just jahangiri’s

i thought of putting out a well researched post on one of my favourite indian sweets….the jangiri or jahangiri as we call it on our side of the world….but with things going haywire at this time…i have to defer it to another time……

i made this for K a few weeks ago…. the recipe will be posted soon…. amma’s friend / professor of 48 years parted with her recipe to indulge both me and K!!

and no i havent dropped off the Earth…. have been swamped with chocolate making orders for diwali since this is the peak season….and amma was down with a bad viral…so have been playing nursemaid too…. and that K has buried his nose in 16 hours of work each day just adds to my woes!! the only thing that give me comfort is the picture of the jahangiri’s i have left…..the sweets of course vanished from the plate….

Jhat phat fatafat

A cousin of my mother’s and her daughter paid us a visit a few days ago….they were meeting after 37 years …so this is the first time I met this cousin of mine….she’s a doctor of the medical kind and we got along like a house on fire!!……..I am always thinking of ways in which to bring variety to our table especially when we have hard core carnivorous guests at home….. I like to serve them food which invariably leads them to remark quite surprisingly that they aren’t missing non vegetarian preparations (in my family and its huge extension….it is still a horror story that I have given up a certain food group…so I quite enjoy this secret game of mine)….. So for lunch I turned to Tarla dalal’s Quick Cooking…..it was bought on a fancy for the title…and though it has a pretty good mix of indian and western dishes from soups and salads to main course and desserts….I have made just one preparation from this book thus far….. I chose Makhni gravy, doubled all the ingredients and froze half of it……I didn’t realize that I would actually use it so soon after I had made it to whip up dinner in a jiffy…… this evening, K returned from work famished as he’d skipped lunch (again!!) so I made him some trikoni parathas (his request) and he had it with the sabzi from lunch….not realizing that it constituted the sum total of dinner for us….

So out came the makhni gravy and some paneer that was also sitting pretty in the freezer…while the gravy went into a pan with ½ cup of water and was simmering, I nuked the paneer in the microwave for a minute on high, cut out a portion of it, made bite sized chunks to go into the gravy, returned the rest to its container and the freezer…..i was ready for dinner before amma could ask “so what shall we have with the parathas??” paneer makhni, salad and trikoni parathe for dinner….

Conclusion…..having the gravy on hand was such a convenience, plus the fact that it tasted great means that I am gonna make this (and freeze it) regularly now….

Culinary Escapades will be on TV9 tonight @ 10.30 pm

A big thank you for all the wishes and comments that my friends from the blogging world have sent my way following my last post of Culinary Escapades, my chocolate making class being covered by the local TV channel…… the telecast is scheduled for tonight. It will be on TV9, the local telugu news channel available in India at 10.30 pm and tomorrow at 2.30 pm, India time.

My little chocolate making class on TV!!

Culinary Escapades is my little chocolate making class….. i had blogged about it a few months ago when I decided to relaunch it in July this year….every week i teach people to make hand made, hand moulded chocolates of different kinds, shapes, flavours and fillings…..its an extension of my corporate training repertoire and brings my love for all things food, a little closer to my life…..its been great so far, I get calls for enquiry and people register and learn how to make the chocolates, the joy and happiness when they unmould and pack the chocolate they make is so great, more satisfying than any end of training feedback!!

A few days ago, a reporter from the local Telugu channel TV9 called me and asked for the details and asked if they could cover it…I dismissed it as a prank call….imagine my surprise when they called again on Saturday morning….15 minutes before my class was scheduled to begin, to ask for directions to my place!! To cut a long story short, the team arrived to film us at work as part of a small capsule for their entertainment and local events roundup, I had informed the participants of this, I need not have been skeptical of their response, because they were thrilled and put up quite a show…..

Instead of doing the 2 minute capsule as planned, they decided to film the entire class and later did an interview with me. They also asked me to demonstrate two varieties of chocolates for the viewers…… I had to control my grin cos for me it was actually reliving my childhood playing “kitchen kitchen” where I would speak in hindi acting like I was demonstrating a cookery program a la sanjeev kapoor…..they have told me that they’d call and inform us before the telecast…..

More on this is here……