Kesar Pedha/Peda

My last post was about "Mava/Khoya". So, it was natural to follow it up with the easiest and one of the most traditional Indian sweets - "Pedha".  Pedha is possibly the easiest Indian sweet that you can make if you have mava at home (whether home made or store bought). It is a great mithai to make for potlucks too, being very easy to scale up. Cooking time is around ten minutes or so and you can serve them as soon as the rolled out pedha cools down to room temperature.

There are many kinds of pedhas and the easiest one is kesar pedha or pedha with saffron. Of course, there are also the more complicated ones that take a lot of cooking time and are more effort intensive like the kandi pedha(Dharwadi pedha). Pedhas are a staple at any traditional Indian function.

Ingredients
2 cups mava
3/4 - 1 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp cardamom/elaichi powder
10-15 flakes of saffron
1 tsp milk
1 tsp ghee

Method
Grate or cruble the mava into small pieces and measure 2 cups.  Warm the milk a little and add the saffron strands to it, mix and keep aside. In a pan, add some ghee and the mava and cook on low heat. Stir so that it doesnt stick to the bottom of the pan. You will need to cook for about 7-10 minutes and you will start getting the aroma of mava being roasted. At this stage the color of the mava will start to turn a very light brown (almost beige). Then add the cardamom powder and the saffron milk and mix well. Let it all cook together, till the milk evaporates and then take it off the heat. When the mixture cools down where it is warm to touch, add the powdered sugar and mix thoroughly.

Then, apply a little ghee to your hands and take small amount of this mixture and roll it into a ball and flatten it to form a disc. The disc should be around an inch in diameter. Your pedha is ready. Let the warm pedhas cool down and serve at room temperature.

 These will last without refrigeration for a couple of days. For longer term storage, store in the fridge. You can store it in the fridge for two-three weeks.

Tips
I added on 3/4 cup of sugar when I made pedhas, but if you want it to be sweeter, add more to taste.
An extremely easy method to make pedhas is to reduce condensed milk and roll pedhas from it when the mixture solidifies. However, the major drawback of this method is that you are not at liberty to choose the amount of sugar that gets added to the pedha. Condensed milk tends to be very sweet and hence your pedhas will also turn out very sweet.
Upon creating the flattened pedha disc, you can add a slice of almond or pistachio on top of the pedha to decorate it.

Panha - A Refreshing Raw Mango Drink

This is one of the most refreshing summer drinks and always takes me back to those long summer vacations spent at my maternal grandmother's place. She used to make pitchers of "panha" during summer along with other summer drinks like "taak" and "limbu sarbat". This is also a great accompaniment to the "kairi chi daal". I made panha this summer and realised that it is a very simple recipe. I shall definitely be making it every summer from now on. The main ingredient for this is the raw mango (kairi) and as its available only during early summer, this is a seasonal drink. Its definitely a bit late to find raw mangoes now but do try it the next time you bring raw mangoes home.

Ingredients
1 large/ 2 medium green mango - must be raw
salt to taste
jaggery to taste - depends on how tart and sour the mango is
a couple of pinches of cardamom powder
a few strands of saffron
1-2 cups of water - depends on how much pulp you get from the mango

Method
Pressure cook the mango. I cooked it till I heard 1 whistle. Once the mango cools, peel the skin and discard. Scrape the pulp off the mango and discard the seed. To this pulp add the jaggery, salt, cardamom powder and the saffron strands. Add about half a cup of water and blend all these ingredients together. Increase the amount of water and adjust the salt and jaggery based on the kind of consistency you want. You will also need to adjust the salt and the sweetness based on how sour the mango is.

In the Instant Pot you would cook it for 3 minutes on manual mode, high pressure and then let the pressure release naturally.

Tips
A friend gave me a tip that if the skin of the mango is a bit tough and not very sour, then its best to peel the mangoes before cooking them. That will prevent the drink from any bitterness. You can substiture jaggery with sugar. Brown sugar has molasses and will have a taste closer to jaggery, but if you don't have brown sugar use regular white sugar. If the raw mango is not very sour, you may need to add some lemon or lime juice to adjust the tartness.

Shrikhand (Sweet Yogurt)

A wonderful dessert and simple to make too! Shrikhand is a yogurt dessert. It has minimal ingredients and requires no cooking. It can be made well in advance. In fact it tastes much better when the flavors have had a chance to marry. This is a popular dessert made in Western India, specially in Maharashtra and Gujarat. The recipe that follows is the basic Shrikhand recipe. You can very easily change an ingredient to make this into Amrakhand.

Ingredients
2 - 3 cups of yogurt
1 cup powdered sugar
4-5 strands of saffron
1-1.5 tbsp mix  of sliced blanched almond and pistachio
1 pinch of powdered cardamom
1/8 tsp water or milk

Method
Tie up the yogurt in a fine cotton cloth/cheese cloth and hang it overnight or about 6-8 hours to drain the liquid part of the yogurt.  The yogurt should be as dry as possible so that it doesnt become runny when you add the sugar. Once all the water is drained, it will come together in a ball. The resultant yogurt volume will be about 1 to 1.5 cups of drained yogurt. To this add the sugar.  The sugar will get assimilated immediately. Soak the strands of saffron in about 1/8th tsp of milk and add this to the yogurt sugar mix. Add the nuts and cardamom powder. Stir everything together and refrigerate. Serve cold. Enjoy with chapati/puri or just on its own.

Tips
There is a lot of water in yogurt and you should be prepared that the remaining volume will be half of what you started out with. So be careful with your estimations. Use powdered sugar so that a lot of heat is not generated when you mix the it together with the yogurt. The powdered sugar will melt into the yogurt immediately. If granulated sugar is used, it will take a while to dissolve the sugar and will make the shrikhand runny or watery.