Cooking Day : A Fruit Salad, Fun With Lemons & Churning Butter

Today for most of the day we spent our time cooking. The  2nd maid didnt turn up and we started out cutting the veggies for the lunch. The girls started out with the salad cutting & Chellu soon came up with the idea of a fruit salad. She selected the fruits , got the pomegrante seeds out, cut green apple & grapes while Kunju peeled & cut the cucumber & along with her akka deseeded the cherries. Chellu experimented with the apple cutter & much to her amusement saw the cutter getting broken!
Next Chellu helped a little with cutting the greens but soon gave up since it was proving to be too hard.

In the afternoon I got out all the huge lemons from Hemant's farm and along with Ayush the girls juiced out @ 10-15 of them. The best part was they went @ our building & others  asking for juicers.  The girls cut the lemons & then the fun started- the 3 of them had a gala time juicing the lemons. They tried all the juicers they had borrowed..tried with diffn pressures, techniques , fought a bit about which one to use, tried along & together ...all sorts of stuff was seen!

After that Ayush left & the girls helped a little with churning butter out of cream. They did quite a bit initially but soon got cranky & bored since it takes an awfully long time.  I realized that this activity is great when they are called in during the very last stage when the butter is about to get separated ( had done this last time & it was a gr8 hit. But this time it kinda back-fired !!! ) Lessons learned and lots of fun had!

                                                  Fruit Salad with a sprinkling of chaat masala.

Cooking With Mud

Mitti ki chapatti ready for their babies.

Mitti ka cake- the mud is the chocolate , white flowers the cream and the pink flower in the middle is the cherry.

Yep..thats true! Chellu devised a novel way of cooking- cooking with mud. She & kunju have created so far 2 mud cakes , mitti ki chapatti, mitti ki atta & mitti ki dal. 

Chocolate Pouches

This was again made from the cooking art book. Chellu mixed cocoa powder, dry milk powder & brown sugar really well . The packed it in small plastic pouches & neatly tied it with satin ribbons. She then happily gifted each pouch to a friend of hers. Must have made @ 10 of them.

Ofcourse one of them got to be gift-wrapped like a bag.To it was also added a satin ribbon in the form of a bag handle. It was for her favorite cousin-Dhriti. All of Dhriti's presents always get gift-wrapped! :))

Cooking With Dominic & Folks

                                        Chellu helping with mixing the fermented idli dough.

                                    The girls & Joon preparing the potted salad after all the cutting.

                                          Potted salad

                                                  Chellu mixing the salad dressing.

When Dominc Anthony, Joon & Mustafa from Mumbai visited us we did a lot of cooking. t]The girls participated in everything as usual. For Chellu it was like a carnival. Two things that were of interest to her were: Cantaloupe ice-cream decorated with gems & jellies & Potted salad- this looks like a pot with the Baba ganouj dip as the "mud". 

Ketchup Ice

One of the many experiments with ice this summer. along with ketchup ice she had also made lotsa colored ice by pouring juice into ice containers. It was an instant hit with her friends. She also experimented with keeping chai's leftover water in the freezer. And most recently with freezing water in water bottles and thinking of all the ways to melt it. 

Raita Preparation

One of the afternoon preparations to accompany lunch. All by herself.

Potato Balls With Coating Of Ginger Garlic Paste

Chellu said this recipe came in her dreams.

Recipe:
Boil the potatoes with salt & haldi. Mash the potatoes.
Roll into balls & coat with ginger-garlic paste.
Lightly fry in a layer of oil.
Serve with ketchup.

Result:

Shreedari gobbled up most of the balls leaving none for the father!