Gingersnaps, Ragi Dosas, Running Water

Gingerbread house

December 21- winter solstice. For the first time in a long time, I have 18 whole days in a row off work, achieved by stringing together six vacation days, six holidays, and six weekend days. And we're not traveling, so I get to be in my own home without any real agenda- a true luxury. 

The usual holiday activities are ongoing. This morning, the kids assembled a gingerbread house. I love this kit from Trader Joe's. It is well-fabricated and dead easy to assemble. What I also love is that it comes with four little creatures- a deer, squirrel, fox, and owl- and we have all four of these living in our backyard! 

How this year has sped by. Ever since the kids finished the last school year in May of this year, it has been a case of one-thing-after-another with barely any time to sit back and breathe. It has been a mix of some very good things, some stressful things, and many good things that were also stressful. 

An example of the third category- my daughter was a dancer in a production of "The Grinch: Musical". What a fantastic production it was, how wonderful for these young performers to get this amazing stage experience, and what a joy to see her in several dances. But getting this child back and forth to the endless rehearsals and performances (4 shows over 3 days) while managing her meals, sleep and school was pretty stressful! 

Another recent dramatic episode started two weeks ago when I came home from work to find no running water in the house- the water company has turned it off due to a massive leak in the main line going from the city supply to our house. An emergency plumber was called, and four days of basically-no-running-water later, a new pipe was put into place. Apparently, this is just one of those things that happen when you live in a 65 year old house with bits of infrastructure reaching the end of their lifetime. 

I had to laugh bitterly at the irony of it all. I'm militant about not wasting water, yelling at my kids to take shorter showers, all of that...and in the space of a few days, unbeknownst to us, we lost a swimming pool's worth of water in the leak, effectively neutralizing my water conservation and then some. Such is life! I never take my life's conveniences for granted, but I am doubly thankful for running water these days. 

* * *

The first try- hockey pucks

I started my cookie-box baking last weekend with what I assumed was a soft start- an easy, well-rated recipe for crispy gingersnaps. 

I did everything correctly, or so I thought, testing that the baking soda was active, even weighing out the flour instead of measuring by the cup, and somehow the cookies did not spread at all, turning out like hockey pucks. I was dismayed. Tasty, though! My only change to the recipe was to add a teaspoon of ground cardamom along with the other spices. I still don't quite know what I did wrong there.

I tried the recipe again this weekend, working even more carefully than before, and the cookies decided to cooperate, with a couple of them even spreading a little bit too much and merging into their neighbors. This time, I rolled them in some crunchy, crystalline turbinado sugar. 

Crispy gingersnaps

These cookies are SO GOOD. In fact, they are a convincing dupe for our family's favorite store-bought cookie, Trader Joe's triple ginger cookies. From the ingredient list, my homemade cookies are a little different from the ones from TJ's. Those contain ground ginger, fresh ginger, and crystallized ginger (hence the triple ginger). The cookies I made contain only ground ginger, and additionally, cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. However, I believe molasses must be carrying the flavor of both these cookies, because they taste pretty much identical. 

If you're a fan of spice cookies and of gingersnaps, I highly recommend this recipe. I can see myself making it regularly to keep around for the kids to snack on, and for myself for chai-dunking purposes. 

* * *

One of the things I will be doing during this winter is deep-cleaning and organizing the pantry, fridge, and freezer. A lot of this involves "eating down" these food stashes- using up bits and bobs and hoarded and forgotten ingredients. 

Among my Indian pantry staples are three flours, including besan (chickpea flour), rice flour, and ragi (millet) flour. They come in clutch for making instant dosas, where you basically mix the flour with water and make some savory pancakes/crepes. 

I've been using up the ragi flour with some instant ragi dosas. I mix ragi flour and rice flour with about a 3:1 ratio. Then I add some yogurt for tang and flavor the batter with minced onion, cilantro, green chili. Some salt and cumin seeds finish it off, along with enough water to make a thin batter. 

It is important that the batter be thin (thinner than you think it should be), because these instant dosas are poured in a different way than regular fermented urad dal dosas. With the latter, you ladle the batter into the center and use the bottom of the ladle to spread the dosa from the inside out. 

With instant dosas, you start pouring around the edge and work your way in. The thin batter forms a thin, lacy dosa. (There are plenty of videos online that demonstrate this method.) Be patient and let it cook and get crispy before flipping to the other side and letting it cook again. It takes a few minutes to make a dosa, but you end up with something crispy and tasty. We ate the dosas with a side of curried lima beans. 

So there you have it- my three tips for instant ragi dosas: make the batter thin enough to pour, pour it from the outside in, and be patient and let it cook and get some good color before flipping it.

* * *

I read a great book recently- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, published in 2013. I had this text exchange with my friend (we occasionally exchange books and jigsaw puzzles), and she let me borrow her copy. 

It is a hefty book, coming in at 900+ pages for the paperback; however, it is engrossing enough that I breezed through it in a few days. If you are looking for an immersive, richly descriptive story to read over your holiday break or during long winter evenings, I recommend this novel. 

This novel falls into the literary fiction category and won the Pulitzer prize in 2014. It is a bildungsroman (coming of age novel) and has elements of mystery. I won't say much about the plot but there's much I loved about this book, including the setting of NYC (although large parts are set in Vegas and Amsterdam), family dynamics, found family, the world and underworld of art. 

There were parts I didn't care for- like that whole stint in Vegas, holy cow; this isn't a light-hearted book by any means- but there are many sentences in this book that simply took my breath away. I would call this a modern classic, one that centers around a small painting from the 1650s. “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

How is this week looking for you? Any breaks/vacations? Any baking? Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!