Capirotada de Cuernitos or Croissant Bread Pudding

Capirotada de cuernitos

This is a Mexican bread pudding. Traditionally a lenten dish, it exists with many variations, and here is my recipe using mini-croissants. I give it a little desi twist in a couple of ways. First, I use golden raisins or sultanas instead of dark colored raisins.  Paneer is used instead of salty cheese, but you can use queso fresco if that is what you have around. 


3/4 cup fresh paneer or queso fresco mixed with 2-3 tbs sugar, crumbled.

-To make the jarabe:
1 stick cinnamon
2 cloves
1 cone of piloncillo
1 star anise
2-3 cups water to cover
1 tsp lime juice to add when boiling
1 tbs orange marmalade to add when done
1/2 cup white sugar to add when done

Boil cinnamon, cloves, water with piloncillo for about 20 mins till
all the piloncillo is melted and the jarabe is a little thick but
still pretty liquidy.
Add in 1/2 cup sugar and orange marmalade and allow to cool.

-The bread:
8-10 mini croissants, cut in half to open up.


1 stick butter, melted

Paint croissants with butter, bake for 10 mins at 400 degrees to dry out.

-To make the pudding:
For the layering: 1/4 cups sultanas, 3/4 cups mixed nuts (pecans, pine
nuts, walnuts) 1/4 cup sweetened coconut shreds, the cheese mentioned above

In a 8/10 baking dish, place first layer of baked croissant halves. Cover
completely with half of the syrup. Add a layer of raisins, coconut,
nuts, then cheese. Add second layer of croissants. Cover with syrup. Push down 
the croissants to flatten them into the dish and make sure everything is soaking in syrup. Add second layer of garnishes. Bake uncovered at 350 for about 15 mins, taking care not to burn.

Lucknowi Chicken Qormah

Lucknowi qorma made for a Ramazan iftaar. This one has a tiny pinch of saffron in it.

This is a Lucknowi style qormah and is fancy and tasted perfumey from
the spices and the keora jal. This is the style of qorma served in my
husband's family...I don't know if you
would regularly use some of these ingredients like keora jal or
roasted ground white poppy seed . If these ingredients are are exotic
for you, just leave them out. Also, you can use almonds instead of
cashews. Feel free to adapt as suits you!

¼ cup oil

1 skinless, bone-in chicken cut into 12 pieces

1 medium onion finely sliced, brown fried, and crushed
(My method for making brown fried onions)

Whole spices:
6 green cardamoms, husk popped open by pressing with knife
2 black cardamoms (bari elaichi)
2 bay leaves (tez patta)
1 piece of cinnamon bark, about 2 inches long

1 tsp garlic paste

Yoghurt spice mixture:
1 cup yoghurt with ½ tsp garam masala , 1 tsp red chile powder, and 1
tbs ginger paste whipped in

12 cashews  soaking in hot water to just cover
1 tbs toasted ground white poppy seed
1/2 cup water

Powdered spiced for finishing
¼ tsp mace powder (jaavitri)
¼ tsp nutmeg powder (jaiphal)
1/4 tsp freshly ground green cardamom powder
pinch of garam masala powder
1 tsp salt or to taste
1/2 tsp of keora jal (pandanus water)

*Have brown fried crushed onions set aside. One fried onion will look
like 2-3 tbs of crushed fried onion.

*Grind cashews with a little of the soaking liquid to make a cashew
paste and set aside. (You can also use almonds if that's what you have
on hand.)

1.In deep pot that has lid: Heat oil and add in all whole spices for a minute.
2. Add in chicken meat and brown well, add in garlic paste and allow
to turn golden, lower flame.
3. On low flame (or even turn flame off to prevent yoghurt from
curdling) add in yoghurt mixture and stir well. When oil rises above
yoghurt, turn up flame.
4. Stir in 1/2 cup water and salt. Bring to boil, lower heat , and
cook for 20-25 min or so until chicken is fully cooked. Stir
occasionally.
5. Almost done: Stir in the crushed brown fried onions, and ground
white poppy seeds, and ground cashew paste. Keep covered on a very low
flame for five more minutes.
6. Finally, turn off flame and add in your finishing spices: stir in
powdered mace, nutmeg, green cardamom, pinch of garam masala, and 1/2
tsp of keora jal. Cover and let sit for 5 more mins, then serve with
naan and/or white rice.

