Homemade Guacamole and Chips

Few snacks are as wholly satisfying as guac and tortilla chips.

For tortillas:
4 tortillas (pick your favourite)
2-3 tsp cooking oil (your favourite)

Procedure:
Stack the tortillas and coat one side of each with a little oil. Cut them into sections using a pizza cutter. Lay the pieces on a baking tray and bake them in an oven at 375 degrees for 10 minutes. Flip them over halfway through and check that they are not getting burnt. Repeat if necessary. Healthy tortilla chips.


For guacamole:
4 avocados, peeled, cored and roughly chopped
1 tomato diced
1 onion finely chopped
juice of one lemon (optional)
1 tsp mexican hot sauce
salt to taste

Method:
Add all ingredients in a mixing bowl....squoosh to the desired consistency. There you go!

My new santoku knife

I don't even remember the time when I started dreaming about a good kitchen knife. I recently bought a set of four knives with a knife block, but the past several days, I have been drooling over the idea of owning a santoku knife. I checked out a couple of them in the stores and the price range was very broad. I have never used one before, so I wanted to try out a moderately priced one to see if I really like it, before investing in a more expensive one.

I bought one this evening, and loved using it for the first time. I think one of my favourite parts is how you can scoop up cut veggies into your hand using the knife.

Tamale Pie

This is a real comfort food recipe and a very easy one to make. I tried looking for the provenance of the recipe, but was not really able to find anything concrete. Drop me a line if you know about its origins. This dish is usually cooked with ground beef, but we decided to use ground chicken instead.

Ingredients:
1 store bought pack of ground chicken
1 store bought pie crust
1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 large onion
2 tsp freshly ground cumin powder
3/4 cup fresh corn
1 red bell pepper diced
1 cup tomato sauce (puree)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tbsp cooking oil
1 tsp hot sauce
salt to taste

Procedure:
Heat oil in a pan, and add the chopped onions and garlic. Saute till the onions are translucent. Add the cumin powder and sauté for a minute. Add the ground chicken and keep stirring till the minced chicken is white. Continue to stir making sure there are no lumps. Add the diced bell pepper, corn and tomato sauce and stir well till the tomato sauce is well soaked into the mixture. Add the hot sauce and cook for a minute.



Carefully arrange the pie crust in a baking tray/vessel. Pour the mixture on to the crust. Bake at 375 degrees for 25 minutes. Top with the shredded sharp cheddar and bake for 10 more minutes.

Homemade Kulfi

This is an improvisation on a brilliant mango ice-cream recipe that we have tried and loved. With a cool improvisation, it turns into an awesome kulfi recipe.

Ingredients:

1 can condensed milk
1 and a half cans evaporated milk
1 box cool whip
half cup almonds, pistachios and cashews
1 tsp ground cardamoms

Grind the dry-fruits in a food processor into a fine consistency. Mix all ingredients together along with the ground dryfruits in a large vessel till they form a thick smooth paste. Make sure there are no lumps. Freeze for at least 8 hours. Garnish with raisins.


PS: For the original mango ice-cream recipe, replace the evaporated milk with a tin of mango pulp (aamras), and avoid the dryfruits. I promise, it is the best mango ice-cream I have ever eaten.

modprobe for tun driver failed

My school uses the Juniper Network Connect client software to provide a VPN solution. So the typical usage scenario is that you go to vpn.organization.com and login with your credentials. Then you click on the start button against the network connect. Then it installs a java client on your machine and you are connected to the school network, and all is dandy.

This was working fine till I installed Linux Mint 9 Isadora on my laptop and one fine day it just stopped working for me. Every time it would try to install the client, I would get an error message saying:

modprobe for tun driver failed

I searched for solutions online and I found this: http://mad-scientist.us/juniper.html
The guy is providing a custom script to help you install the client on your machine, but I realized that I did not have to go so far. I also found some people saying that the juniper client has had issues with openjdk on certain linux systems. So I went ahead and uninstalled openjdk from my box:
$ sudo apt-get remove openjdk-6-jre

Next I installed sun's jdk and browser plugin:
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin
I restarted the browser, went back to vpn.organization.com, and everything started working fine, even though I continued to get the modprobe error.

My Dum Biryani

I decided to make the vegetable biryani because I was catering to at-least one vegetarian. So here goes...

