Palak Karachi Hotel Style

Friday, January 8, 2021

  •  hello guys please note 1kg for home cooking....
  • ghee /cooking oil... 1cup
  • onion................2 medium size
  • ginger paste...1 tea spn
  • garlic paste.....1 tea spn
  • tomato.............2 medium size
  • salt..... to taste..?
  • red chilli powder... 1 tbl spn
  • tumeric.......... 1 tea spn
  • cumin seed crushed. 1 tea spn
  • dry corieander crushed...1 tea spn
  • Spinach .......1kg
  • potato....half kg
  • green chilli....4to5
  • garam masala powder....1 tea spn
  • black paper powder....... 1 tea spn
  • Try our recipe And enjoy your lovely family and remember us in your prayers.

Ricotta Scramble with Tomatoes (Requeson Revuelto)

Monday, January 4, 2021

 

Ricotta Scramble with Tomatoes (Requeson Revuelto)

This scramble of fresh ricotta, flavored with chiles, onions, and tomatoes, is delicious wrapped in warm tortillas or piled on toasted bread.Penny De Los Santos

Yield: makes 2 1/2 CUPS

Ingredients

  • 1⁄4 cup canola oil
  • 4 serrano chiles, stemmed, seeded, and finely chopped
  • 1 small white onion, finely chopped
  • 2 plum tomatoes, cored and finely chopped
  • 2 1⁄2 cups ricotta cheese
  • Kosher salt, to taste
  • Warm tortillas, for serving

Instructions

  1. Heat oil in a 12″ skillet over medium-high heat. Add chiles and onion, and cook, stirring, until soft, about 4 minutes. Add tomatoes, and cook, stirring, until almost dry, about 6 minutes. Add ricotta, and cook, stirring often, until mixture begins to turn light brown and ricotta is very smooth and thickened, about 20 minutes. Remove from heat and season with salt; serve immediately with tortillas.

The Expat: Diana Kennedy

 

The Expat: Diana Kennedy

Diana Kennedy's greatest gift to Mexico is her outsider's perspective

"The Julia Child of Mexico? Oh dear, what nonsense." Diana Kennedy is making her way briskly across the small central square of Zitacuaro, a town of about 150,000 in the pine-forested mountains of northeast Michoacan state. "Of course I'm flattered by the comparison," she adds, "but it's totally inaccurate." I have just arrived to spend a few days at Kennedy's home, in the countryside not far from here, observing the British-born authority on Mexican cuisine—renowned cook, ethnographer, naturalist, and perfectionist—at work. The slight 89-year-old calls out to me over her shoulder as she goes; it's all I can do to keep up. We advance into the maze of the covered market, and vendors to the left and to the right call out to Kennedy as she moves from stall to stall, vocally appraising what's on offer, in a crisp British accent that seems not to have diminished in the 55 years since she first arrived in Mexico. Of some pale guavas: "These are a little over the hill. I want them greener." Of the wild mushrooms called clavitos (little nails): "Unusual to see them this late in the year. Troubling." Of a sack of chiles de arbol: "Imported from China! The flavor is not the same! And look, they're 80 pesos to the kilo; the local ones are 120. How can the farmers be expected to compete?" At the table of a seller of wild greens, Kennedy's eyes light up at the sight of quelites (lamb's-quarter). "Señora, how do you cook it?" she asks. The vendor replies that she boils them in unsalted water, drains, and then salts them. It must be sheer reflex by now, this thing that Kennedy has spent a half-century doing: collecting recipes from cooks across the vast span of Mexico, a job that is never complete.

As we head out onto the road in Kennedy's Nissan pickup truck, the parking attendant offers a blessing. Kennedy beams. "Always nice to get a blessing, isn't it? Especially as I'm such a pagan!" Next stop is a pulqueria—a cantina specializing in the sale of pulque, the fermented sap of maguey. The owner, whom she introduces as Rigoberto Medrano Soto, fills small earthenware cups with frothing, milky white pulque—bracing, sour, vigorously effervescent. Kennedy and the pulquero discuss the health of his plants, and the work of a maguey researcher Kennedy recently brought back with her from a conference in Hidalgo. This is another vital aspect of her work: the collecting and cataloguing of information about edible plants in Mexico, a place of astonishing biodiversity.

