The decoy McCoy

Gajar Paneer Halwa

As a child whose additional language was English (yes, did you know this is a new ‘inclusive’ term for English as a Second/Foreign language?) my understanding of the word ‘diet’ was limited to a ‘weight loss diet’. 

In the 70s, it had become a buzzword for grown-ups around me, almost like a fad.  Family and folks used it with such natural ease that I didn’t even think it was an English word. Everyone seemed to have an opinion, an anecdote and gratis advice to mete out about 'diets'.

And everyone had someone in the family who had seriously asked the question, “Should I eat this diet stuff before or after a meal?”

I must have been about 8 or 10 years old, long gone past the 'cute and chubby', 'pullable-cheek' stage and endowed out of the 'puppy fat' category, when this “d” word became a dreaded reality for me personally. What had hitherto been unconditional praise for my precociousness, started to come with a proviso bordering on a warning – albeit to my mother, 'but you should get her to diet, you know…'

Over the years, I fought with my foodophilia and succumbed to many diets – the GM Diet, the Atkins Diet, and the Cabbage Soup Diet – you name it and I was game for it.   But alas! These adventures invariably started with ditties and ended in dirges.

If you didn’t take it so seriously, 'Diet' digs were doubly doomful.  When I self-righteously refused a sweet while on one of these grueling regimes, I was told-  go ahead, have it… it’s a boiled sweet… You’re on veggies and fruit? Try this carrot cake ….  how about some apple pie…

My calling as a food blogger has seen me ingeniously tiptoeing around recipes with 'sugar/sweetener' options and 'fry/bake' discretions, attempting brilliant coups to overthrow the white supremacy of the butter-sugar-flour clan. But I won’t be honest if I don’t admit that many times these dishes are but shadows of the real McCoys.  

But not this one. 

Here’s a “diet” gajar paneer halwa, which cheats in every possible way, but manages to beat the fray!

Gajar Paneer Halwa

Ingredients

2 cups lightly scraped and grated carrots

10-12 cashew nuts, halved 

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp ghee (optional)

1 cup skimmed milk

½ tsp green cardamom powder (only if you don’t have a cardamom hater at home)           

2 cups grated paneer

4-5 tbsp coconut sugar

Sweetener as required to bring the halwa to your desired level of sweetness

Method

Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a thick-bottomed pan, and add the cashew nuts and fry them slightly and remove from the pan. Now add the grated carrots and sauté for a few minutes. Add milk and cook on medium heat for about 10-15 minutes or until the milk evaporates and the carrots are cooked. Stir from time to time.

Stir in the grated paneer and coconut sugar and cook for two to three minutes or till the sugar melts and mixes well, stirring continuously. The coconut sugar, made from the sap of the coconut palm does not taste like coconut at all. It is not only a low glycemic index sweetening option, but also gives a caramel flavour to the halwa and deepens the colour. Coconut sugar also has nutrients such as magnesium, potassium, zinc, iron, B vitamins, and amino acids.

Add some sweetener like Splenda or Agave syrup, if required.

Add the green cardamom powder and the tablespoon of ghee (if using). Continue to cook for a minute more.

Garnish with halved cashew nuts. Serve warm. Forget the clichéd ice cream.

Fake it, but cake it!

Not-So-Rich Christmas Cake

Photos by Apurva Nargundkar 

Festive times can be very vexing when for a variety of reasons we are trying to overthrow the (white) supremacy of the flour, butter, eggs and sugar quartet. 

Every time I almost succumb to the dictates of the big four, I think of my doctor (who incidentally reads my posts). How can I convince her that I may be cooking all these dishes, but I don’t necessarily eat too much or beyond reason, that it’s mostly low calorie stuff I cook on a daily basis, that I do keep away from the white venoms … sigh, leave it.

My first born, my Sancho Panza in my culinary quests, is away on holidays in India, leaving me alley less in this season when everywhere out there is in festal food frenzy. I tried consoling myself by going through the photos of last year’s cake, kulkul and roce cookies and reposting some of the old posts, but that only deepened the longing for cake. Being at home on holidays didn’t help as well. TV shows on every channel – yes even in Amharic and Samoan ones - feature Christmas food. 

I realised how right old Billy Boy Shakespeare in saying, “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend”, when even my alter ego Facebook betrayed me by graffiting its walls with Christmas goodies. 

Subjected to this tyranny of festive times, how on earth is one supposed to quash yearnings for Christmas cake? How can I bear to break the more than two-decade-old annual ritual of fruitcake and tea breakfasts in December? Who said all self-respecting food bloggers must bake a Christmas cake? 

Oh dear, am I a candidate for “Festivus for the rest of us”?

No, no no – but then, the prospect of baking a cake was not only lonely, but also posed logistical problems. 

I hadn’t shopped for the ingredients, hadn’t soaked the fruit, didn’t have a recipe zeroed in on. Then again, my daughters who have always taken an ethical stand against factory farming and animal cruelty have recently started to make a serious attempt at veganism. That eliminated the dairy and eggs. Husband is allergic to alcohol and this year he’s around for Christmas, so there goes the soaking in the brandy. The youngest is an archenemy of raisins, orange peel, and cardamom, nutmeg and anything that makes a cake a fruitcake, so there was no point in trying to enlist her support. Under the magic spell of whole meal spelt flour, I was loath to use plain flour. 

