Weeknight Dinner - Egg Roll

On days I plan to make some chicken in he evening, I remove the chicken from the freezer, in the morning before I leave for work. By the time I am back home in the evening, it well thawed and ready for cooking. But lately, in my morning rush to get out of the houseafter getting my daughter ready, dropping her at daycare and still trying to reach office at a respectable time of the morning, I seem to forget to take out the chicken or fish from the freezer. Today was one such morning, so I had to modify my original dinner plans and think of something new (and quick!). Usually whenever I am at a loss of what to make and want something I quick, I fall back on the versatile Egg Roll. Both my daughter and husband love eggs so it doesn't really matter what I put inside the roll, they are happy.

Ingredients:

4 Flour Tortillas (ideally rotis or home made parathas, but I am not fast enough to pull that off in less than 30 min and I really want to send this for Mallugirl's Summer Express Cooking event)

Eggs (1 per roll)

chopped onions

chopped tomatos

Some lettuce (or any greens of your choice)

Ketchup (mustard, coriander chutney or any other condiment of your choice)

Vegetable patties (or chicken or any leftover sabzi, or skip this altogether)

Here is the vegetable patty I use. Bought from Costco. I really like it's taste, much better than the usual garden burgers. In fact, the cafeteria at my work is pretty bad, so on days I don't have leftovers from the dinner to take to work for lunch, I throw in one of these patties and have it with bread.

Method:

Break eggs and mix in a bowl with salt
Pour some in a frying pan with a little oil and spread it to about the size of your roti/tortilla
When it is half cooked, put the tortilla on the egg.

Turn and cook the other side (one side should be coated with the egg and well cooked)

Remove from heat and add onions, tomatoes, ketchup greens. This is a versatile dinner add whatever you like.

Roll it up and eat!

Back home the Egg Roll serves more as an evening snack, but I turn into a full meal on days I am short on time.

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.

Potato-Beet Breadrolls

I have been eyeing a few recipes from Sandeepa's blog - Bong Mom's Cookbook for a while now. Now as a rule of thumb, the more un-healthy something is, the more I like it. So baked breadrolls with just beet stuffing would be way too healthy for me :-) I added some potatoes to the mix and changed the masala slightly. The end result, though did not look as lovely as Sandeepa's tasted quite divine! I have a quick recap of the recipe here for myself, but for more detailed instructions and step-wise photographs, see Sandeepa's original recipe.

This is my entry to Coffee's Monthly Blog Patrol for February.

Ingredients:

3 small beetroots
2 medium size potatoes (boiled)
1 tsp garam masala
1-2 tsp roasted dhania-jeera powder
1 egg
2 tbsp suji(cream of wheat or you could use cornmeal)
bread (about 10-12)
salt to taste
raisins (optional)

Method:
Grate/Shred the beetroots.
Fry the garam masala, add beetroots. Add some roasted dhania-jeera powder to taste. I usually keep some prepared for raitas.
When the beetroot becomes soft, it is cooked. Add the mashed boiled potatoes and mix well.
Moisten the bread slices, make beetroot-potato mixture into golf-ball sized balls and place on the bread. Roll the slice to cover it completely (See Sandeepa's photos for this)
Brush these with the egg and either brush some butter or spray with oil.
Fry with very little oil just to get a slight brown color on the rolls.
Preheat over to 400 degrees F
Sprinkle the rolls with some suji and bake till the outer cover turns uniformly brown (maybe about 35 min)

Mmmmm… delicious… Thanks Sandeepa for this awesome recipe and excuse me as I rush off to gobble some of those breadrolls!