Dimer Devil or Devilled Eggs Bengali style

I have been having trouble with blogger lately. It would just not let me upload any photographs. Not being very blog-savvy, I have been struggling with this for a couple of weeks now. I haven’t figured out what is wrong but do find using firefox instead of IE allows me to at least post to my much-neglected blog.

Bikeler jol-khabar or The Evening Snack on weekends had always been something to look forward to as I was growing up. My mother being a working mom of her generation, would usually cook something yummy for our family snack. Then the adults would sit down for their evening cuppa and the kids would attack the goodies. I hardly remember a weekend when we did not have friends or family over for at least one day. I really miss that here in the US. Everyone always seems so busy, it is very rare that I am surprised with an evening knock on the door from a friend or neighbor without calling in advance. So I thought of making something "jol-khabar"-ish for the family and relive some old happy memories.

Ingredients:

4 hard boiled eggs

4 -5 large potatoes boiled and mashed. (Needs to be enough to cover 8 egg halves)

2 red chillies (add more if your taste buds allow)

1 large onion, sliced.

2 cups besan or pakora mix

salt to taste

oil for deep frying

Method:

Fry the red chillies and keep aside

Mash the potatoes and red chillies together. Add salt to taste.

Fry the onion slices till they turn brown and mix well with the potato-chillies

Cut the boiled eggs into half lengthwise. (Back in India this is usually prepared using the whole, egg, I decided to reduce our egg-intake for the snack) Cover each egg-half with the potatoes as shown in the photo below.

Add a little water to make a batter with the besan. This should form a thick coating so don’t add too much water.

Dip the egg-potato ovals into the besan paste and coat well.

Deep fry in the pre-heated oil.

Enjoy with some ketchup or in my case home-made tomato-achar.

On a side note: I was surprised to find something called Devilled Eggs here in USA and how different it was from the Bengali version of Devilled Eggs. I love the American version too, but that I'll make some time later.