Besan Ka Chilla | The Novice Housewife
This besan chilla recipe was something that my grandfather made for us. Growing up, summer and winter vacations were always at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother was a great cook and almost all meals were cooked by her, but besan ka chilla and cold coffee were my grandfather’s forte.

Besan ka Chilla is kind of like a vegetarian omelet made from gram flour mixed with water (all those aquafaba stories you hear today- apparently something similar was being done by our grandparents long back and we had no clue).

Since nobody in our family, for religious purposes or because of allergies, had any problems with egg, my grandfather would make a variant of the besan ka chilla and would add egg to the whole mix. You can of course make it eggless, but then it wont be my grandfather’s recipe. I do have an eggless version with moong dal in the archives but today I am sharing the version that I have grown up on.

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Punjabi rajma | The Novice Housewife

 

Happy New Year everyone. Hope 2016 is treating you well so far.

I am not making any resolutions this year. They are always about weight loss- and clearly if I keep making them the beginning of every year, I am not doing a good job at keeping them.

The only thing I am resolving to do this year is to try and be more regular with blogging, and with GMT. And even though I am not posting a new recipe today for GMT, I have updated the punjabi rajma/ red kidney bean recipe that I posted the first year I started the blog.

Over the years, I made a few modifications to the original rajma recipe, and thought an update was required. I have noted the changes in the original post. I have updated the post with newer photographs and also added a printable version of the recipe. I have included a slow cooker variant to the recipe as well. Its not a throw everything in the slow cooker recipe like my dal makhani recipe– but it does solve my problem of not using the pressure cooker. You still need to cook the masala, but you can freeze it. You can make the masala on a weekend and freeze it. For a weeknight meal, just throw the 10 minute boiled kidney beans and the masala in the slow cooker and let it cook on low while you attend work during the day. By dinner you will have the rajma ready.

It is fun revisiting old posts and I loved reading about what I had written about my relationship with my best friend B. She celebrated her birthday few days back and now has a kid who just started pre-school. I don’t think she has ever been that nervous about anything. I still can’t believe she is a mother now.

You can find more about B and all the changes in the original post here.

Happy cooking!

Warm Goat Cheese Salad with walnuts and pear

The last post of 2015 and I am ending it with a recipe for this warm goat cheese salad. The warm breaded goat cheese is perfect for the cold weather and the salad leaves with the homemade dressing make the dish light and a perfect way to get your greens in.

2015 was pretty uneventful with respect to blogging. I posted only 17 times, out of which 8 posts were on Tuesdays (mostly, GMTs).

Though the blog was inactive, I was busy with my new baking venture The Pink CakeBox in Chandigarh, India. TPC was one of my best experiences, but it did come with its share of stressful moments. Each cake, each request, each delivery taught me something new and despite the struggles, I am glad I took a step towards my dream. I had to leave it mid-way but I hope to revive it again in some form or the other soon. Till then, and even after I do, I plan to keep this blog as one of my top priorities.

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The Novice Housewife gave me an identity and it helped me gain the confidence to tap into my passion for baking and open TPC. So even though 2015 saw me absent for the most time from the blogging scene, I will make sure in 2016 I am more present and dedicated to this space.

As a goodbye to 2015, I thought of sharing the top 5 posts that were most visited in 2015

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