The Seven Cup sweet/burfi

The recipe for this sweet comes from my Mom and you can find it here. The recipe is listed below is the same except that I've added a few instructions for the first-timers.

Essentially you need 1 cup each of: milk, besan (chickpea flour), sooji, desi ghee, grated coconut and 2 cups of sugar.

1. Grease a flat plate.
2. Add all the ingredients to a heavy bottomed pan and keep on medium-low heat.
3. Keep stirring till the batter leaves the sides of the pan. You'll know it when the batter almost seems to be moving together (not completely but almost).
4. Take it off the heat.
5. Spread the batter/mixture on the plate. To flatten it, use the base of a bowl. Grease it with ghee too so that it doesn't stick.
6. (Optional)Make markings in the flattened mixture as you would finally cut it.  This makes it easier to cut once the burfi is done.
7. Let it cool. Once cool, cut it into squares.

I made these as a prasad.

Yummy Focaccia!!

I saw this recipe on King Arthur's blog and it looked like one recipe that didn't have too many ingredients and not too complicated to make. So that tempted me into trying it out! I must say that KA's blog is awesome! It gives you a set-by-step picture tutorial of everything they make. That is sooooo helpful. After every step you know how your ingredients are supposed to look. You can find the recipe here and I've also listed it below.

1. Mix 3 cups all purpose flour, 1 tbsp yeast, 3 tbsp olive oil, 1.5 cups warm water, 1.25 tsp salt in a bowl with an electric mixer for 60 seconds. I have the small egg-beater kind of mixer and once the dough was together I couldn't mix it further with the beater so I just mixed it with hand.
2. Line a 9 X 13 pan with parchment paper (or butter paper or just grease it)  and drizzle olive oil over it.
3. Take the dough and spread it all over the pan.
4. Let it rise for 60 minutes.
5. Preheat the oven to 375 F.
6. With your index finger punch the dough to make small craters, spread some olive oil and garnish with dried italian herbs. I have italian seasoning so I used that but you can use whatever herbs you have/want. I think you can use fresh ones also, they would give a really nice aroma.
7. Bake for 35-40 minutes.

More vegetable carving...

Found this cool link on Vegetable Carving; it's by the ever famous Saxton Freymann.