Happy Diwali! And an easy recipe to make your Diwali a bit sweeter

Diwali's coming! Wafts of delicious Diwali treats being whipped up by Ma greet me everyday when I return from work. The roads are lined with sellers of firecrackers, mounds of rangoli colours, shimmering lanterns and endless diyas (earthen lamps).

One of the goodies my Mom has recently started making for special occasions is the crowd favourite - kaju barfi. This sweet sensation is soft and rich with cashewnuts and other delights. And what is more delightful is that the recipe is so easy! Few ingredients, simple steps and voila - a delicious sweet is ready for you (or your guests, if you're feeling particularly generous!) to swoon over.

The recipe is my Aunt's - thanks, S Kaku!

S Kaku's Kaju Barfi:

Ingredients:

3 cups ground cashewnuts (coarsely ground, texture that of coarse breadcrumbs)

2 cups sugar

1 cup milk powder (yes!)

1 cup water

A few strands of saffron (kesar), dissolved in 2 teaspoons of warm milk

Silver leaf (varkha) (optional, for garnish)

Method:

Thoroughly mix the cashewnut rubble with the milk powder.

Grease a tray/dish with ghee (unsalted butter for those who dont have ghee)

Make syrup from the sugar and water. If you are the finicky type, you can 'clean' the syrup by adding some milk while it boils and skimming away the impurities that the milk pulls to the surface and then straining the syrup. This ensures that the syrup is crystal-clear. But it is not worth the bother, at least in this recipe.

Boil away on medium heat. The syrup should be thick (A test: When a drop of syrup is dropped into a bowl of cool water it should not dissolve but hold its own)

Now comes the time for some quick action - tip in the dissolved saffron and the cashewnut-and- milk powder mix into the syrup and stir it in briskly, all of this in rapid-fire succession.

Tip out the mass onto the greased tray and spread it out FAST with your palms (its HOT, but cant be helped). Then turn a rolling pin over the whole thing so that you get a smooth, even surface.

Garnish with silver leaf.

Score the tray with criss-crosses, going all the way till the bottom of the tray.
It is crucial that you score/cut the pieces while the nut mass is still warm. You can break up the barfi into individual pieces when it has cooled down, but attempting to cut the barfi after it has cooled down is a lost cause - the pieces will brittly splinter into shards.

So there you go - a simple, straightforward recipe to sweeten this Diwali!

May the festival of lights brighten up our lives. :)

Serendipity - and my tryst with scrambled eggs

Scrambled eggs have always fascinated me - well, at least ever since I figured out that this dish is vastly different than its Indianised version, i.e. bhurji or khagina.

I tried cooking up scrambled eggs several times (too many to count), trying to get the perfect 'pillowy-soft almost-set' eggs. I fiddled around with cooking times, ingredients (cream/milk/cream+milk/cheese and so on), techniques (whisk eggs like mad, add to the pan, add cream and then scramble over high heat/ whisk eggs and milk together, scramble over medium heat/ mix eggs and cream and milk (no whisking!) and scramble over very low heat and so on) but there would always be some thing which would mar the perfection of the pale golden eggs - either they would be too dry or too runny or horrors! - have a perfect just-set texture which would start giving off watery juices as it cooled. :(

And then, a few weeks ago, I chanced upon the best eggs I have ever made - serendipity! What happened was that I had swirled some oil in the pan over medium heat when I got a phone call. Engrossed in conversation, I only came back to earth when I saw that the oil was about to start smoking. To avoid disaster, (and to minimise the washing-up) I cracked open a couple of eggs straight into the pan. Unfortunately they began to set right away due to the high heat, throwing me into panic - I didnt want fried eggs! I tipped in a rather generous splash of milk and stirred like crazy - all the while going on with my phone conversation (the friend at the other end had no clue she was aiding a culinary discovery!)

And what would you say - the result of this dangerous multitasking resulted in the yummiest, most scrumptiously soft scrambled eggs I have ever managed to make. No runny juices, no disappointingly dry scrambles, no large clods of eggs - but perfectly butter-yellow-shot-with-white soft quilt-like eggs.....and, for a wonder I'd got the seasoning perfectly right too. Bliss!

Sometimes, the best things in life happen by chance. :)