Indian desserts are a great treat and one of my favourites are gulab jamun ... deep fried dough balls soaked in flavoured syrup and served hot or cold.

I'm fortunate that I can enjoy this Indian treat at 4 different convenience levels.

( Making and enjoying gulab jamun )

It's been a while since I had a real Indian feast and after Eva's recent Indian party post, I decided it was time to indulge myself. Also, when I hit my free account file limit at ImageShack, I deleted a lot of pictures rather hastily assuming that I could always replace them from my archived disks. Unfortunately, it turned out I hadn't saved my ( Read more... )

ETA: The recipes for the pastry and filling are here.

I know that there's a more elegant way of folding samosas, but this is the way that works for me, especially as I started out by making samosas with a loose ground beef filling. So that's what you're going to learn by clicking on the LJ cut below.

( Making pastry including assembly )

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Traditionally gulab jamun are made by boiling milk down into a thick mass called khoya which involves a lot of time and patience. In the west we usually replace the khoya with whole dried milk powder or skim milk powder moistened with a butter/whole milk mixture or whipping cream. The first time I made gulab jamun (at least 1 1/2 yrs ago)  I used ( Read more... )

Pork ribs are tasty and can be baked in the oven to fall off the bone tenderness. I just have to work on seasoning them more creatively as all my previous attempts at rubs have been disappointing. Oh well, they were cheap and filling. :)


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I ran out of tamarind paste making the tamarind drink I just posted, so I decided to hit the Indian grocery store and restock.

My memory was obviously quite faulty in saying I had never seen tamarind fruit 'in the flesh' as I found that the grocery store also had at least 2 brands of dried whole tamarind available to purchase, as well as the ( Read more... )

Today I went grocery shopping and picked up a 4 liter 3-bag pack of homogenized milk (3.25% butterfat) so I could do a final trial on the production of paneer. I used white vinegar because it's cheap, I have a ton of it in the house and the percentage of acid is consistent for the volume used. My kitchen scale is not digital so the accuracy is low ( Read more... )

I decided to make a pizza for supper today and while kneading was reminded again of the quest for a no-knead bread recipe which comes up periodically on food blogs and LJ posts ( Read more... )

Making Paneer - Additional notes

Yield in all 3 trials was 1 oz paneer per cup of milk weighed on my inexpensive, non-digital, kitchen scales ( Read more... )