweetness.

The food is super creative, service is top-notch. Knowledgeable, unobtrusive staff; peaceful, romantic setting. Now I remember why Mistral is my favorite fine dining establishment in Seattle. 

Mistral in Seattle

Technorati tags: ,

10 Comments

Do you think the name is a little too long? I actually wanted to call this post Cardamom infused Jackfruit Yogurt Panna Cotta with Blueberry Coulis and Jackfruit Puree… but it looked just a tad too long. I like naming my posts with the names of the major ingredients, since that improves the search engine visibility. Yes, it is fun to come up with clever names for a dish, I could’ve called this dish Jackotta, but until I get my own cooking show and make Jackotta a household name, nobody is going to type in Jackotta in a search box, are they? Coming to think of it, I don’t think anyone is going to search for Jackfruit Panna Cotta either, hmm….

When I heard that Jackfruit is the JFI ingredient for this month, like any true mallu I was all excited! But then I realized I just like to eat the fruit as such, in fact that is what happened to the first few cans of jackfruit I bought! Those never saw the light of the day, I mean heat of the stove… None of my cookbooks had any exciting jackfruit recipes. Poor confused me waited and waited till the last minute, and realized last night with a panic that the deadline is almost here. So I raided the fridge, and all I could find were cream, yogurt and blueberries. I remembered the expression When in doubta, Make Panna cotta (okay, I just made it up) and came up with this recipe.  The basic panna cotta recipe is adapted from a Pandan Infused Mango Yogurt Panna Cotta recipe from the cookbook New Asian Cuisine - Fabulous Recipes from Celebrity Chefs.

I had no idea how this was going to taste, my hope was that it would at least look good. But surprisingly the experiment turned out to be a success! The refreshingly light and creamy taste of the yogurt was dressed up with the distinct jackfruit flavor and the mild spices from the cardamom pods. The jackfruit flavor wasn’t too overpowering, but nevertheless quite distinct.  The main reason to make the blueberry Coulis was to dress up the Panna cotta, yellow and purple go so well together. But surprisingly the acidic sweetness of the blueberries went nicely with the just so slightly sweet panna cotta. I was very happy with the way this whole thing turned out, a definite keeper, an unexpected hit!

Jackfruit Puree

Ingredients

    • 1 20 oz can ripe jackfruit in syrup
    • 2 tbsp sugar
    • 1/2 cup water

Method

Drain the jackfruit from syrup and cut into small pieces.

In a small pan, cook the jackfruit pieces along with sugar and water till the jackfruit pieces are soft and the water is almost gone.

Transfer the mixture to a blender and process to make a smooth paste.

Blueberry Coulis

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup blueberries
  • 2 tbsp lime juice
  • 1 tbsp sugar
  • 1/4 cup water

Method

Blend all the ingredients in a blender till smooth. (Pass through a fine sieve to remove the pulp and seeds if you like). Chill before serving.

Panna Cotta

Ingredients

  • 4 oz jackfruit puree (see recipe above)
  • 8 oz heavy cream
  • 6 oz non fat yogurt
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 10 cardamom pods
  • 2 drops vanilla essence
  • 1 tbsp unflavored gelatin

Method

Sprinkle gelatin over 3 tbsp water and let it stand for a few minutes without stirring. This will soften the gelatin.

In a saucepan, add cream and cardamom and bring to a boil on medium heat. Add the vanilla essence and simmer for about 10-15 minutes on low heat.

Remove from heat and strain to remove the cardamom pods. Add the softened gelatin to the cream and mix well till the gelatin is completely dissolved.

In the meantime, combine the yogurt, jackfruit puree and sugar in a cup and whisk well to form a smooth mixture.

Pass the jackfruit-yogurt mixture through a fine sieve into the cream (to remove any pieces of jackfruit which escaped the blender blade). Whisk well to combine.

Pour into ramekins or dessert molds (this should make about six servings). Chill in the refrigerator for at least three hours or till set.

Serve with blueberry Coulis and the rest of the jackfruit puree. Garnish with fresh blueberries and jackfruit pieces.

If you are not a jackfruit fan, you can use the same recipe with mango puree instead. Also check out my orange Panna cotta recipe for a more mainstream Panna cotta.

This is my entry for JFI - Jackfruit hosted by the amusing couple Jai and Bee of Jugalbandi. JFI stands for Jihva for Ingredients and is the brainchild of Indira of Mahanandi.  If you don’t know what a jackfruit looks like, check out this post to see the anatomy of a jackfruit.

Technorati tags: , , , ,
35 Comments

 LinkWithin Related Stories Widget for Blogs