Arusuvai Friendship Chain

This is a post that was gathering dust in the draft for over a month in anticipation of a good photo. After my last post, things just unraveled in my house with the onset of spring and flu..so while I am still catching my breath from that, decided to post this instead.

Latha N from "The YUM blog" started the "Arusuvai Friendship Chain" in India and Latha from "Masala Magic" continued the Arusuvai friendship chain in USA where bloggers send "mystery" ingredients to each other.

Arusuvai means six tastes (aru=six, suvai=taste) in Tamizh and is used to refer for Tasty preparation with six tastes - inippu/ thithippu (sweet), orappu/ karam (hot), kassappu (bitter) , pulippu (sour), uppu(salt), tuvarpu (tastes that one gets in raw leaves)".

It's been going around US now and I am a little late entrant into it. So it was exciting when my friend Shn of Mishmash fame wrote to me about being a part of the Arusuvai Friendship Chain. What's to refuse about getting gifts, I thought and I wasn't disappointed. When the postlady dropped off the package my little one and I jumped on it. The surprise ingredient came with other goodies such as the yummilicious pecans and delicious chocolates. One of the chocolates was coconut flavored and I was floored.:)Anything with coconut in it is always welcome!!

The pecans were made by Mishmash and you can try them from the recipe here. Those are nutty treats that you just can't stop eating once you start tasting. You have to wait till you get eventually sick of them to stop. Thanks a lot, Mishmash.

So onto the real purpose of the friendship chain: The surprise ingredient turned out to be Agar agar..china grass as it is commonly known. Now I know you can make delicious puddings and stuff with it but I have never used it. Its a good thing that I got some extra packets of it to get comfortable with it. So I started with the dessert in Mishmash 's blog first and liked it. Didn't take a picture of it though!

Then I made jello out of it but that got voted out by my little jello connoisseur for having an aftertaste. I played with modifying a pineapple pudding recipe that I normally make with gelatine and that came nice. So I will post that as soon as I make it again. The only other recipe I know is with (karikku)tender coconut which I don't have here to experiment with. So if any of you, my readers, have yummy recipes using china grass, please mail them to me and I will surely try them out.

On my part I sent the Arusuvai package to Mona at Zaiqa and Linda at Out of the Garden.

Kalakand..Something Sweet On Vishu! and RCI-Bengal

Happy Vishu!! Vishu dina Ashamsakal...to all my readers. Hope each and every one of you have a prosperous, happy and healthy year ahead.
Thanks for all the input on the template. I have reverted to the old template for now while I work on getting the new one customized to my liking.It feels odd to go back and forth between templates now, but since Blogger has made that part easy, it was just a matter of one click. Now let me see if I can get the new template to look so streamlined.


Last year Vishu fell on a Sunday and I had time to celebrate it with a nadan meal. Hence now when I look back at it, there is a memory made. This year, It falls on a working day so the same level of excitement is missing. Still, anybody visiting my blog should have a visual feast, right? I know I should have a true Keralite dish today of all days, but other preoccupations have been keeping me busy and away from the kitchen. So though I don't have any sadya laid out, there is Kalakand for you to sweeten your tooth on.

Don't you notice that "happy memories" are what how or what we make of an otherwise ordinary day? Birthdays, festivals, anniversaries..all are just days till we take the pains to do something special, maybe cook something,maybe call friends over or maybe even eat out. And isn't it so natural that these memories are indelibly tinged with food? What we ate, where, who made it, how we ate it, did we like it or not..the details may change but the memories for me definitely are all about the place and the food.

My associations with Kalakand are more with Diwali than Vishu, when all our neighbors brought over a plate of delicacies. My mother used to separate them on the basis of their demand in the house and invariably the kalakands, the gulab jamuns and the burfis were the first to go. Some other nondescript sweets would languish unwanted just as the popular ones were fought over. Of these my favorite was the kalakand. Kalakand has a semi-crunchy, incredibly soft and crumbly texture and is really white in color. It's one of the really time intensive Bengali sweets that I really wouldn't be making, if I wasn't out of the country.