"The Julia Child of Mexico? Oh dear, what nonsense."

In fact, the more time I spend with Diana Kennedy, the more I'm reminded not of Julia Child, but of the 19th-century philosopher-naturalists, of Charles Darwin, or Henry David Thoreau, an impression only reinforced by a tour of her adobe house. It's beautiful but not at all grand, more like a thing that sprang from the rocky soil than a structure built by human hands, surrounded by evergreen forest and vegetable gardens heaving with produce. The man Kennedy describes as the foreman of the property, Carlos Ferrer, works closely with botanists from UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico); when I arrive, he's preparing a batch of plant samples. There is an agreeable, industrious sort of feeling all around.

In an outdoor kitchen equipped with wood-fired grills and two adobe beehive ovens, reflectors are set up to harness the sun's energy and heat water; pinned to a clothesline nearby, plastic bags, rinsed for reuse, bob on the breeze. Upstairs, Kennedy's bedroom opens onto a sun-drenched study; books and papers are stacked on every surface ("My out-box," she says, pointing to a chaise longue buried in mail), and dozens of morel mushrooms are laid out to dry. A door past the staircase leads to a greenhouse planted in specimens ranging from culantro to vanilla to bananas. A large tank collects rainwater throughout the year—it's the house's only source, and Kennedy monitors every drop—while a patch of land below the garden serves as a filter bed for waste water.

I think again of Thoreau, and his own experiment in living close to the land at Walden Pond: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Kennedy's statement of purpose, laid out in her book My Mexico (Clarkson Potter, 1998), is slightly less grandiloquent but no less firm in its convictions: "I wanted a house of locally made materials that would address itself to the resources of the area and be in tune with the restrictions with which my neighbors had to live, and had survived, for many years." And it must be said, while Thoreau lasted two years in the woods, Kennedy has persevered for 32, and counting.

I return to the pulqueria one evening, and as the sun drops behind the mountains, Medrano Soto provides some perspective on what persevering in this part of Mexico has come to mean in recent years. The area has seen its share of the narco-crime currently oppressing the country. People are on edge, cautious about going out; whereas his father typically sold 500 liters of pulque daily back in the 1980s, today the pulqueria sells more like 30 liters in a day, most of it carry-out. Kennedy, he emphasizes, has set down deep roots in this place. "She's very altruistic," he says. "She cares about things a lot of Mexican people don't."

It's a common refrain among Kennedy's friends and colleagues, in Mexico and abroad. Carmen "Titita" Ramirez Degollado, the chef-matriarch who presides over the El Bajio restaurants in Mexico City, is one of many Mexican chefs who have made the pilgrimage to Kennedy's kitchen to cook and learn. "Diana has dedicated her life to Mexican cooking!" she says. According to Fran McCullough, the editor at Harper & Row who worked with Kennedy to produce her seminal early books in the 1970s (see A Life in Letters), "Because she started her work when she did, and with an anthropologist's eye but a home cook's approach, she had a unique appreciation of the cooks who shared their food with her. She has both authority and an amateur's total surrender to her subject."

"I wanted a house of locally made materials that would address itself to the resources of the area and be in tune with the restrictions with which my neighbors had to live, and had survived, for many years."

As for Kennedy, she's a stickler about giving credit where it's due. "Josefina Velazquez de Leon did it first, beginning in the 1940s," she says, "traveling to different regions, collecting recipes, and publishing them. She was the one who opened my eyes to Mexico's regional cuisines." As a writer, Kennedy's inspiration was fellow Englishwoman Elizabeth David, "though I'm not as scholarly—no, not nearly—as she."

Writing books wasn't even a faint ambition when Kennedy (nee Diana Southwood) arrived in Mexico in 1957, with her soon-to-be husband, Paul Kennedy, a New York Times correspondent living in the capital. In a poignant passage from Nothing Fancy (Dial Press, 1984), her wonderful memoir-with-recipes, Kennedy draws a sketch of her husband with characteristic candor and economy. "He would collect recipes for me when I couldn't accompany him on his travels," she writes, and then shares one that he recorded for "Sancocho (Dominican National Dish)," hilarious in its telegraphic terseness. "His typing was no better than mine, his spelling far worse—like me, he was always in a hurry."

