Kaju Gathiya nu Shaak_Kathiyawadi Dhaba style

Sharing a recipe from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiun_eF1qXWAhXnwVQKHdTzCVIQFghFMAc&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsaasbahurasoi.com%2Fsb%2Frecipe%2Fkathiyawadi-dhaba-style-kaju-gathiya-nu-shaak-kaju-gathiya-ki-subzi-gathiya-cashew-curry%2F&usg=AFQjCNFez90_pWkRoKYfq_EfxaH_SnUu6w

Sweet Potato Fenugreek Stir Fry with Chickpea Flour

Ingredients

4-5 tbsp - Oil
0.75 cups - Chickpea flour (Besan)
1 tsp - Cumin seeds
1 tsp - Mustard seeds
3 - Medium sweet potatoes
0.5 tsp - Turmeric
3 tbsp - Dried fenugreek leaves (Kasuri Methi)
1.5 tbsp - Minced garlic
1.5 tsp - Chilly powder
1 cup - Vegetable stock (can be replaced with water)
1 tsp - Amchur/Chaat Masala
Salt, to taste
Sugar, to taste (optional but plays off the bitter flavor emanating from the fenugreek leaves)


Instructions

Boil the sweet potatoes in water and salt. Peel them thereafter, and cut them into small cubes. Heat the oil. Crackle the cumin and the mustard seeds. Once done, add minced garlic. Once the garlic is browned, add the boiled sweet potatoes and fry them until they are soft and cooked. Add all the remaining ingredients except the stock and the chickpea flour and stir fry for a few seconds. Lastly, add the chickpea flour along with some oil/ghee (to ensure the besan cooks), slowly add the stock and turn the heat to a minimum. Cook for a few minutes with a lid on. Take it off when the besan comes off from the bottom of the cooking vessel.

Note: Sweet potatoes can be replaced with carrots and/or potatoes 

Apple Buttermilk Breakfast Loaf

Transitioning gradually towards original recipe ideas, here is an outrageous aberration from routine!

INGREDIENTS:

All purpose flour: 1.5 cups
Sweet Cream Butter: 3/4th stick, melted
Egg: 1, large
Apples: 2, large, chopped (unpeeled)
Buttermilk: 3/4th cup
Baking Powder: 1.5 teaspoons
Baking Soda: 0.5 teaspoons
Sugar/Honey: 1 cup

METHOD:
Grind the apples with the sugar/honey until they attain a smooth consistency. Combine the melted butter, flour, cracked egg, blended apples, buttermilk, baking powder and baking soda in a large mixing bowl and whisk it till the batter reaches a dollop-drop consistency. Grease a loaf tray with butter/oil and pour the mixture into it. Preheat the oven to 360 Fahrenheit and bake the mixture for 75 minutes.

Creamy Mushroom Broth

Ingredients:

50 gm button mushrooms
1 cup 2% milk
1 cup water
1/2 tablespoon all-purpose flour (maida)
1 teaspoon crushed garlic/garlic paste
Onion, chopped, 1/2-medium
Black pepper-2 teaspoons
Butter
Salt, to taste

Method:
Heat some butter in a frying pan and add the chopped onion, garlic and mushrooms to it. Keep frying until the mushrooms start leaving water and the onions turn pinkish. Now add the milk, maida and water to the pan. Boil the mixture 2-3 times. Take it off the gas and leave it to cool. Once cold enough to be touched with bare hands, transfer the contents of the pan to a mixer and blend until a smooth mixture is formed. Transfer the contents of the mixer to the pan again and boil the soup one more time. Lastly, add the salt and black pepper  and serve hot with lightly toasted butter baguette . 

Banana cake

This is the first self-styled baking recipe I ever created and managed to pull off with a flourish which didn't involve any burns, cuts, scrapes or first-aid-equipped tasters. The ratio is the most optimum possible.Also, one of the softest eggless, sugarfree baking recipe I tried in two decades! I will be posting pictures of this one soon!

Ingredients:

Bananas-----2 large (or 4 medium), cut into small pieces
Honey-----4-5 tablespoons (according to your taste)
All-purpose baking flour (maida)----1.5 cups
Baking powder-----1.5 teaspoons
Baking soda----0.5 teaspoons
Unsalted butter/Oil----1-1.25 cups
Chopped nuts and/or chocochips---Use at your own discretion!

Method:
Preheat the oven for 10 minutes at 350 F/180 C.
Grind the bananas combined with the honey in a high-powered blender to a smooth consistency. At this point, you can taste the slush for the sugar appropriation. Melt the butter (if using) for a minute in the microwave and add to the banana-honey slush. Mix it well with a slotted spoon/cake-beater. Now add the flour, baking powder and baking soda and mix into the  batter so that no lumps remain. Add in the chopped nuts/ chocolate chips and mix the batter well. It can be of either of a dollop-drop consistency (which would make it more creamy) or a kneaded dough like consistency (which would make it more of a banana bread than a banana cake!). Grease a baking dish with oil/unsalted butter and pour in the batter. Place it inside the preheated oven and bake for 40-45 minutes until a toothpick/fork pierced into the the cake comes out clean! Your all healthy, eggless, sugarfree cake/banana bread is ready to be devoured. :)

Apple Cake

This is the first self-styled baking recipe I ever created and managed to pull off with a flourish which didn't involve any burns, cuts, scrapes or first-aid-equipped tasters. The ratio is the most optimum possible.Also, one of the softest eggless, sugarfree baking recipe I tried in two decades! I will be posting pictures of this one soon!