This is a microwave version of Kalakand, very easily made with local ingredients. Some enterprising immigrant adapted the recipe for kalakand with ricotta cheese to make this pleasing sweet many years ago and according to the web legends, this recipe has been around for 20 years or more!!
My friend A introduced me to it just last year and now when I searched, there were so many recipes similar to this everywhere. So I am guessing I am late in learning how to make it, and though it is only somewhat near the taste of a real kalakand, it satisfies my sweet urge instantly. Did I mention it is made in a microwave..no long hours of stirring and cooking?:)) No milk getting stuck and burnt and you prying it off. This sweet tastes like a cross between the snow white kalakand and the brown "palgova" that I used to get in the Co-operative milk store in Palayam in Calicut. So if are familiar with either, you will like this.
So Happu Vishu and if you are on you way home to no feast, you could still try making this sweet.
You Will Need:
Powdered milk- 4 tablespoon
1 Tin(14 ounces) Ricotta cheese (whole milk)
Butter- 2 tablespoon
Condensed Milk-1 small can
Cardamom - 5 crushed into powder, discard skin
For Garnish:
Almond -2-3 tablespoon chopped up
Pistachios-2-3 tablespoon chopped up

Preparation:
1. Soften the butter and mix it in with the ricotta cheese, condensed milk and dry milk powder in a microwave safe glass square dish. Use a whisk to smoothen out the lumps and blend it well. Try not to be tempted to lick the condensed milk can clean.(yum!) You might cut your finger on the edge!!
2. Set the microwave for 40% heat or level 4. (Check your microwave manual on how to do it if you still have the manual.) On this setting on the microwave, cook for 10 minutes. Open, stir well, take a taste test..(yum!!) It will still taste like condensed milk but richer.
3.Put it back in for another 5 minutes at the same 40% setting. Open, stir and put it in for 5 minutes at 60% setting. Open, and by now you get the picture...stir again and taste. Now it will take on the flavor of peda or palgova..milk sweets. Add the powdered cardamom and stir it in.
4. Now heat it at 75% for two minutes. You have almost reached the end so go slow and keep checking to see if it is turning brown. It can get burnt very fast now so I prefer to keep it slow and check after every minute. Heat it on full heat for another 1 or 2 minutes till it looks golden brown and its ready. You can cook it a bit longer if you want a more crustier texture to it.As the microwave power and time varies, it may take you a couple of trial and errors before you will get the optimal time taken to get the mix to a stage where the milk solids are starting to come together.
Sprinkle the top with more crushed up almonds and pistachios. Place it the refrigerator to cool. When it has cooled and become firm to the touch, you could cut into easily into any shape and size you like. Stays fresh in the refrigerator for a week or so.
Since this is a Semi-Bengali Dish, I hope its ok if I sent it over RCI-Bengal, hosted by Sandeepa.

Spring Cleaning And Template Change

It's that time of the year again. Buds on trees, clear skies interspersed with showers, yellow flowers on hedges, a faint green on the lawns instead of the dead brown. I remember an old saying from 3rd grade in Calicut.."April Showers bring May flowers"...Only problem is that there are no May flowers here..those beautiful mass of color that herald summer there!!

Spring is here, evident in the chirping punctuating the morning before the light breaks through and awakens you earlier than the past few months. Evident in the light that greets you when you step out of the office in the evening, so invigorating that you feel the whole day is still ahead of you and its not just evening 6pm. Soccer practice, swimming classes, cycling, gardening, or just park visits..every body is suddenly outside, streaming out of the rabbit holes. We visited the park yesterday and it was filled with the chattering of kids and parents relieved to let the kids expend the energy outside. Even strangers smile at you!!



It's also that time of the year when I look at my blog, my deep blue ocean of thoughts and ponderings and then I look at other happening blogs which seems so colorful and start thinking of template change. Hmm.. why doesn't my blog have that feature or this feature(Not that I have the time to maintain it:))...Hmm.. There are so many wonderful looking templates out there thats its tempting..

And then there are you, my readers. Looking from the other side, I bet you don't like change. You want the familiar and trustworthy, You want everything to stay exactly the same, don't you? So the knee jerk reaction of disliking my blog's new look..

C'mon all of you who sent in comments, even the anonymous eyeball in a million, don't you paint your house once in a while? (I hope you do) Do you think it's ok for your friends to come into your living room and say, "eeewww..what a color, Please please for millions of eyeballs' sake go back to your old color?"

GIve it a chance, it will grow on you. Just think of it as a friend who got a new haircut. You may dislike the look initially, but the soul is the same.
The content is the same, the links the same but I wanted to upgrade for the ease of getting my posts to you faster, without having to struggle thru the old HTML format...

Its my readers that compel me to keep posting, so all your thots are really appreciated. So do tell me if you really want the old "blue all over" back or the "new blue-white box" template as shown above. And seriously that header had grown so moldy..even the best of spices need to get changed once a year at least!!They grow old and lose their vibrancy and flavor. SO I have either this look or the white box in a blue look finalised. Which one do u like more? I need a vote to decide. SO do write in..