Over several afternoons in Kennedy's kitchen—the indoor one, with a great tiled "peninsula" equipped with gas burners, its counters strewn with yet more labeled, dated specimens (chiles, herbs, pineapple vinegars)—I get more mental snapshots from that happy period in her life, in the 1950s and '60s, when every day brought thrilling new flavors and exotic ingredients. Preparing a snack of salsa de albañil (literally, "bricklayers' sauce"), a tangy tomatillo salsa with sliced avocado, strips of queso fresco, and chopped cilantro, Kennedy recalls the first time she tried it, at the Lincoln Grill in Mexico City in the early '60s. It was served to "soak up the drinks," along with tortillas.

In the late 1960s, when Kennedy was living in New York City following her husband's untimely death from cancer, it was her friend Craig Claiborne, the food editor of The New York Times, who pushed her to start teaching Mexican cooking classes. That's how McCullough, then an editor at Harper & Row and a California transplant hungry for good Mexican food, found her, and ended up working on five books with her. By 1976 Kennedy was back in Mexico City; in 1980, she moved out here to Michoacan, to the property she dubbed Quinta Diana. Before long, the acolytes began arriving at her kitchen door.

As we work, Kennedy's kitchen assistant, a young man named Miguel Angel, works alongside us; he and she cook in easy symbiosis, often taking over from one another mid-task. I'm assigned to slice an avocado, a duty of which I have, up to now, considered myself adequately capable. Kennedy takes one look and says, "Well, we won't be photographing that one." This qualifies as getting off easy. "I've seen her bring a very famous chef to tears by critiquing his efforts to make her food," McCullough tells me. But isn't learning the point? Here is a woman who went into the woods to live deliberately. If you don't want to do things her way, then why follow her into the woods?

She has both authority and an amateur's total surrender to her subject.

What strikes me above all about the dishes we prepare in Kennedy's kitchen is how simple, but also deeply flavorful and satisfying, they are. A Oaxacan egg-and-masa "omelet" infused with the rich, round, root beer-like flavor of yerba santa leaf. Lusty Central Mexican-style "pot" beans topped with soft cheese melting to cream. "I just mash the beans slightly," she says, "so they'll absorb more flavor." Requeson revuelto, a ricotta scramble with serrano chiles, is cooked until the curds are golden and sweetened ever so slightly by tomatoes. These are dishes she's made too many times to count, the kind of thing she'll produce in minutes for lunch. But she approaches each one as if she's making it for the first time. After all these years, the ingredients still turn her on. Sauteing some quintonil, a green in the amaranth family, on a ceramic comal, she inhales deeply. "Smells of iron, doesn't it?" she murmurs. "And the chickens are going to love it, because they'll get all those stalks!"

Honest food. "Comida casera," she calls it, home cooking of the very best kind. The attention to detail and technique, to doing things properly, that she's observed in Mexican home cooks has earned her highest admiration. "To me, the interesting part of cooking is cooking," she says, "bringing flavors out of ingredients, not having to put flavors in." Fronting, in other words, only the essential facts of life.

Vietnamese Rice Paper Rolls (Spring Rolls)

 


Recipe video above. Vietnamese Rice Paper Rolls are incredibly fresh and healthy. The Vietnamese peanut dipping sauce that accompanies this is sensational and completely addictive!
Prep Time20 mins
Total Time20 mins
Course: Appetizer, Finger Food, Starter
Cuisine: Vietnamese
Keyword: Vietnamese Rice Paper Rolls
 
Servings: 7
 
Calories: 135cal
 
Author: Nagi | RecipeTin Eats

Ingredients

  • 7 - 14 sheets of 22cm/8.5" round rice paper (Note 1)
  • 11 small cooked prawns/shrimp (about 12cm/5" in length, unpeeled including the head)
  • 50g / 1.5 oz dried vermicelli noodles
  • 7 lettuce leaves - use a lettuce with soft leaves, like Oak or Butter Lettuce (Note 2)
  • 14 mint leaves
  • 1 cup bean sprouts

Vietnamese Peanut Dipping Sauce (Note 3)

