Healthy Date and Almond Bites

The other day my sister challenged me to make something for her mid-morning snack. These were her conditions:

1. It should be nutritious. 

2. It should be small enough to politely eat in office. 

3. It should be delicious, because she was sick of the roasted peanuts and sprouts and other foods that are typically recommended as healthy snacks. 

4. It should be relatively easy, in case she wanted to make it herself later.

With these conditions in mind, I scoured the internet for recipes. One of Tarla Dalal's recipes stood out to me - Date and Almond Balls. While simple enough, it tasted of just dates, as they overpower everything else.

So this is my slightly altered and renamed recipe and it's full of iron, vitamins, antioxidants, minerals and dietary fibre. Yayyy for your immunity and haemoglobin! And yes, my sister was very happy. :)

5 Minute Microwave Cake!

Tanvi and I both LOVE instant food. Any delicious recipe that gets done within 15 mins is literally close to our hearts. Microwave mug cakes are a blessing from heaven!

Sometimes you just crave chocolate. But a bar of chocolate is too sweet or too bitter. And chocolate milk is just not what you want. You want chocolate cake and you want it now! So what do you do?

You make a microwave cake! Yes there are a lot of recipes online for the same. But trust me, this one is tried and tested for perfection. Oh so rich and heart warming (I swear, it literally does)!

A warm cup of rich choco awesomeness!

This recipe takes 5 minutes in total!

Pancakes/Crepes

Pancakes for breakfast! Pancakes for lunch! Pancakes for dinner! Pancakes for midnight snacks! Yea yea yea! I'm addicted to pancakes and crepes! I don't think I can get enough of these guys *sigh

No wonder they have a day dedicated to pancakes! But I guess its Happy Pancake Day for me every day! Hail Pancake!

I still remember, the first time I ever made Pancakes, Tanvi happened to be around. We were both so excited over the achievement that we didn't really care about how they were a tab bit salty. Instead we sent a couple of vanilla ice cream scoops over them and ah! We were twinkly eyed for the next several minutes.

They're absolutely easy to make, literally take about 5 mins. And ah! Such comfort food. Makes your insides all happy :D

Crepes with honey strawberries and bananas and blueberries! Yum right?

Pizza Sauce

Who loves pizza? Everyone does! And we love going out to grab some. But then there are days when you just feel enthusiastic enough to custom make some for yourself with your favourite toppings, jussst the way you like it!

This sauce is brilliant and crazy versatile, goes well as anything- pizza sauce, pasta sauce, use it as the base for open cheese toast, eat it with potato chips, fries, the list just goes on!

So make this yummy sauce in bulk and store it in your refrigerator, scoop out a spoonful and put it to good use as and when you be starvinggg!

So lets just get straight to it!

Our oblong rectangular pizza, all set to get baked!

Quick and Easy Teriyaki Sauce

Okay so yesterday I was craving this particular kind of chicken stir-fry I'd made while studying abroad, and the main ingredient was teriyaki sauce. Unfortunately, none of the shops around here (you know, regular grocery stores) have even heard of teriyaki sauce. The shopkeepers insisted that I meant to ask for soy sauce/soya sauce, and was simply confused.  

So I caved and bought some soy sauce, and decided to make my own teriyaki sauce at home! Now traditionally it's made with either mirin or sake, but after the teriyaki sauce-finding debacle I was quite certain that neither of these ingredients were an option.  

This particular recipe has super-convenient ingredients and makes a wonderful sauce which can be used for stir-fry or barbecue.

Now I realise I used a dark saucepan for a dark sauce and so the photo is really dark, but just trust me on this. 

Any flavoured Muffins :D

For the longest time I had this misconception that I couldn't bake or I'd just be baaad at it. I think it was mostly because baking sounded like this tedious, patience testing process. Okay, probably I was being plain lazy!

So one day (only due to this uncontainable craving of course), I thought of baking myself some muffins. I looked up a couple of recipes online and mixed them up according to my convenience and availability of ingredients and voila!

Well that's the story of how I took my first few steps towards baking! Big leap I must say.

Microwave Mug Cake with a Ginger Latte twist

Despite our love of baking, sometimes Snigdha and I are just too lazy to wait for dessert and need a quick sugar fix. One such chilled out evening, we were watching a rerun of Friends in which Monica was baking.

I'm extremely impressionable when it comes to TV food (The Big Bang Theory is evil with all their pizza and Chinese) so I had an instant craving for cake. Meanwhile, Snigdha decided she wanted some sort of coffee. And in a fit of inspiration, the Ginger Latte microwave mug cake was born. Took all of 10 minutes total, and was really tasty! Plus it was quick, which was more important at that point of time.

It also smells AMAZING, which you'll find out soon enough (I'm estimating 10 minutes after you read this recipe).