Thursday, December 18, 2008

RASGULLA RECIPE - Desserts Recipes





ROSSOGULLA (RASGULLA):




Ingredients:
1 litre milk
1/2 tsp. citric acid
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 cups water
2-3 drops rose essence
Method:
Heat the milk and bring to boil.
Cool the milk for a couple of hours. Remove the cream layer.
Reheat the milk and bring to a boil.
Add the citric acid dissolved in some water.
Stir slowly till the milk is fully curdled.
Keep as it is for 5 minutes.
Meanwhile heat the sugar and water in a wide sauce pan. Bring to a boil.
Strain the milk through a muslin cloth. Wash the chenna in the cloth under cold running water.
Press out the excess water and remove in a wide plate.
Gently knead into a soft dough by passing between fingers.
Make twelve equal sized balls of the dough.
Let them into the boiling water. Cover with a perforated lid. Boil for 13 to 15 minutes.
Take off from heat and cool them to room temperature.
Add essence and chill for at least 4 to 5 hours.
Serves: 6 helpings
Time required: 1/2 hour.
Rasgulla Photo is given above to guide you.

The Asian Home Gourmet

I like this brand: http://www.asianhomegourmet.com/ and not just because of the dancing ginger family on the home page. I like their spice pastes, and I usually don't recommend spice blends and pastes - preferring of course to mix them up myself from the basic ingredients. But the flavor is authentic and I can add whatever proteins and vegetables I want. There are spice blends representing several Asian countries: China, Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Japan, and Thailand.
I've only ever found this brand in Asian grocery stores. In Minneapolis, United Noodles. In Chicago, Super H Mart. My favorites have been the Thai Tom Yum Soup (high sodium, very spicy but tasty with shrimp and spinach), Thai Green Curry, Indonesian Vegetable Curry, and Korean Bulgogi Marinade. And the Indonesian Satay. And the Sambal Stir Fry Noodles. And - well there are so many options and I'd be lucky to find them all. I may have to order some online.

The Curse of the Christmas Cake

T’was the week before Christmas and all through the house
The cook was a-stressing like a scared and trapped mouse

Right, so poetry might not be my forte but where my rhyming abilities fail me, I am supposed to be able to compensate by successfully fashioning near perfect culinary creations.

But I am increasingly starting to think I may have wronged a gypsy at some point over the last couple of years because it appears that my attempts to make Christmas cake are cursed.

For those that don’t know, a traditional Christmas cake is a dense, rich and heavy construction made from much dried fruit, butter, sugar, eggs and a little flour to bind it all together. It is flavoured, rather generously, with brandy or other tasty and strong spirit. It is almost the densest substance known to man and there is a theory that each one is a miniature black hole.

It is exactly the sort of dessert that you don’t want after eating an entire roast dinner, Christmas pudding, mince pies, stilton and far too much chocolate but if there is one thing us Brits do well it is traditions and this is one that will not be ignored. Even it often results in instant sleep and indigestion.

If you would be so kind as to accompany me on a journey back in time then I’d like to whisk you away, way back to Christmas 2006. This was the first time I attempted to make this most rich of cakes. And it was a total success. I followed Nigel Slater’s recipe from the superb book The Kitchen Diaries and everything went well. The resultant cake was moist, dark, tasty and so very good with cheese (honestly – fruit cake and cheese is a winning combo).

Fast forward to Christmas 2007. I was still residing in the family seat at this point (I use the expression metaphorically – we don’t own vast swathes of land or a country estate anywhere), living with my parents. ‘Seen as the cake was so good lat year, why don’t you make it again?’ Said my mother.

I couldn’t wait. I got to work chopping and mixing and stirring and making merry and festive in the kitchen. Once the thick dark mixture had been poured into a large cake tin I was advised to wrap it in dark paper to slow down the cooking process. Which I did. But I didn’t wrap it tightly enough and as I tried to lift it into the oven it all went a bit wrong.

‘Alex,’ said my dad in a calm voice, ‘why is the Christmas cake on the floor?’ The paper had remained in my oven-gloved hands, in a near perfect circle. The cake, however, had fallen to the floor and was rapidly leaking from its tin, spreading tide-like over the tiled floor.

Despite the mess, the mixture was (just about) salvageable and we managed to get it into the oven, relieved that nothing more had gone wrong.

My parents have an Aga at home, a wonderful and warming oven that is an absolute delight to cook on with a hot oven at the top and a cooler one at the bottom which makes slow cooking an effortless pleasure. We decided to cook the cake slowly, hoping that a good six hours would leave it moist and supremely tasty.

We were surprised, therefore, to find it the following day with a black layer on the top looking as if it had been put through a cremation oven. Eventually we found the culprit. ‘I didn’t think it was cooking,’ said my dad sheepishly. ‘I thought it would be ok for a few minutes in the hot oven.’ Not so.