  • 1 tbsp peanut butter, preferably smooth (crunchy is ok too)
  • 2 tbsp Hoisin Sauce
  • 1 1/2 tbsp white vinegar (or lime juice)
  • 1/3 cup milk (any fat %) (or water)
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • 1/2 tsp crushed chilli, samba oelak or other chilli paste, adjust to taste (optional)

Instructions

  • Peanut Sauce: Combine the Peanut Dipping Sauce ingredients. Mix briefly (it won't come together), then microwave for 30 seconds. Mix again until smooth. Set aside to cool. Adjust sour with vinegar, salt with salt and spiciness to taste.  Thickness can be adjusted with milk or water once cooled.
  • Place vermicelli noodles in a bowl and cover with warm water for 2 minutes, then drain (or follow packet instructions).
  • Peel the prawns, slice in half lengthwise and devein (watch video).
  • Remove the crunchy core of the lettuce leaves (watch video).
  • Tip - LETTUCE BUNDLE (Note 4): Place some vermicelli noodles and bean sprouts in a lettuce leaf, then roll it up, finishing seam side down. Repeat.
  • Fill a large bowl with warm water. The bowl doesn't need to be large enough to fit the whole rice paper in one go.
  • Place two rice papers together (if using 2). Note which side is the smooth side - this is supposed to be the outside of the spring roll. Submerge the rice papers into the water (both of them at the same time, together) for 2 seconds. If your bowl isn't large enough to fit the whole rice paper in one go, that's fine, just rotate it and count 2 seconds for each section you submerge into the water.
  • Place both the rice papers (one on top of the other, they will stick together) on a board or the counter with the smooth side down.
  • On the top part of the rice paper, place 3 prawns with a mint leaf in between, as per the photo below.
  • Place the lettuce bundle with the seam side down onto the middle of the rice paper.
  • Fold the left and right edges of the rice paper in, then starting from the bottom, roll up to cover the lettuce bundle. Then keep rolling firmly. The rice paper is sticky, it will seal itself.
  • If you placed the ingredients on the rice paper as per the photo below, your rice paper rolls should look pretty with the prawn and mint leaves on the smooth side of the roll and the seam on the side or underside of the roll.
  • Serve immediately with the peanut dipping sauce.

Notes

* Peanut free sauce alternative: sweet chilli sauce.
1. Tip to make your rice paper roll life easier: use 2 rice papers per roll. Easier to handle and less prone to tearing. The ends of the roll where there are quadruple layers of rice paper will be a bit chewier, but not super chewy, it is still soft. 
Nowadays, rice paper is sold even at supermarkets here in Australia, in the Asian section. It's super good value too!
2. Lettuce: I use butter or oak lettuce because they are softer and more pliable than iceberg which makes it perfect for rolling up. Iceberg and other crunchy lettuce doesn't work as well because they break when you scrunch them, and are prone to tearing the rice paper. If you can't find a soft lettuce, then I suggest shredding the lettuce - it will make it much easier to handle!
3. Sauce: Some Hoisin sauces differ in strength of flavour so adjust the flavour to taste at the end by adding more peanut butter or vinegar, then milk or water to adjust thickness. Milk doesn't add flavour to the sauce, it just makes it a lighter colour so you know it's a peanut sauce - the colour you get at Vietnamese restaurants. So you can use water if you prefer, but the sauce will be a darker brown. Or even coconut milk!
4. My tip for rolling these up is to wrap the bean sprouts and vermicelli noodles in the lettuce then roll it up and/or scrunch it lightly so it stays together. Then roll it up in the rice paper. Much easier to handle!
5. STORAGE: Some recipes will tell you that you can make rice paper rolls the day before and you can keep them moist with a damp paper towel. Firstly, I find that the rice paper rolls smelt like the paper towel and secondly, they didn't hold up that great anyway. My rule of thumb is 6 hours (max 8) - you can make them up to 6 hours ahead, tightly wrap each one in cling wrap as soon as you make them and refrigerate. Don't just put them on a plate and put cling wrap on the plate, you should roll up each on in cling wrap (you should be able to fit 2 per piece of cling wrap - wrap one first, then place another next to it and roll up with the remaining cling wrap).
DIY OPTION: A popular menu item at Vietnamese restaurants here in Sydney are DIY rice paper rolls. So lay out all the components in this recipe out on a table with a large bowl of water, and let everyone make their own!
6. OTHER FILLING IDEAS: * Julienned vegetables like carrots, cucumbers* Alfalfa, watercress and other similar shaped vegetables* Thinly sliced tofu* Shredded chicken and other proteins* Other herbs like coriander/cilantro, chives (this is classic Viet)
7. ORIGINAL PEANUT DIPPING SAUCE: As requested by a reader! The one provided in the recipe is more authentic and akin to what you get at Vietnamese restaurants here in Sydney. But here is the original one, FYI:
½ cup smooth peanut butter1 tbsp sugar4 tbsp hoisin sauce1 tbsp sweet soy sauce (kecap manis, it's thick like syrup)2 small garlic cloves (or 1 large), minced1 birds eye chilli, finely chopped1 tbsp sesame oil2 tbsp lime juiceWater
Mix together ingredients, using water to thin to a dippable consistency.
8. Nutrition per rice paper roll, no sauce.




