Home Cooking Express

Dips are the perfect thing for a small dinner party where you can pass around crackers, chips, biscuits or vegetables and have a yummy dip to go with it. Here is a recipe of onion dip which is very simple.

INGREDIENTS

(Makes 2 cups)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 onion (large)

1 leek

3 cloves of garlic

A pinch of salt

12 ounces of firm tofu that has been drained

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon lemon juice

Freshly ground black pepper

PROCEDURE

Peel and cut the onions in half and then slice it thinly until you have around 2 cups of cut onion slices.  Slice the white part of the leek and the garlic. Heat a pan on the stove at medium heat and put in the olive oil.  Add the onions, leek and garlic and add as much salt as you need. Cook for roughly 10 minutes or until the onions turn brown and remember to keep stirring so nothing burns.

Put this mixture into the food processor and blend the ingredients together smoothly.  Taste it and add seasonings according to your liking. Chill for at least a few hours and serve with pita chips, potato chips or almost anything.  

This thing is very easy to make at home and is also an excellent accompaniment. It goes well with many varieties of food and saves you the bother of making something elaborate.

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Every Indian restaurant over the world whether in the United Kingdom, the U.S or Canada served kheema matar. This dish is a spicy dish made with minced meat and peas and is extremely popular in India. It is dry and is generally served with pooris or paranthas (Indian breads) but some people like it with rice. It uses very simple ingredients you will have lying around in your kitchen and doesn’t take too long to make.

INGREDIENTS

500 gm minced meat

1 tablespoon of cooking oil

1 medium onion chopped

4-5 cloves of garlic chopped

An 1 inch cube of ginger, peeled and grated

A few chillies, depending on your taste

1 teaspoon of ground coriander leaves

2 teaspoons of cumin (ground)

½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

A handful of coriander

A teaspoon of salt

½ a cup of peas

1 teaspoon of garam masala (An essential Indian powder, spicy)

1 ½ tablespoons of lemon juice

Heat the oil in a wide frying pan over a medium flame and when hot add in the onions and cook until golden brown. Now add the garlic and cook for a little while. Then add the minced meat, ground coriander, chillies, cumin and cayenne. Stir it well. The taste comes out much better if the spices blend. Once it is browned well add 150 ml of water and when it begins to boil, turn down the heat and leave it to simmer for half an hour. Check on it now and then.

Finally add the peas, salt, garam masala, lemon juice,coriander and 75 ml of water. Mix it well and allow it to cook until the peas are done.

Your kheema matar is ready. You can serve it with roti, parantha, poori or rice.

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Every mother knows how troublesome it can be to get kids to eat. How many people have spent their entire day running after their kids in an attempt to make them eat? The key to getting kids to eat is make healthy food in a way that is tasty and attractive to kids. That would mean putting in chocolate or cheese in a dish to make it yummy. Today’s recipe is something that combines apples with a lot of yummy things and makes it super tempting for the kids.

This recipe serves four on an average and takes around 10 minutes to prepare. The cooking takes around 50 minutes. You have a delicious and very healthy dish ready in an hour.

Apple Crisps

INGREDIENTS

4 apples- peeled, chopped and the cores removed

A dash of ground cinnamon

A dash of ground nutmeg

½ a cup of walnuts

½ cup of pecans

½ a cup of brown sugar

½ a cup of flour (all purpose)

4 tablespoons of butter (diced)

A pinch of salt

PROCEDURE

Make sure the oven is preheated at 350 degrees. Then put the apples in a baking dish and sprinkle with nutmeg and cinnamon. Cover with foil and bake for around 20 minutes. Then chop up a few nuts finely along with some short pulses.  Add in sugar and flour to the mixture and combine. Add butter to it so that a coarse mixture is formed. Now sprinkle this mixture over the apples. Bake for half and hour or until golden brown.

The kids will have no reason to refuse this. You could add a few variations to it if you feel the need to. This is one of those things which would gel well with other additions. Try a little chocolate sauce or pieces of chocolate in the dish.

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Everyone loves ice cream and the most preferred flavour of ice cream would have to be chocolate ice cream. From the time of frozen ice from mountains flavoured with syrups to the variety of flavours that are replicated by gelatos and sorbets, ice creams have come a long way. Chocolate ice cream though still continues to be a favourite with people all over the world.

Making chocolate ice cream at home is not very difficult and it turns out tasting reasonably like ice creams from ice cream parlours. It takes very little time to actually prepare it and after that it needs to be frozen.

What you need to make your own chocolate ice cream:

One can of condensed milk

2/3 cup of chocolate syrup

2 cups of heavy cream

THE METHOD

With aluminium foil line the inside of an 8X5 inch loaf pan. In a large bowl stir together the condensed milk and the chocolate syrup until it is evenly coloured. You could vary the amount of condensed milk and chocolate sauce depending on how sweet or chocolatey you want your ice cream to be. Then in another bowl whip the cream together until it is light and fluffy and stiff peaks form. Fold or put into the chocolate mixture the whipped cream and pour the entire mixture into the lined pan. Cover it and freeze for around 6 hours until it is firm.

Your own made at home chocolate ice cream is ready to go. If you want to you can also put the mixture into an ice cream machine or you could do it this way.

This is the perfect solution if you have guests arriving or your kids have been bugging you for their favourite dessert. This is very easy to do and virtually anyone can make great chocolate ice cream.

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