Cheesy Pasta with Olives & Broccoli

Recently I have started making dishes which includes cheese or paneer. I have increased making dishes with these two ingredients to make my girls eat cheese.  My girls love Pasta. They used to eat it plain with out any sauce.

Homemade Nachos

As I have mentioned in my previous post, I have started making dishes in which I can add more cheese and veggies.  Recently my girls started liking Nachos and now I am experimenting nachos with different types of vegetables.  This is something I tried last week and it vanished within few minutes.  Here goes the recipe.

Homemade Salsa

My kids just love Nachos.  I recently found another way to make them eat cheese. I am making them eat extra servings of vegetables as well because of Nachos. Instead of buying salsa from store, I thought of making at home.  I made a whole big bowl of them yesterday for making Nachos.  Here goes the recipe.

Ingredients:

1. Tomato - 2 Nos (big)
2. Onion - 1 (big- I used Pink Onion)
3. Bell Pepper - 1
4. Green Chilli - 1 (remove seeds from it)
5. Coriander leaves - 1/4 cup
6. Lemon Juice - 2 tbsp
7. Salt to taste.

Salsa

Chop the vegetables into tiny small pieces.  Put everything in a bowl.  Chop coriander leaves finely and add it.  Add lemon juice and salt and mix everything well.  My friend also suggested that we can add a teaspoon of cumin powder to it.  I have not tried that yet personally.  This salsa tasted so refreshing and the good part is its home made.

Idly/Dosa Molagapodi

Even though I like to have molagapodi as side dish with almost all of my dishes (including thayir saadam), I didn't know how to make it until last week.  My MIL used to make it in large quantity and give it to us.  But this time while coming back from India, I forgot to ask her.  We ran out of molagapodi last week.  So I had to make it here.  I asked my MIL the recipe for making it and tried it here.  It came out pretty good.  I put little less chilli than her.  Here goes the recipe.

Ingredients:

1. Channa Dhall / Kadala paruppu - 1 cup
2. Red Chillies - 3/4 cup (acc to taste)
3. Salt to taste
4. White Sesame Seeds -  1 tsp
5. Sesame Oil - 1 tbsp
6. jaggery/Vellam - 1 tsp

Molagapodi

Preheat oil in a kadai/pan.  Add the red chillies and fry it in low/medium flame until it becomes dark red color.  Don't burn the chillies.  Take the chillies out when it is done and keep it in a wide plate for cooling.  Now add channa dhall to the same kadai and fry it until it becomes golden brown.  A nice aroma will come when it is done.  Take it out of the flame and put it along with the chillies and let it cool.  Turn down the flame to low and put the sesame seeds in it and fry it until it becomes pink color.  Add it along with chilli and dhall.  Once it is cool, grind it coarsely adding salt and jaggery to it. Enjoy with Idly, dosa, adai etc

Banana Smoothie with girl scout Almond Bar !!

I got the recipe from a friend of mine. I tried it and it came out well. But my girls love to eat banana by itself, instead of drinking a smoothie. So I am not doing it anymore. Here is the recipe for my friends.

Ingredients:-

1. Banana - 1 (freeze it for half an hour)
2. Milk - 1 cup (skim milk)
3. Girl Scout Almond chocolate bar - four small squares.

Blend the above said ingredients till it turns smooth and enjoy. In this recipe, adding sugar is optional. Because banana by itself is sweet and i added chocolate bar to make my girlies drink it.  Also we can replace chocolate with honey which is very good for health.