*To make this even fancier, soak 12 strands of saffron 3 tbs  warm water while cooking, and pour this into the dish at the end of cooking when you add in your finishing spices. This will make your qorma 'zafrani' or perfumed by saffron.

Dum Ka Qeema Smokey Keema

Smokey and delicious dum ka qeema

Here is my dum ka qeema recipe. I served this dish at an iftaar recently and a friend kept demanding that I give her the recipe. Since I wrote it down for her in an email, I decided to post it here on my food blog.

This recipe is adapted from Zubaida Tariq's Kitchen (p. 72)...I'd like to link that book, but oddly I cannot find the English version online. (I know I've seen it before!) I purchased the book in Pakistan years ago.

This dish is a favorite of mine, and it is so good that you end up eating more ground meat than you ever imagined you could consume in a single meal. It's something about the smokey flavor that makes you unable to stop indulging.

Ingredients

ground meat (beef or mutton, fatty is good)-2 lbs

yoghurt-1.5 cups whipped 

ginger/garlic paste-2 tbsp (one of each)

onion-1 (Already brown fried tali hui pyaaz)

mint-1/2 cup fresh leaves

green chile-4 (chopped roughly for grinding)

lemons-juice of 2 lemons, plus some lemon slices for garnish

unripe papaya (kacha papita) with ground with skin-2 tbs

khashkhaash (white poppyseed)-2tbsp roasted and ground

bhune hue channe (chilke wale)-2 tbsp roasted and ground to powder 

OR if you don't have it -2 tbp besan toasted in a pan

red chile powder-1 tbs

garam masala 2.5 tsp

black cumin (shahi zeera)-1/2 tsp

salt-1 tsp or to tasteoil-1/2 cup or so (maybe even 1 cup!)
1 cup water

plus 2-3 tbs more oil for dhungar


1 small piece of coal for giving dhungar

Garnish: fresh mint leaves, sliced raw onions (rings look especially nice), lemon wedges

Method:

Grind fried onions, gg paste, green chiles, mint, and juice of onelemon together. Mix this into the yoghurt. Add this into the meat and add in the khashkhaash, ground bhune hue channe/besan, 1 tsp red chilepowder, 2 tsp garam masala, and papaya. Mix well. Allow to rest forone hour. This will allow the meat to soften from the papaya. Don'tleave to marinade for more than one hour or the papaya will turn yourmeat to paste.


Heat oil in pan. Add in qeema and stir on high heat till the water dries up. This will take a long time. Like maybe 7-10 minutes. When it looks dry, add in salt and 1/2 cup water. Mix in, allow to come to a boil, then simmer covered for 15 minutes on low flame. Now turn up the flame and bhunofy it for 10 more minutes until it looks very brown. Sprinkle a little bit of water from the remaining half a cup you have to prevent any burning or sticking. You have to keep stirring and stirring and your arm will hurt, but when it is brown colored, it is done cooking. As long as it is well browned, you don't have to dry up any extra water you put in. It shouldn't be so extremely dry as to be crumbly, and should be tender. The ghee/oil as well as the water used at the end will keep this dish moist.


Giving dhungar (perfuming with smokey flavor): Now heat up your coal on the stove. When it is hot, make a cup out of silver foil (or use a cup made out of a single large onion petal) and put ghee or oil into that cup (2-3 tbs). Put the foil cup filled with oil into the pan with the cooked qeema. Place the hot coal into the oil and quickly cover. Allow the smoke that rises to penetrate the qeema for about 20 minutes or until the coal is cool.When the coal is cool, remove the foil and coal but pour the extra smokey oil into the qeema. Mix this oil into the qeema and also add in1/2 tsp more garam masala and 1/2 tsp shahi zeera. Before serving, stir in juice of one more lemon. (To prevent a house fire, take care to put the leftover burnt lump of coal in a cup of water for a while before disposing, and don't just throw it directly into the trashcan even if it seems completely cool.)