However, in true spirit of Christmas, overcoming all obstacles was born this cake. 

Almost a fake cake - it seems to me - for it has been substituted beyond belief - no alcohol, white or brown sugar, eggs, plain flour, butter, yoghurt or milk. 

What is for real though, is that it is a delicious cake - not better than the original - I’ll be lying if I say that - but it is good enough to have it and eat it too! 

And I don’t have to worry about my doc reading this post.


Not-So-Rich Fruit Cake

Ingredients

½ kg mixed fruit (I use dates, candied papaya, prunes, sultanas, raisins, dried apples and cranberries)
½ cup olive oil
½ cup coconut sugar (this has a low GI of 35 only)
Pinch of salt
½ cup water
½ cup fresh orange juice
Zest of 2 oranges
2 tbsp organic molasses
2 cups spelt flour
1 tsp soda bicarbonate
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp flaxseed powder mixed with 6 tbsps water 
¾ cup chopped mixed nuts (almonds, walnuts, cashews, pepitas) 
¾ tsp ground cinnamon
¾ tsp grated nutmeg
½ tsp ground cloves
½ tsp ground allspice

Method

In a pan, add mixed chopped fruit, oil, coconut sugar, molasses, salt, water and orange juice. Bring the mixture to the boil and set aside to cool completely.  

Preheat oven to 140 degrees. 

Grease and line the base and side of a 22cm spring form cake tin with baking paper, making sure the lining is a few inches taller than the pan.

In a large bowl, sift spelt flour with soda bicarb and baking powder. Add the cooled fruit mixture to the flour, followed by the nuts, zest and spices. Mix well with a long handled spoon. If the mixture is too thick, add some orange juice.

Spoon into prepared tin and smooth the surface with the back of a spoon. 

Cut a thick brown paper bag to size and pop the cake tin inside. If required, tie the paper bag around the outside of the tin.  Fold a sheet of baking parchment into a double square and cut a small hole in the centre.  Cover the top of the cake with this paper, with a hole in the centre. 

Bake the cake on the lower shelf of the oven, look at the table above for baking times, and don’t open the door to peek at it until at least 3 hours have passed. Check for doneness with a skewer and bake a little longer if required.

When done, remove from oven and leave cake pan to cool completely, then turn out and peel off baking paper. 

When the cake is cold, wrap it well in double greaseproof paper and store in an airtight tin.

This will keep fresh for a few days in the fridge. 

I am going to try and freeze it till my fruitcake-loving daughter comes back from overseas.

Showstopper Laadu

Spelt and Edible Gum Laadoo (गोंद के लड्डू - डिंकाचे लाडू)

Diwali is that time of the year when you indulge in things you normally don’t do and to top it, I have inherited Mother’s irrepressible need to make something exotic each Diwali. Every year she would make all the absolute essentials such as ladu, chivda, shankarpali, chakli, et al, but she would come up without fail with a distinctive showstopper for the Diwali pharal (breakfast) that would remain in her guests’ and our minds for a long time. 

I can’t forget her spectacular Gujarati moong-gotey- spicy mint stuffed baby potatoes, coated with a soaked moong dal batter and deep-fried to perfection. She had made rose petal and rava laddus when it still hadn’t become a fashion to clutter everything from decorative brass troughs to food photos with rose petals. Or for that matter, her baking karanjis at a time when ovens weren’t permanent fixtures in most middle class households. 

So it was in this quest for that “something different” that I thought of gond laadus!

There is something very mysterious and unattainable about gond laadus. 

It’s the scarcity principle at work here – a product is coveted and in demand if it is restricted, limited, or inventory is extremely low. As kids, we would be very unreasonably rationed one laddu whenever these laddus were made for a new mum undergoing postnatal confinement in the extended family.  

This was one treat that mothers could “hand over their heart”- without batting one compunctious eyelid - deny their kids.  For the otherwise doting matron, this wasn't a delicacy to indulge your child; it was a health supplement for one of her sorority who had this only opportunity to eat well and rest a bit while she healed.

But why?!

For one, the stuff that goes into these laddus was prohibitively expensive and not always easily available. Then, these laadus were thought to be very “heat inducing” and thus unsuitable for regular consumption (by this I mean what would have been “regular” consumption if we had been allowed unrestricted access). 

On a lighter note, I think the most demanding and difficult task was that of keeping those laddus from marauding kids and men folk. I remember one neighbouring aunty sharing her clever tricks of hiding the dabba of laddus inside other larger dabbas or inside the flour bins and changing the hiding place of the laddus everyday.

But seriously, it simply wasn’t the norm in an average home to indulge in such luxuries so impulsively, so rampantly. 