Ingredients:

Apples-----2 large, cut into small pieces (no need to peel)
Honey-----4-5 tablespoons (according to your taste)
All-purpose baking flour (maida)----1.5 cups
Baking powder-----1.5 teaspoons
Baking soda----0.5 teaspoons
Unsalted butter/Oil----1-1.25 cups
Chopped nuts and/or chocochips---Use at your own discretion!

Method:
Preheat the oven for 10 minutes at 350 F/180 C.
Grind the apples combined with the honey in a high-powered blender to a smooth consistency. At this point, you can taste the slush for the sugar appropriation. Melt the butter (if using) for a minute in the microwave and add to the apple-honey slush. Mix it well with a slotted spoon/cake-beater. Now add the flour, baking powder and baking soda and mix into the  batter so that no lumps remain. Add in the chopped nuts/ chocolate chips and mix the batter well. It should be of a dollop-drop consistency. Grease a baking dish with oil/unsalted butter and pour in the batter. Place it inside the preheated oven and bake for 40-45 minutes until a toothpick/fork pierced into the the cake comes out clean! Your all healthy, eggless, sugarfree cake is ready to be devoured. :)

Explicable Flavors

A research project carried out by IIT Jodhpur students revealed much about the innate Indian-ness of the now world renowned concept and the new-fangled word in the Oxford dictioanry, "Curry".

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/535451/data-mining-indian-recipes-reveals-new-food-pairing-phenomenon/?utm_campaign=socialsync&utm_medium=social-post&utm_source=facebook
http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03815: Original Paper

EXCERPT:

The food pairing hypothesis is the idea that ingredients that share the same flavors ought to combine well in recipes. For example, the English chef Heston Blumenthal discovered that white chocolate and caviar share many flavors and turn out to be a good combination. Other unusual combinations that seem to confirm the hypothesis include strawberries and peas, asparagus and butter, and chocolate and blue cheese.

But in recent years researchers have begun to question how well this hypothesis holds in different cuisines. For example, food pairing seems to be common in North American and Western European cuisines but absent in cuisines from southern Europe and East Asia.

Today, Anupam Jain and pals at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur say the opposite effect occurs in Indian cuisine. In this part of the world, foods with common flavors are less likely to appear together in the same recipe. And the presence of certain spices make the negative food pairing effect even stronger.

Jain and co began their work by downloading more than 2,500 recipes from an online cooking database called TarlaDalal.com. These recipes come from eight sub-cuisines, including Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, and South Indian, which together span vast geographies, climates, and cultures in the Indian subcontinent.

Together, these recipes contain 194 different ingredients. The average recipe contains seven ingredients but some can contain up to 40. In particular, the Mughlai sub-cuisine has many recipes with exceptionally large numbers of ingredients, probably because of its royal heritage.

Jain and co then created a flavor network in which ingredients are linked if they appear together in the same recipe. The network can then be studied for interesting phenomenon such as clustering effects.

The question that the team set out to answer was to what extent food pairing is positive or negative. In other words, do ingredients sharing flavor compounds occur in the same recipe more often than if the ingredients were chosen at random.

The results make for interesting reading. Jain and co conclude that Indian cuisine is characterized by strong negative food pairing. Not only that, but the strength of this negative correlation is much higher than anything previously reported.

They also found that specific ingredients dramatically effect food pairing. For example, the presence of cayenne pepper strongly biases the flavor sharing pattern of Indian cuisine towards negative pairing. Other ingredients that have a similar effect include green bell pepper, coriander, garam masala, tamarind, ginger, cinnamon and so on.

In other words, spices make the negative food pairing effect more powerful, a phenomenon never seen before. “Our study reveals that spices occupy a unique position in the ingredient composition of Indian cuisine and play a major role in defining its characteristic profile,” say Jain and co.

That result has some interesting corollaries. In many cuisines, spices add flavor but also prevent food spoilage by killing certain types of bacteria. Jain and co say this medicinal role must have had a significant effect on the way recipes evolved since removing these ingredients would have had health impacts. “We conclude that the evolution of cooking driven by medicinal beliefs would have left its signature on traditional Indian recipes,” they say.

The result also has implications for the future of food. In the same way that Western chefs search for unusual ingredients that share the same flavors, negative food pairing may also drive the development of new flavor combinations and recipes in Indian food. “Our study could potentially lead to methods for creating novel Indian signature recipes, healthy recipe alterations and recipe recommender systems,” conclude Jain and co.

Beyond that, this work shows how powerful network science has become in analyzing disparate aspects of everyday life. Treating recipes as networks has turned out to be a powerful tool that is changing the way we think about food and how we consume it.