Top with garnishes and serve.

It is a fattening and arduous dish but very delicious. It is traditionally served with parathas, bhatooras, or puris. Naan works, too. It can also be rolled into paraathas along with sliced onions and tamarind chutney for dum ka qeema roll.


Variation:

Dum ke kabab

Use only 1 cup of yoghurt, but keep the rest of the ingredients the same. After one hour of marinading, do as follows: Do the dhungar process on the raw meat. Shape meat into hamburger patty shaped kababs or oval shapes, and pan fry in a little bit of oil on medium heat, nicely browning each side and cooking through thoroughly.

Doab Fish Fry (What to do with Shan Masala)

I have a lot of recipes that are based on adding my own twist to packaged Shan Masala packets. Their qorma, chappli kabab, Sindhi biriani, and a few others are quite good but all need some adaptation to give one's own signature to a dish. Here is what I do with a box of Shan Lahori Fish Mix. Shan Lahori Fish Mix on its own is quite good but extremely salty. It is so salty that if you don't doctor it up, it is inedible. But it is quite convenient to use in that if you were to make a fish fry mix on your own you would need at least a dozen more ingredients than what I have listed below, so it saves time and effort.

I christened this recipe Doab (doh-aahb) Fish Fry since it is a confluence of Shan fish fry and my ingredients, just like a meeting of rivers in The Land of the Five Rivers, Punjab. :)

Doab Fish Fry:

1 lbs Swai fish filets cut into 2-3 inch chunks or large nuggets (or any other white, mild tasting fish like tilapia or king fish)
3 tbs vinegar
1 tsp turmeric
pinch of salt (1/8 tsp)

1 box Shan Lahori Fish Mix
1/4 cup of besan (chickpea flour) plus 2 tablespoons
4 tbs yellow cornmeal
3 pieces of garlic
1 inch of ginger
2 green chiles
2 tbs fresh cilantro finely chopped
1/2 tsp dried mint
1/2 tsp ajwain seeds
pinch of red or orange food coloring powder (optional, I just use it to give a festive look and also so that the end result doesn't seem like I have used Shan Masala stuff from the box or that it is just a fish pakora)
1 tsp lime juice
1 and 1/4 cups water or a little more if the batter looks too thick

oil for shallow frying

Method:

• Wash fish well and cut into large nuggets. In a bowl, mix the vinegar, turmeric, and salt. Add fish to this and allow to marinate for 1 hour or so. The vinegar will have a slight pickling affect on the fish, so when it is battered and deep fried the fish flesh will be extra creamy and tender against the crisp batter. Yum! The vinegar also removes any unpleasant fishiness from the fish. When you are ready to fry, remove fish from vinegar, briefly rinse the fish and pat dry. 

*Tip: You can also freeze your fish nuggets in the marinade and defrost, rinse, and proceed.

• Grind together the garlic, ginger, and green chiles to create a fine paste. 
• In a large mixing bowl, add all of the dry ingredients into the  Shan Lahori Fish fry. Mix well. Stir in the water and the wet ingredients including the ginger-garlic-chile paste and cilantro. Add in the fish and allow to marinade for 1/2 an hour to 1 hour. 
• Heat oil on a medium-high flame and shallow fry fish on one side, then the other.
• Serve immediately. You may wish to garnish with a dash of chaat masala or a sprinkle of lime juice but I think it tastes amazing on its own. Serve with ketchup or meethi chutney. For my meethi chutney recipe, see here in this post.

*Tip: I wear disposable kitchen gloves when I handle the fish and wet marinade and batter because I like to mix with my hands to ensure even coating, but I hate the stains of turmeric or food coloring.

Pastel de Tres Leches or Tres Leches Cake (Halal)

In Spanish, tres means three, leches means milks. Tres leches is a cake moistened with three types of milk.

