Mitan Ghosh's Gulab Jamun CheeseCake -- No Bake

Many of you already know 🌸Mitan Ghosh,  a successful fashion designer in her own rights. Her designer sarees and dresses are quite the rage in US. You can have a peek at her beautiful collection here and I promise you, you will be hooked forever. Just like her designs, her home is another work of art and I love, love how she designs each corner.

Her creativity runneth over and you can see her magic touch in everything from exquisite saris to scintillating wedding trousseau, from carefully curated paintings to the food she cooks.

I asked her a few rapid fire questions for fun and here is what she had to say:

🍁1. Designing or Cooking?

Designing

🍁2. What do you like cooking best?

I am not really fond of cooking but when I do cook anything, I do so passionately!

🍁3. Favorite Food?

Dal, Bhaat, Begun Bhaaja

🍁4. Favorite Designer?

None. Oh wait, Gaurang Shah.

🍁5. Mishti na Nonta ?

Mishti

🍁6. Favorite Restaurant?

NJ/NY: Minado for Sushi
Kolkata: 6 Ballygunge Place
Mumbai: Mahesh Lunch Home
Chennai: Ponnusamy

I love Mitan, not only for her multiple talents, or because she is a wonderful person inside out, but because we share the same day of birth and it only gives me hope :-p, for myself that is!

Last week she baked a Gulab Jamun Cheese Cake as a test run for our Thanksgiving meal. Now this Thanksgiving I will not be sharing this meal as I will be traveling miles to celebrate it with another set of my friends.

So when I saw the photos of her test run, I pleaded and cajoled and she sent me a generous portion to taste. That very morning we were discussing this cheesecake recipe. Mitan had taken the idea of a Gulab Jamun cheesecake but played around with the ingredients to make it a far more simpler version than anything you would get on the internet. I told her if it works well, I am going to give it a try :-) And boy the outcome was gorgeous.

I followed her instructions and made the cheesecake over this weekend. It was so so good. I shared it with neighbors and colleagues and everyone raved about it.

It is
no bake
easy to make
freezes very well
and Delicious
Those are all my criteria for a good dessert!

Make it this week. Perfect dessert for your Thanksgiving table straddling the East and the West.

Spicy Kale Soup with Potato and Sausage

The weather around here is getting positively chilly. It had been a fabulous couple of months with great weather, festivities in the air, glittering lights and overload of sweets. The trees near my house are now preparing for winter, their leaves turning a rusty red, though this year we did not get the gorgeous colors like other years.

This is also the time when I start making soups. Soups that can be sent in a thermos for school lunch, soups that can be served with dinner. Now, the thing is there are millions and billions of soups and soup recipes out there, but my girls like only a few of them, and so those are the soups I make most often. Until they get tired of them that is.

In this whole gamut of soups, or rather a fraction of whole gamut of soups, both my girls seem to have taken a certain liking towards Kale soup.

Yes, you heard it right. K-A-L-E soup. It is a pretty, mossy green looking soup but it tastes delicious. I add little bit of potato to it and even carrots. I might or might not add sausages but sausages are definitely a plus. And garlic, oh yes garlic, lots of it please.

For a spicier, kind of Indianized version of this soup, I make a paste of coriander and green chili and then add it towards the very end to the soup simmering gently on the stove.

You see there are plenty of directions this soup can go. It is for you to decide which road to take.

Dim Narkel Posto -- Egg Curry with Poppy seeds and Coconut

Dim Posto or Dim Narkel Posto -- Egg Curry with Poppy seeds paste

Almost everyday I tell the girls, "Practice makes Perfection. You have to practice <*> everyday if you want to be good at it". Into the wild card goes everything from math, piano, gymnastics to combing hair. By now they have heard it so often that they turn a deaf ear to my gyaan.

Now I will let you on to secret. Though I give them this gyaan repeatedly, I don't always adhere to it. Definitely not when it comes to cooking.

I mean look at it this way. I am an adult! It is not for nothing that I have grown up to pay monthly bills and worry about them. I need some leeway, some pleasure out of this whole growing-up business, something that will make my adulthood worth it. And that is not to achieve perfection. At least not in my kitchen. For to be perfect in cooking any dish, I need to do it again and again and again. That is B-O-R-I-N-G. And then who is going to eat that same thing tell me?

So instead of practicing the same thing over and over, I fleet around from one recipe to another, jumping to add a tomato where it is not called for, posto aka poppy seed paste where unnecessary. My rutis can take whatever shape they want but I am not rolling them until they are round! Of course all of this fleeting around is bound within certain constraints like
a) has to be easy peasy
b) the end product will not be so wild that it will be untouched by my house humans.

Following this line of thought, I made something different with eggs few weeks back. A Dim Posto Narkol or Dim Narkol Posto or Narkol Posto Dim or whatever that required eggs, posto aka poppy seeds -- a Bengali's favorite spice, and coconut. Now my mother did make a Dim Posto and even a Dim Shorshe posto, so technically I am not crossing uncharted territories here. It is just that this Dim Narkel Posto is, you know different!

Try it. We loved it and even Big Sis who is no lover of eggs grudgingly admitted "Eita khub bhalo hoyeche"! She doesn't know about my personal policies on perfection yet. Don't tell them!