Alcha Parata

There are rare eat outs in Shantiniketon. Alcha is one place I made my home, when I was living there. It had a little library with a variation of books, donation from old students, the owner etc.

Decorated beautifully, it was a little sanctuary for me.

Their menu was small, but it was the only place in town that had scrambled eggs, hash browns, humus, sandwhiches etc. One of their specialities was their paratas. There was alu, gobi, cheese and plain parata. Here's a sample:

Pub Food

It was my belated birthday surprise dinner. We went to an Irish Pub, where I've had a brilliant lunch before from the specials menu, but that day, nothing on the specials looked particularly yummy, so we took the regular a la carte. it wasn't particularly the best meal ever, but the soup was seriously good!

the Pub

Appetizer : Stuffed Mushroom

This was the super yummy potato creamy soup we had, this is the only thing I'll definitely go back for here!

My Grilled Salmon, mashed potatoes were very normal English, non creamy style, the type I used to have in my Primary school in North London

Bedueen's favourite: Chicken Marsala

Lamb Rezala

Although lamb is a rare eat for me, bedueen wanted lamb rezala for a while now. So I tired a Recipe from a Bengali website. This is the original recipe, but as I don't take ghee, I used olive oil and additionally I marinated the meat with 1 tablespoon of yogurt for 30 mins.

Ingredients
	750 g lamb/mutton/beef 500 g yoghurt 100 g ghee 100 g sliced onions 4 bay leaves 2 inch cinnamon stick 4 green cardamom pods 4 cloves 2 tsp garlic paste 2 tsp chilli powder 1 tsp sugar Salt to taste
	Procedure
	Heat ghee in a pan, add bay leaves, cloves, cinnamon and cardamoms, and sauté. Add sliced onion and fry for a few minutes, add garlic paste and chilli powder and sauté. Add mutton and fry for a few minutes. Add salt and sugar to taste. Gradually stir the yoghurt. Put the lid on and leave to cook. If water dries up add a little water. Cook till water dries up and ghee comes on top Serve hot with rice or parota.

Chicken Korma- a mixed recipe

My Dadi is the only person in the WORLD who makes the perfect chicken korma. I usually never like shahi foods such as that, but I was craving some soft shada korma so I tried to my hand at it.

Bedueen's mom's recipe, which I used for the first time, turned out to be the regular dawat korma, which although Bedueen liked, I'm not that fond off.

So I tried a random recipe, taking snipets from various blogs and my dadi's.

Ingredients:

Olive oil
1 full chicken
Ginger (chopped)
Garlic (chopped)
Cinammon
Cardamom
Black pepper (whole)
Curry Leaves
Green chillies (sliced)
Yogurt (beaten) 
Cream
Salt
Sugar
Onions
Turmeric

Cooking it:
I sauteed the onions in the olive oil and added a little salt and the cardamom, cinamon, curry leaves, ginger, garlic and chillies. On law flame I sauteed them for a while then added yogurt and chicken and upped the heat to medium flame. Sprinkle the TINIEST bit of turmeric on the chicken.After lightly browning the chicken, I added the cream (as much as you prefer) and sugar (also ur preference) and let it cook for 20-30 mins. Add boiling water according to how much gravy you want.

Et Voila, a light creamy curry. As I am yet to make shada polau (white pilaf), the best accompaniment to Korma, I ate with white basmati rice :-)

Birthday Brunch!

I'll start off my blog, with today's eating activities: a friend's surprise party. The guests (us) and his wife, arranged a lovely decorated party with assorted main dishes and deserts:

We had main courses from Ghoroa Restaurant of Parata, Chicken Roast, 2 kinds of Beef Kabab and Polau rice. But my favourite part of lunch was the olive oil dipped mozzarella! YUM. i had like 5, and it tasted good with the shahi food!

This is the chocolate mousse cake I got :-)

And a beautiful soft mango souffle brought by another friend. It was Perfect, real mango flavour with a shortbread crust..

This was my favourite of the evening: Assorted Cupcakes from Sunshine Bakery. Soooo Good! The colours ones were normal coloured icing, but the white ones were this cool-whip typish softer icing.
I had half a turquoise one and half a white one!

Was quite a colourful spread, thus I thought I'd use it for the first post :-)

Hope you guys liked it, feel free to leave comments.