This is a common party cake in my home state of Texas, especially among Mexican-American families. I read that the origins of this cake are that it is based on traditional Latin American syrup soaked sponge cakes, but the tres leches concept was created by a canned milk company to promote their products during the 1950s. Versions of it exist all over Latin America, and some include coconut milk or alcohol. My recipe is a simple Tex-Mex version, and the tres leches or three types of milks are sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, and half-and-half.

To begin, you need to bake a yellow cake from a box mix. I use Betty Crocker's Supermoist Yellow cake. Bake this according to the instructions on the box in a 9 by 13 inch glass baking pan, but add a dash of alcohol free vanilla. I use Frontier brand, and I find that it is very delicious. Allow the cake to cool completely for several hours. Then, using a fork, poke holes all over the cake.

Take note of the holes poked in the cake. Feeling stabby?

For the leches, mix together:
3 tbs plain sugar
1/8 teaspoon (pinch) cinnamon
few drops of alcohol free vanilla
1 14 oz can of evaporated milk (I use Carnation)
1 14 oz can sweetened condensed milk (I use Eagle)
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 cup whole milk
(or use 2 cups half and half, which is half cream and half milk)

Ladle this milk mixture over your sponge, ensuring that you moisten all parts of the cake. Cover cake and allow to absorb the milks overnight in the refrigerator.

The whipped cream frosting topping:
2 cups organic* heavy whipping cream
4 tbs powdered sugar
few drops alcohol free vanilla
1/4 cup sweetened shredded coconut
3 tbs chopped pecans

Blend ingredients and using an electric beater, beat your whipping cream with the powdered sugar and vanilla until it forms stiff peaks. Spread this on top of your milk-soaked sponge. Garnish with the coconut and nuts. You can experiment with garnishes of fruit, cajeta, caramel, chocolate shavings, or whatever suits you.

I wish I had a picture of the finished product, but on the day I was taking these demo pics, my kids came and smashed the cake with the cake server before I had a chance to snap a picture. Mine is a very home-made, non-fancy look, though. The end result is a sweet, super moist but not soggy, delicious cake!

*I use regular heavy whipping cream in the tres leches mixture but I go for a superior tasting organic heavy whipping cream for the whipped cream frosting to achieve the best taste. Organic cream is more expensive.

Mangoes 'n Cream or Aam ka meetha

This is a recipe from my mother in-law. It is not a fancy party recipe, but just something to serve at home after a family meal.

Mangoes are so delicious by themselves when they are in season. But what do you do if you have mangoes that are from towards the end of the season or overripe, or the mangos weren't handled well during transport/export so they will never develop their full sweetness even when ripe? What if you only have frozen or canned mangoes available in your location? This is a super simple recipe that allows you to take advantage of delicious mango flavor even though the mangoes you may have aren't in their prime state of sweetness.

Just cut about 3 mangoes (+/- 2.5 cups or so) into bite sized, mushy chunks. Mush them a bit more with the back of a spoon. Whip 1 cup of regular or double cream (!) with 1/4 cup sugar. Use just a tablespoon or so sugar for canned mangoes as these have been soaking in sugar syrup. Beat well to ensure sugar dissolves. Then stir in the mangos. Transfer to a serving dish. Chill in the fridge for a few hours, then serve. The cream will thicken very slightly and you will have a sweet and creamy mango delight! You can also do this with any other juicy pulpy suitable fruit like peach or apricot.

Roasted Garlic Chile Chutney

This chutney is caustically hot, and has all of the sweet, deep flavor of caramelized, roasted garlic! I was inspired to create this recipe by an imagined amalgamation of North African harissa and Gujarati red garlic chutney. Plus, anything with roasted garlic is just gooood.