After shaving the thick black layer off the cake like an overly enthusiastic archaeologist, we were left with a slightly smaller but satisfyingly tasty treat that served us well through the festive period.

And then we come to this year. I was optimistic: We had some good organic fruit, we had our own freshly laid eggs. We had a winning recipe and we had the right equipment – a brilliant Kenwood Chef machine from the 1970s that my grandmother donated to us when we moved in.

Things started well. Ingredients were measured out and weighed. The cake tin was prepared and the mixer was ready. And then it all went quite wrong and I had to make a rapid trip to the emergency surgery to get my finger checked out due to a slip with the Big Knife (it’s all OK, I shall be nail-less for some months but it’s fine).

A day later, and dosed up on super-strength painkillers, it was time to try again. I (slowly) chopped the rest of the dried fruit and gradually the mixture came together. Finally it was time to put it all into the oven to cook nice and slowly. Thinking we had plenty of time we went next door for a drink. And then had another. And another. And another.

By the time we wobbled back home, the cake (despite having been in no longer than it should, at a temperature lower than recommended) had taken on a rather black and dry appearance. I think it might, might, be shave-able but I am not holding my breath because it looks a lot worse than last year’s. Oh dear. I dread to think what misadventures Christmas Cake 2009 will bring. Perhaps some things are best left to the professionals…

Roast Chicken and Other Stories

I know I haven’t had much chance to talk about Paris – things have been a bit ker-razy since we got back.

We had some great food. Really amazing food. We had some deeply average food too but the good stuff outweighed the OK stuff by a ratio of about 4:1 so I like to concentrate on the positives.

There were a couple of occasions where we forgot to eat lunch and by the time hunger pangs and low blood sugar started to cause the onset of grumpiness, every single eatery was closed apart from Greek and Middle Eastern places that had enormous rotating elephant’s feet in the window. Doner kebab is fine, providing you have imbibed a significant amount of alcohol but at three in the afternoon it is less appealing.

I will (shamefully) admit that we resorted to falafel.

The best meal we had was probably at a tiny restaurant in Les Halles. We stumbled upon it just as the hunger was starting to cause a little tetchiness and it was a welcome site indeed. The menu was written up on a chalkboard and consisted of two choices – one of which had sold out. It was perfection.



We both had brochette d’onglet, a supremely tasty cut of meat that, although not famed for tenderness, is one of the most delicious cuts of beef I think there is. It is hard to get here but if you ask your butcher for skirt then you wouldn’t be far off. Cook it fast and hot and no more than medium rare or else you will end up with something to re-sole your shoes. What’s more, it’s cheap so perfect for these lean times.

We washed it down with a bottle of fresh Beaujolais, barely two weeks old and spent the afternoon ambling the streets in a warm and happy fuzz.

For the first half of our trip we were lucky to have the use of an apartment complete with cooking facilities which we chose to make full use of.

Like many other fellow foodies, I have something of a bee in my bonnet about chicken. We simply don’t buy intensively raised birds. They taste bad. Really bad. They are unnatural, full of a disgusting cocktails of drugs, hormones, growth promoters and antibiotics and generally lead a pretty shoddy life before they get the chop.

But we are so used to seeing these Frankenstein’s monster type birds in the supermarkets, with their wet flesh and odd proportions (thanks to selective breeding we now end up with chickens with very large breasts. When was this a good thing? Who requested this? The rest of the bird tastes much better) that when we see a proper chicken, it can seem a little strange.

But French chicken is awesome. No doubt they have some dubious farming practices as well but on the whole, quality of food is so important that even if they cared little for animal welfare, they wouldn’t stoop so low as to eat something that tasted bad. And intensively reared chicken tastes bad.

We decided to invest in a proper chicken to take home and roast. Our budget didn’t quite stretch to the famed Poulet de Bresse (although this is definitely on my list of things to eat before I die) but we bought a wonderful looking chicken from a butcher on Rue Mouffetard and took it back to the apartment.

Since cooking a chicken Thomas Keller’s way (keep it very, very simple) we’ve vowed never to try any other method. No lemons up bums, no garlic in the hold, no herbs, no butter, no oil – just salt and pepper and a hot oven. If you have great chicken you need do nothing with it, just let nature take hold and allow the ingredients to sing.



So that’s exactly what we did. Served with nothing more than bread and butter and a glass of chilled Sauvignon, it was as close to food heaven as I think it is possible to get without actually eating the gods’ own Ambrosia.

And don’t forget, you can now follow my culinary adventures on Twitter: www.twitter.com/justcookit

Prissy Cutlery's

I was looking forward that this coming Christmas I am going to have my Noche Buena table in my new found place. I was imagining the table setting, what menu I am going to prepare and who will dine with me at my new dinner table. But things were postponed a bit so hopefully come Valentines everything is ok. Even though my happy lunch and dinner were stolen, I know I can have them once more at the right time. Few more days it's Christmas. Hoping for my "Yuletide Wish" to come true.

hugs,
joanie xxx