Badusha

If you want real authentic recipe with correct quantities, please refer to the recipe here

I made Badusha many many times and each time it turned out different, I don’t know why. May be the quality of maida or yogurt made them different. I learnt little from each experiment and I used that experience today while making this Badusha. Seriously speaking, I have not measured oil and yogurt in this recipe. And the Badusha has turned out really well. Ravi and Naveen loved those instantly and we finished all at one go.

What I did was, I took 2 cups of maida, added little salt to it, a spoon of baking powder and 1/6th cup of rice flour and mixed them thoroughly (usually people sieve the whole thing together). I kept on adding oil instead of ghee (as I ran out of ghee) until the mixture became like breadcrumbs. Then I kept adding yogurt until the mixture looked like layers and made that into a ball. Do not put water. These are the ground rules for making badusha. Oil/ghee and yogurt form an important part of the recipe. Then covered it with a wet cloth for half an hour. Made small balls out of the dough and pressed in the center. Made thin sugar syrup on the side. Deep fried the balls and soaked in sugar syrup for 15 mins. Took them out and left them aside for an hour.

You can store them for more than a month in a refrigerator. Heat those for 10 sec before eating.

Chana Dal Payasam

It's a quick way of making this payasam. I heard people making this payasam but never made one. My mom makes Polelu (Puran Poli) on Ugadi with Pachadi and some kind of dal with the dal and jaggery/bellam (gur). I never thought I would make this when I started cooking, but somehow ended up making this dish.'

You need...
1 cup chana dal
1 cup water
1 cup milk
1 tsbp ghee
dry fruits
3 cubes Jaggery/bellam
1 spoon cardammon powder

1. Cook chana dal in pressure cooker. Mash half of it.
2. Make jaggery syrup in the pan by adding a cup of water to jaggery. Let it come to a boil.
3. Heat 1 cup milk in a microwave and add it to the syrup.
4. Add chana dal and cardammon powder.
5. Heat a small pan, add ghee, fry dry fruits (cashews, almonds, raisins) and add it to the payasam.

Serve hot or cold, it tasted good both ways. You can try adding dried cocunut pieces along with other dry fruits. For the picture, check my previous post.

Ragi Pudding

I make this quite often now, atleast twice a week. We are incorporating Ragi into our daily food schedule. We are either eating Ragi Dosa or Ragi Pudding daily for dinner after reading a lot of good stuff about Ragi. I even asked Mom to make this for Dad sometimes. My mom talked about Ragi Ambali (that I never heard before), she also gave me the recipe and I will try that soon.

I made this in Microwave though Microwave is not recommended for cooking because of the loss of nutrients due to the radiation.

You need...

3 cups Milk
1 cup Ragi
3 spoons of Jaggery
1/2 spoon dry fruit masala

1. Heat milk in the microwave for 2 or 3 minutes.
2. Mix Ragi with little milk to form a paste.
3. Add that paste to the milk and cook in microwave in 30 sec increments. Remove after 30 sec and mix. Ragi tends to become hard but mix that well and cook again. Cook until the kind of thickness you want. I get my kind of thickness (like pudding) in just 2 or 3 increments. Add dry fruit masala and serve hot.

It is healthy and tasty too. It tastes something like Bambino sweet.

To make Dry Fruit Masala you need..

one tablespoon each of cashews, almonds, pista and one or two cardammoms (Ravi doesn't like the taste of cardammom, he says it dominates, so I put little) and blend all together. Keep the masala for future use. I put this masala in all the desserts.