A few words on chutney for people less familiar with South Asian cuisine:
I've come to realize that many non-desis are confused bout chutney. For example, we goras (white Euro-origin people) usually think that chutney means some sort of fruit compote. We think instantly of mango chutney when we hear the word mentioned. I suppose that this is one kind of chutney. Many goras who frequent Indo-Pak restaurants know mint chutney and tamarind chutney as the green and red sauces that come with pappadums. Those are also two types of chutney. But how does one explain what chutney actually is? Chutney can be a concoction which is served as a dipping sauce, but it is more than that. It is like Korean kimchi. You can have bites of many types of chutneys on the side of a meal, or mix it into your food to change up the flavor. Chutneys can be cooling, but often they add heat and pungency to a dish. There are wet chutneys and dry chutneys. There are chutneys made with fresh ingredients and chutneys made with cooked ingredients, and combinations of both. There are even chutneys that are powder or grain-like in texture. From Kashmir to Kerala and all in between, there are probably hundreds of thousands of types of chutneys.




For roasted garlic chile chutney:
It is meant to be eaten spooned on the side of a plate of rice and daal or rice and vegetables, or with flat bread (chapati or roti). You can have a bite of it, or in a plain home style daal, mix morsels of rice mashed with daal with a bit of this chutney while you eat. Scrumptious! Brave souls who like desi-fusion will enjoy this chutney as a spread on sandwiches.


How to roast garlic:
For this you need to roast whole peeled cloves of garlic to cook out their rawness and bring out their sweetness. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Toss 2 cups of garlic cloves (3-4 peeled heads) in a flavorless oil (like Sunflower or Canola) and a dash of salt. Lay some aluminum foil on a baking sheet, put the oiled garlic on this foil, and now roll up the foil to seal the garlic inside of it, making a rough pouch. Put this on the baking sheet into the oven for about 50 minutes. The garlic will come out browned and mushy. You can make this in advance and keep it in the fridge until you are ready to make the chutney.

Ingredients:
About 2 cups roasted garlic cloves (your original 2 cups may shrink a bit upon roasting, that's ok)
10 dried red Indian chiles or Mexican árbol chiles
1/2 heaping cup Indian red chile powder (no joke!)
1/2 cup cumin powder
3 tbs coriander powder
1/4 or so cup mustard oil
2-3 tbs flavorless oil like sunflower or canola
3 tbs sugar, or to taste
1.5 to 2 tbs salt, or to taste (you should have a slightly overly salted result)
1/2 cup or so fresh squeezed lime juice (may need more or less depending on how sour your limes are)


Method:
Heat mustard oil in a pan. When it smokes, toss in your dried whole red chiles. Very shortly, when they color and puff up, remove them quickly from the oil (with tongs or slotted spoon) and set them aside on a paper towel to drain. In the same hot oil, add in the roasted garlic. Turn off the flame and immediately toss in the dried red chile powder, cumin, and coriander. Stir to fry it in the oil. The flame is off so as to not burn the spice powder. Allow this to cool so that you can transfer it to a blender.

When cool, scrape this into a blender. Add in your lime juice, salt, sugar, and 2-3 tbs of flavorless oil. Blend well to a thick creamy paste, pushing down what rises to the sides of the blender. Taste for salt. It should be a bit overly salted since it is not meant to be eaten on its own but with a meal containing rice or flatbread. Adjust with a bit more salt, sugar, and lime juice if necessary. Now, stir in the fried whole chiles which you have kept aside. Pulse the blender, pushing the chiles down a few times to get them to be roughly chopped into large pieces in your chutney. The large chile chunks look pretty in the paste, and taste smokey if you happen to get one in your mouth. You may have to add a dash more of your flavorless oil to help things along in the blender.

This recipe yields about 2-2.5 cups of chutney which will keep in the fridge for 4-6 weeks.

The oil, sugar, salt, and lime juice are natural preservatives for this roasted garlic and chile chutney. Transfer into a clean, dry container with a lid, and keep in the fridge to serve this hot stuff with daily meals.

This stuff is pungent, extremely piquant, and or course lip smackingly garlicky. I highly advise against kissing anyone immediately after consumption unless your co-kisser has also eaten some of this roasted garlic chile chutney, too!




Are you a chutney addict?
For a delicious Hyderbadi style tomato chutney, see here.
For a Gujarati style coriander-peanut chutney, see here.