Mushroom and Spinach Lasagna

Lasagna is a Pasta dish made in layers with meat sauce and cheese. I made a vegetarian version using mushroom and spinach. One of my readers wanted me to post Lasagna recipe. I have seen so many recipes but never attempted it at home. SO when I saw the Lasagna sheets in the stores I grabbed it. Those sheets were oven ready sheets so you need not precook the sheets. Just layer it with sauce and cheese and bake for 30 minutes and Lasagna is ready. This recipe is adapted from Titli's vegetarian lasagna. It turned out wonderful. The white cheese sauce was absolutely delicious and it just melted in the mouth. I am really happy that I tried this. Next time I am planning to do a spicy version as hubby likes only spicy food. I assembled the lasagna and refrigerated it. The next day I baked it. There is one more lasagna in the freezer. You can either freeze uncooked lasagna or cooked lasagna. Both works great. So have one in freezer and on a day when you are in no mood to work in kitchen, just remove it, thaw and bake. Your food is ready in 30 minutes without even doing any work...

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Gujarathi Gathiya

For this month's Indian Cooking Challenge, Srivalli got the recipe for Gujarathi snack Gathiya from Vaishali who got it from her friend. Gathiya is a savoury snack which is almost like the south Indian kara sev. The only difference is it is mildly spiced whereas kara sev is extremely spicy. I made this two days back. Sruti is not a great fan of savoury snacks but hubby dear loved it. We are having a nice time during coffee. They pair up perfectly. The addition of baking soda to the dough is very quite interesting. We need to roast baking soda until brown and then add it to the flour. This makes sure that the gathiyas melt in the mouth. The addition of ajwain/ omam gives it a nice flavour.

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Golubsty / Cabbage Rolls - Vegetarian Version

Golubsty is a classic Russian dish made of cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and beef. I made a vegetarian version of Golubsty with mushroom and rice. I made this for this month's Daring Cook's challenge. This month's host Olga gave us three versions of cabbage rolls for this month's challenge, one the authentic version, one with fish and the other with vegetables. I chose to do the vegetarian version and made some changes to Olga's recipes to give an Indian touch to it. I added chilly powder to make it more spicy and hubby dear liked it so much. It was such a satisfying dinner. I added lots of sauce and the rolls turned out so saucy. If you want, you can decrease the amount of sauce you add to the rolls.
The procedure is quite interesting. Usually large cabbage is used but as I get only medium sized cabbage here, I bought it home. You need to cook the whole cabbage in water until the leaves come apart and becomes transparent and soft. You need to prepare the filling and the sauce, then stuff the cabbage leaves with the prepared filling, roll it, arrange in a baking pan, our the sauce over and bake. You can also do it on stove top but you need to ensure that the flame is on the lowest setting as it takes 1 1/2 hours to finish cooking.

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Diwali Special - Round up and Winner Announcement

Last month I announced a Special event for Diwali. I hope the recipes in the collection would be very helpful for your upcoming celebrations. Though this Diwali is over, there are many more festivals to come and this list would be an online cook book for many of you including me. There are 85 delicious sweets and savouries in this list and I hope you enjoy the same. And it is time for the announcement of winner in this event. I selected a lucky winner using random number generator. It is entry number 78 - Ragi Ribbon Pakoda from Nandoos Kitchen. Congratulations Nandoo. Please mail me your Indian address along with the phone number to gayathriraani@gmail.com to claim the gift.. 

Diwali Special Sweets and Snacks

Here is a compilation of some of the sweets and savouries you could make for this Diwali. Have a happy time going through all the dishes....
Click on the name of the dishes for the complete recipe and instructions...

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