Then making these laddus was not a very easy task too, what with such involved preparations of buying the best quality, purest acacia gum, sourcing the purest marking tree nut kernels (godambi in Marathi) and the sweetest and plumpest of dried fruit and nuts and seeds.  The cold larder preparations were equally onerous– with the lynching of the dried dates, the shelling and hand pounding of nuts, the sourcing of the ghee which had to be made of cow’s milk – light, fragrant, yellow and grainy. 

When it was my time to eat these laadus with abandonment, I was both too overworked and too stressed to eat these. And yes, postpartum weight gain did weigh heavily on my mind.

Over the years I have made many heirloom dishes for my girls to learn about them and had made these laadus for the first time a couple of years ago.  Some of the remaining gond and kharik had patiently waited in banishment in the furthest corner of the pantry to return to favour. The rest of the ingredients were available at home. Gond laadus it was going to be this Diwali. 

How easy was that! But good things don’t come so easily and certainly not without a contest, do they?

Recent admonishment by my GP has made me introspect about sugars and fats of another nature and description. How on earth was I going to make gond laadus notorious for their calorific excesses and sweet and unctuous treachery?

Bingo! That’s the exoticness I have been looking for. That’s the show stealer- the showstopper challenge of my Diwali preparations.  

What ensued were perfect, lower calorie, enhanced nutrition Spelt Dinakacha Laadus.

My daughter has been trying out alternate foods in her quest to eat healthier. She recently introduced me to Spelt, a delicious and nutritious ancient grain with a deep nutlike flavor. It’s a cousin to wheat, but offers a broader spectrum of nutrients compared to wheat. It is an excellent source of vitamin B2, a very good source of manganese, and a good source of niacin, thiamine and copper. It’s great cholesterol-lowering properties make it good for cardio-vascular health.

Another of the daughter’s discoveries is coconut sugar (not palm sugar). It's sugar made out of the sap of the coconut tree. It has become quite popular recently as a low calorie substitute for sugar for it has a Glycemic Index of 35 compared to the GI of refined white sugar (60) and brown sugar (64). Its caramely jaggery-like taste meant it was a perfect fit on the flavour front. 

The selection of olive oil to shallow fry the edible gum and roast the spelt flour was an adventure that paid off well.

So ladies and gentlemen, presenting the showstopper - Spelt and Gond laadu!

Ingredients

2 ½ cups coconut palm sugar (you can get it in any health food store or online)

1 ½ cups desiccated coconut 

1cup edible gum crystals

1cup almonds  

1cup cashews  

1 cup dried dates (kharik) (you can use fresh dates too)

1 cups whole meal Spelt flour

3 tbsp white poppy seeds 

1 tbsp ghee

 ½ cup Olive oil for frying the gum 

1 tsp ground green cardamom 

½ a small nutmeg, grated/powdered 

Method 

Break the dry dates into small pieces in a mortar and pestle. In Marathi we call this “chechne” - the equivalent of lynching! Remove the seeds (it’s a good idea to count the khariks and then check you have those many seeds – so you don’t accidently get a seed in your mixer and break the blade during the festive season! – I have done that once!) 

Transfer the pieces in a microwave proof dish and pop it in a microwave for a minute or so. Remove and cool the pieces thoroughly. This helps to dry the dates even further and facilitates the grinding.

Heat a kadhai and lightly toast the poppy seeds and remove them onto a plate. Then lightly roast the nuts in the same kadhai and keep aside. Toast the desiccated coconut lightly and set aside. Lightly roast the almonds and the cashews as well and set aside.

Heat about a tbsp of the olive oil in the same kadhai and add two tbsps of the edible gum and pan-fry until gum puffs up and changes colour.  Take care not to burn the gum. Repeat this with the rest of the gum crystals adding more olive oil, till all the gum is fried. Set aside to cool. 

In the same kadhai, add the rest of the olive oil and roast the wholemeal Spelt four till it lets out a heavenly aroma. Set aside and cool.

Keep a tbsp of the toasted poppy seeds and an equal measure of the toasted coconut aside, so you can mix it into the mixture to introduce some texture.

Grind the kharik bits into a crumbly mixture. If the bits grind unevenly, sieve the ground mixture through a large holed sieve so you get uniform meal. Remove into a large mixing bowl. The kharik will lend sweetness to the laddus as well.

Reserve some of the cooled fried gum puffs aside, again for texture, and whiz the rest in the mixer or crush in a mortar and pestle. Remove into the mixing bowl along with the kharik meal.

Mix the nuts, coconut and poppy seeds and whiz the mixture through a grinder and remove in the mixing bowl.

Prepare the coconut sugar syrup in a heavy bottom pan by adding the sugar and a little water.  Bring it to a boil.  Continue cooking until the syrup turns sticky.  It was hard to tell the “string consistency” of syrup made with coconut sugar and I was making it for the first time, so I just went by my gut feeling. In any case, we need the syrup only to bind the nuts and flour mixture.

Turn off the heat and add the powdered ingredients, roasted Spelt flour, the reserved whole gum puffs, poppy seeds and toasted grated coconut. Add cardamom and nutmeg powders.  Add a tbsp of ghee for the flavour. Mix well.  

When the mixture cools a little, shape them into small balls or laadus. 

Store in an airtight jar.