सामग्री (serves 8 )

3 cups basmati rice
3 medium sized potatoes
3 large carrots
half a cauliflower
2 large onions
1.5 cups yoghurt (dahi)
3 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp whole garam masala (corriander seeds, cumin seeds, cinnamon, black cardamom, cloves...you know, the whole shebang)
1 tsp haldi powder
1 tsp red chilli powder
2 tbsp pulav/biryani masala (store bought...or if you are adventurous, you can make your own)
half cup finely chopped cilantro (hara dhania)
half cup finely chopped mint leaves (hara pudina)
salt to taste

विधि

• First of all, soak the basmati rice in warm water for at-least one hour in advance. Finely slice the onions and fry them in adequate quantity of oil till they acquire a dark brown color. Keep it aside. In the meantime, chop all the vegetables into bite size pieces. (make them larger than usual i.e. if you are cooking a sabzi)

• In a large pan or kadhai, add some oil. When the oil gets hot, add the whole garam masala and saute for a couple of seconds. Add some jeera, and ginger garlic paste. Now add the chopped vegetables.  Add the red chilli powder, haldi powder, biryani masala and salt to taste. Saute for 5 minutes. Keep stirring occasionally. Add half the quantity of yoghurt, and half the quantity of the chopped mint and cilantro. Make sure that all the pieces of vegetables are coated nicely. We need to cook these vegetables to about 70-80%. Try to cut into a piece of potato. It should not be too hard, and at the same time, don't allow them to cook all the way.

• In another pan, bring a quart of water to a rolling boil. Add some oil, and some whole garam masala to the water. Add the pre-soaked rice to the water. We need to cook this rice to about 70-80%. This will take only about 3-4 minutes in the boiling water since the rice has been soaked for an hour (keep checking the rice). Drain the excess water and keep the rice aside.


• Now comes the part where we layer the vegetables and the rice in a medium sized container (I found the pressure cooker container to be ideal size for this). Add half the rice to the cooker. Add a little more than half of the cooked vegetables on top of the rice. Add the rest of the yoghurt on top. Heat this up a little on low flame while mixing it up nicely. Check for seasoning and add more salt if needed. Add a layer of the fried onions.

• Now add all but a little of the remaining rice on top of the onions. Stack the remaining cooked vegetables on top of the rice, and add the rest of the chopped onions.  Finally top with the last bit of the rice. Garnish with the remaining chopped mint and cilantro

• Cover the cooker with a flat plate, and seal the edges with a bit of dough. Place this vessel into a double boiler as shown in the image below. Cook on medium flame for 30 minutes.

• Open the cooker after 30 minutes to a beautiful aroma.

• Serve with boondi raita (recipe for that in another post).

Some Like it Cold

Vichyssoise soup is a thick vegetable based soup that is very often served cold.  There is some debate about whether this soup is a French or an American creation. This soup can be served both  hot and cold, but I wanted to cook it because I had never tried a cold soup before. The following is the recipe:

सामग्री (serves 5)

1 leek

1 bunch scallions

1 large zuccini

1 red potato

1/4 head cabbage

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

2 tsp sugar

salt to taste

1/2 cup whole milk (I used this instead of heavy cream)

2 and a half cups water (or chicken broth)

1/2 stick butter

1 tbsp cooking oil (use your favourite)

विधि

Roughly chop all the vegetables and keep aside. In a large saucepan, add the butter, oil and ground nutmeg. Let the butter melt. Add all the chopped vegetables, salt and sugar and stir till the vegetables start to cook. Add the milk and water and bring to boil. Reduce the flame to medium and simmer covered for 20 minutes.

Remove the pan from the flame. Use a hand-blender to blend the contents of the pan to form a think soup like consistency. If you don't have a hand blender, use a tabletop blender or food processor. Fill only up to 1/3 the capacity of the blender at a time. Refrigerate the soup for at-least four hours.

Before serving, check seasoning, and stir in some heavy cream if you like (or not, if you are afraid of the calorie mafia. you can also substitute heavy cream by whole milk). Garnish with freshly chopped parsley. Serve with toasted baguette.

Blank Un-numbered pages in a latex manuscript

I recently submitted my MS thesis to the university graduate school. After a couple of days, I got an email from them saying:

Your manuscript requires three blank, unnumbered pages: one at the beginning of your manuscript, the second one after the copyright page and the third one at the end of your manuscript.

Now, since my thesis was formatted using latex, it took a little bit of searching. The solution was quite simple, but not so easy to find. Thanks Night Walker.

\newpage
\thispagestyle{empty}
\mbox{}

Add the above block of code to your main document and you will be good to go. Essentially this creates a new page with an empty style, and adds an mbox with empty text.