black pepper - add spice to your taste buds!

This King of Spices is one of my favorite ingredients in my kitchen. I always make sure I have got some ground pepper ready in my cabinet. Home ground pepper is what i prefer over the powdered black pepper that we get in the market. Fresh ground ones add a zest to your food. I think im really head over heals in love with this spice!

PHOTO: http://www.exportersindia.com/

Food @ Auroville

This weekend getaway to auroville-pondichery gave me a good chance to savor on some good food. Also considering my huge appetite during my 6th month of pregnancy! :-) We had some great Italian pizzas at Auroville and some mouth melting quiches. Le Cafe at Pondichery beach had an awesome variety of food. They just looked so colorful and elegant! And they were more mouth watering than they looked.

Im loving my kitchen

Now that I've been relieved (I'm actually relieved!) from my IT career, I've begun to concentrate more on my kitchen and enjoying it too.

Yesterday I made a successful attempt at Hommous and Pitta bread alhamdulillah. I've been wanting to try it out for a very long time now. Yesterday availability of all the ingredients and the guinea pigs (my brothers-in-law and husband this time) made it perfectly possible to give this a try. Had to do a lot of net browsing and trusting my judgment before making the attempt. I followed the video that was posted by dede on youtube for making hommous.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4uSf0d5yhw
It turned out terrific. The tahini (sesame paste) mentioned in the video is not available in the Indian market. So had to make that on my own. About.com helped me do that - http://mideastfood.about.com/od/dipsandsauces/r/tahinirecipe.htm
I was thrilled to learn that the tahini stays in the fridge for 3 months. All that effort definetly not in vain.
The pitta bread however was my own mix-and-match-recipe. You won't beleive i actually combined the pitta bread recipe I found in one of the magazines with my mother's naan recipe to make my own pitta bread which we call khubus at home.
Here's what i did for pitta bread - I dissolved about 2 tsp of instant yeast into warm water. added half tsp of sugar and left to froth for 20 minutes. After that mixed 2 cups of maida, some salt, yeast mixture and water to make a dough. Had to knead for 10-15 miutes. I placed the dough on a big plate coated with olive oil and left it covered with a moist clean cloth for nearly 3 hours. The dough had turned almost double its orignal size and fluffy inside.I then rolled 8 pitta breads with my hand before baking then in an oven. each bread was cooked for 5 minutes turning the side half way through. It fluffed up inside the oven and so did my smile :-)

The hommous and the pitta bread turned out a awesome appetizer yesterday evening.