Vietnamese Noodle Salad

 


Noodle Salad

This is a great, fresh salad with a fantastic Vietnamese dressing based on a recipe by Bill Granger, a famous Australia chef. I really like this dressing because it's got plenty of flavour but the fish sauce is mild in it. I love Nuoc Cham, which is the classic Vietnamese dipping sauce that doubles as dressings. But some people find that the fish sauce flavour is too strong. Plus, it's an art form to get the flavour balance right!
Prep Time15 mins
Cook Time5 mins
Total Time20 mins
Course: Salad
Cuisine: Modern Vietnamese
 
Servings: 2 - 3
 
Calories: 273cal
 
Author: Nagi | RecipeTin Eats

Ingredients

Garlic Shrimp (Prawns)

  • 12 - 15 medium shrimp (prawns), shelled and deveined (about 5 - 7 oz / 150 - 200g, excluding shells)
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 2 garlic cloves , minced
  • Pinch of salt and pepper

Dressing

  • 1/4 cup lime juice
  • 1/4 cup fish sauce
  • 2 tbsp rice vinegar
  • 1 tbsp caster sugar
  • 1 large garlic clove , very finely chopped
  • 1 tsp very finely chopped red chili , adjust to taste (I use birds eye which is spicy)

Salad

  • 2.5 oz / 75g dried rice vermicelli noodles (Note 1)
  • 3 cups iceberg lettuce , shredded
  • 1 cup carrot , cut into fine matchsticks
  • 1 1/2 cups cucumber , cut into matchsticks
  • 1 1/2 cups beansprouts
  • 1/4 cup coriander leaves , lightly packed
  • 1/4 cup mint leaves (ordinary or Vietnamese), lightly packed

Instructions

  • Combine the Garlic Shrimp ingredients in a small bowl and set aside for 10 minutes.
  • Combine the Dressing ingredients in a small jar, give it a shake then set aside for 10 minutes.
  • Heat a skillet / fry pan over high heat. Add the shrimp, scraping in the olive oil and garlic from the sides of the bowl. Cook for 2 minutes, or until browned and the shrimp is just cooked through. (Note 2)
  • Remove the prawns from the skillet onto a plate.
  • Prepare the vermicelli noodles according to the packet directions. I like to just soak them in hot tap water for a few minutes, this ensures they don't overcook. Then drain the noodles.
  • Arrange the noodles and remaining Salad ingredients on a large plate (like the photo) or toss together in a bowl. Top with prawns (warm or at room temperature). Drizzle over the Dressing (or toss through), or you can serve the Dressing on the side.
  • Serve immediately.

Notes

1. You can use any type of vermicelli noodles in this, rice or bean. The bean ones are slightly more see through. You can also increase the quantity if you want, to fill it out more.
2. How to tell if prawns are cooked: raw prawns hang almost straight, perfectly cooked prawns curl into a "C" shape and overcooked prawns form a tight "O" shape.
3. This salad is also fantastic with chicken. Just omit the Garlic Shrimp completely and replace with cooked, diced or shredded chicken.
4. Nutrition per serving assuming this serves 3 people. The sodium looks very high because of the amount of dressing made. You need that much dressing to pour it all over the salad, but I'd guess around 1/4 ends up pooled at the bottom of the plate at the end.
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