Cooking Is Easy

Breakfast :                                                                            Bread                                                                                            Fish Molly Appetizers:                                                               Finger Fish/Fish Fingers                                                                   Beef Cutlets                                               Beef Ularthiyathu/Slow Roasted Beef. Lunch :                                                               Shrimp Biriyani: Dinner:                                                       Palappam/Lace Pancakes .                                   Chicken Mappas/Chicken in creamy coconut milk. Desserts                                             No Bake Chocolate Biscuit Pudding . Enjoy and a Happy Easter To All!!

Yesterday after Palm Sunday Mass, I made this awfully delicious and skinny cauliflower wraps for my family.  With the beginning of Holy Week and since Homey and myself are abstaining from meat and fish till Easter; I insisted our kids to join in with us during the Holy Week. I had some precooked rotis in the refrigerator, and putting together this wrap was super easy. This recipe is nothing fancy; it is easy and simple and very Indian, and a childhood favorite. A perfect lunch box munch for kids......and perfect for those observing Lent. I have wrapped it in whole wheat Indian flat-bread/roti . Made the filling with just one tbsp of oil and that makes it super skinny for all you dieters :) You can also have this dry curry as a side dish for roti, naan, poori etc. So lets get cooking. Precooked roti: Indian Flatbread/Roti:  Author: Nisa Homey. Ingredients:  Cauliflower: 1 small medium. Jeera/Cumin: 1/2 tsp. Onion: 1/2 of a medium sized, chopped. Ginger: 1 small

Spring rolls with vegetable filling is a Chinese snack, made with a thin round dough sheet with fillings inside, rolled, and deep fried. Crispy crunchy snack filled with amazing goodness of vegetables or even chicken. Amma used to make this during my childhood; this is her way of making sure that my two younger brothers and myself have some veggies in our diet. I am just carrying on the tradition for my kids; both my kids sometimes can be real fussy with vegetables. You can fill it with scrambled eggs and veggies or chicken and veggies or just plain vegetables. The veggies should be stir-fried and then spread out into a large plate to cool down. Coming to the dough; I have made this in my food processor and that makes it easy. I have also added one egg to the dough, this gives an extra crunch. There are many different ways to make the spring roll wrappers; this method is just one of  my favorite because it does not soak up much oil; the other method is making a thin pancak

Mango Ice Cubes---As a kid I used to love mango ice cubes so much that during summer vacations, I used to sneak behind my cousins to the kitchen and slip away with this melt-in-the mouth-cooler.... Kerala, is blessed with mangoes....you name the variety, our backyards have it.....I remember getting up early morning and racing to the backyard mango tree or "mavu" in Malayalam.....the sturdy cousin will climb up the tree and shake a branch while the impatient ones will try to do his part with a long stick or "thotti" and the greedy ones like me will pounce on the ones that fall down....it was raining mangoes for us! Amma used to make jams, jellies, mango fruit leather, squashes, puddings, ice-creams, fresh juice, and ice cubes.....she used to stock this in the freezer and when a thirsty kid drop by her kitchen, she would make a smoothie....instant one! ...the best part is no mango to peel....just 3 cubes into the blender with 1 cup of chilled milk and 3

With summer at its mightiest, fruits and coolers are what my kids demand now. I made this simple cooler with watermelon and grapes for Nidhi.....studying Maths....for her upcoming 10th exam. I used a melon scoop to scoop out the melons and added black grapes.......then sprinkled chaat masala.....chilled it for 20 min. You can use different fruits like orange, green grapes, musk melon, cubed apples, cubed mangoes......what ever is there in your fruit basket....make sure you chill it before serving. How I made this: Water melon: 1/4 of one big melon. Black grapes: 250 gms. Chaat masala: 1/2 tsp. Mint leaves: 2 chopped (optinal). Method: Scoop the melon with a melon scoop into a small bowl, mix in grapes and sprinkle chaat masala. Chill for 20 min. Serve immediately. Perfect summer cooler for kids. Enjoy. Summer Specials: Raw Mango Sherbet. Fruit Chaat.

A few blocks away from our apartment, there is a "famous" Chicken Outlet and my son loves the chicken strips and chicken fillet meal they serve. But the problem is, he cannot tolerate outside/restaurant food at all and if he has just one meal, he gets sick......so the only option I have is to create whatever he likes at home for him like the fried chicken . Well, that is the story behind this chicken fillet meal and how it finds a place at our dinner table.

I don't know whether to call this simple dish; stew, soup, or curry....lauki or bottle-gourd is green in color, and is shaped like a bottle. Its pulp is white and has white seeds within spongy flesh. It is 96.1% water, and is light on the stomach and aids digestion. Do you know 100 gm serving of lauki contains just 12 calories....wow!.....if you are watching your weight. It is rich in iron and also has vitamin C and B complex; sodium of 1.8 mg and 87 mg of potassium....perfect for hypertensive patients. It is supposed to be one of the earliest vegetable cultivated by man, believed to be originated in Africa. If you are a regular reader here, you know that my husband was brought up in Nainital (a beautiful hill station of Uttarakhand). My mother-in-law lived there for 20+ years...........as you might have guessed my husband loves North-Indian food .....and hence North-Indian foods found a place here in my blog. My MIL always says that lauki is best if you have any dig