Cooking like my mother

I have had the recipe for a long time but for some reason, it just sat there in my recipe drawer. Every now and then, i will draw it out as the "next" thing to try but never ended up trying it. The recipe calls for a large oven safe pot for cooking, preferably a cast iron dutch oven. Last week I decided to sneak in an order of a 5 quart cast iron dutch oven while I was ordering other things from Amazon. It came earlier this week and I got baking. Recipe A web search of no knead bread turns up lot of different food blogs with videos, images etc.  All those were very helpful to understand the instructions in details and gain confidence. For the proportions and recipe. I decided to follow the paper recipe (also available at New York times here).  Only problem I ran into is that recipe calls for 1 and 5/8th cups of water. I figured 5/8th of a cup is same as the 1/2 + 1/8th of a cup (I was feeling very proud to have used my math skills for these calculations!). I eye ba...

I bought Ragi (finger millet) flour over 6 months ago in hope of making ragi roti. But the idea of spreading roti with my hands kept me from trying to make it. Finally watching couple of you tube videos made me feel comfortable enough to give it a try this Sunday. Chopped shallots, green onion, cilantro ready to be added to ragi flour.  Cilantro, hot green chillies, yogurt, grated coconut ready to be blended into coconut cilantro chutney. C  I used lightly oil parchment paper to spread ragi roti. Enjoyed ragi roti with chutney and some leftover sambhar (from previous day). It turned out to be a 4 star recipe getting good reviews from everybody in the family. Recipe The two videos that I really found useful were this video that  shows how to roll out roti on a plastic sheet  and  this video which shows multiple ways of rolling out the roti .

The reaction from people of all ages who taste the appams for the first time is always the same - they find it delicious and they always assume that making it must be really complicated. I cant describe how surprised and pleased I was when Mummy introduced Appams to me several years ago in 2001 or 2002. I had eaten something similar in Bangalore but had no idea of how to make it. I was even more pleased to find out that Mummy had got me an Appam Patra, a special gadget/pan required for making Appams. Mummy had got these pans on special order from Madras. Since there was a high demand for the pans among anybody who tasted the Appam and also because they were not available in Agra, i considered myself extremely lucky to get one. This is a good example of how mummy was always seeking and embracing new recipes and making it part of the family tradition. Having learnt the recipe, I made it and served it to people who visited us and had a similar reaction. Anybody who tasted appams for the f...