St. Thomas Episcopal Church

Jaya Teas Summer Nut Tea Sale!

Jaya Teas famous NUT TEA is on sale right now. Here is what one of our customers had to say about the tea...

Jaya Nut Tea is very different from the other darjeelings I've tasted. It is excellent sweet, even with dash of milk. It is not astringent. The flavor is aromatic and flowery, but also nutty, a bit like apricot jam. It is an excellent addition to you tea pantry. It would be a good choice for someone switching from coffee, because it has a more full, dark flavor than other darjeelings, while still being distinctly a darjeeling. Nice for variety too.

Nut tea has the shells of the seed produced by the tea plant. The shells add a bit of a spicyness to the tea which is quite unique. If you want to drink it as an iced tea, I would recommend letting the tea cool for a while after brewing it and then pouring it over ice. I guarantee the tea will wow you!

Save upto $12 today - 100mg Jaya Nut Tea has been reduced for sale from $11.95 to $8.96, and 1lb bag of nut tea has been priced down from $40.85 to $28.60!

And as always, purchases over $75 are shipped free!!

No Knead Bread Recipe

Bread baking is an art form. But when that art form is reduced to a few simple steps, it just makes the art so much more accessible! Here is a recipe for no-knead bread, which pretty much any one can make with great ease. Word to the wise, if you want to bake this bread for your get together, start the day before. Otherwise, your guests will need to bring their own bread!

Simple Joy of Mozzarella Sandwich

My phone rang as I was driving home from work. It was Jaya reminding me to rush home so I could take her to the piano lessons. Since last few weeks Jaya has been taking weekly piano lessons with a local Taiwanese lady. The lessons start at 6.30 pm and last for about 45 minutes. Since 45 minutes is not sufficient enough time to be back home and return in time to pick Jaya up, I have made a ritual out of spending 45 minutes in the local grocery store Stop & Shop. Spending 45 minutes planning dinner and entertainment is a welcome relief from the hectic week end day.

There is a nice little Redbox dvd dispenser which carries many a new releases. Today, I decided to pick up a copy of "Precious" one of the movies that recently hit the Oscar jack pot. While browsing the store I noticed that the store was once again selling 99cent Italian bread baked fresh right in the store. I had noticed this once before and purchased a loaf then, but I didn't know that Stop & Shop has made this into a regular feature.

Thanks to this new "special" Stop & Shop has started something of a tradition in our home. Today, like the other day, I brought home a loaf of fresh Italian bread, some fresh mozzarella cheese, fresh basil and lettuce, and treated la famiglia to the joys of a simple tomato mozzarella sandwich, a sandwich that has become the family favorite not only due to the fact that it is easy to make but also because it is as delicious as it is filling.

You need very simple ingredients to make tomato mozzarella sandwich - clearly you need tomato, and mozarella cheese. But besides this I typically add a layer of jalapeno peppers preserved in vinegar, a thick layer of basil leaves along with some lettuce. If you have never made this sandwich, here is how to make it...

Make chutney (or pesto sauce) out of basil (Italian tulsi), pine nuts (use cashews if pine nuts are not available) and olive oil. Make the chutney in olive oil instead of water - it will stay green longer. Smear one slice of bread with the basil chutney, and lay flat. On top of this add a layer of thinly sliced tomatoes. Sprinkle salt and black pepper for taste. Add a layer of fresh basil leaves, fresh spinach, sprinkle a few slices of jalapeno pepper preserved in vinegar (you can substitute with regular hot pepper if you like, but sprinkle some vinegar to give you the tangy taste). Place the other slice of bread on top and you are all set. Cut the sandwich into two pieces, and serve with potato chips.

I can only tell you that this simple sandwich has become one of the favorite sandwiches in the Joshi household!

I only found out about the joys of mozzarella sandwich once I arrived to US, which is a true wonder because there is no reason why this sandwich should not be easily available in India. The mozzarella cheese is nothing but "chenna" nuked in microwave for a few minutes. Here is an easy recipe to make mozzarella cheese, in case you want to try to make it at home!

Video on how to make Ras Gullas

My favorite Indian dessert is Ras Malai, which roughly translated means Sweet Cheese. But to enjoy Rasmalai one has to strart with Ras Gullas, an equally delicious dessert. Ras Gullas are very popular dessert dish in Calcutta (Bengal is famous for its mithai), and I still have very vivid memories of my trips to Calcutta en route to Darjeeling, where we would buy and gulp down syrupy Ras Gullas from hawkers on the Calcutta railway station.

Manjula's recipe below is very simple one, and I recommend it to any one who wants to give it a try. In the video Manjula recommends using cane sugar, by which I suppose she means use cane sugar instead of beet sugar or sucrose. However, if one is diabetic should one give up on eating Ras Gullas? Not really. Feel free to substitute sugar with Splenda or some other sweetner. In India today its quite common to find Indian sweets made from artificial sweetners instead of sugar (India has one of the fastest rising rates of diabetes in urban areas mainly on account of lack change in lifestyle and increasing affluence)

But in preparation of the syrup, you are on your own! Use your normal substitution conversion rate to figure out exactly how sweet you would like it to be.

Here is Manjula's video - Thanks Manjula!!

Step 1 to making Sourdough bread: Making Levain

The first step to baking a sourdough bread is the make Levain or sourdough starter.

The process of making the levain is not totally unlike the process of making the dosa batter. In making the Dosa batter, one grinds the rice and lentils into pancake like batter, and holds it overnight to ferment and become sour. The sourness of the batter comes from the natural wild yeast that exist on grains of rice (rice being carbohydrate, naturally attract yeast). In making levain, we first mix the wheat flour with sufficient water to get a pancake batter like consistency in a large plastic yogurt container. I could keep this overnight and it would probably ferment on its own. But I have tried this in the past and have not succeeded in getting a good fermentation going (in fact it smelled horrible!). I suspect that this is because we have a dog in the house, and the normal flora of the home is probably different from the normal flora of a typical home. So, to get the right strain of yeast, I decided to add a little bit of Fleishman's baking yeast to the batter. Here are the measurements:

1 cup wheat flour (Apna Bazar brand)
1.5 cup filtered water
1/4 tea spoon Fleishmann's baking yeast

Temperature: 27 degrees centigrade (approx 80 degrees F)

We will see what happens tomorrow! Hopefully I will have some pictures to share.

Post hoc - I repeated the steps everyday for three more days (without adding any additional yeast of course) but this sourdough bread baking exercise turned out to be a disaster. The Apna Bazar four is entirely unsuitable for baking a regular loaf of bread, and the bread turned out to be quite flat albeit tangy sour in taste.

Lesson learned - Indian wheat flours are not suitable for baking western style bread. Its whole wheat bread that perhaps does not have the amount of gluten required/needed to make the bread rise and become soft.

Giraffe & Mickey Mouse Dosa or Pancake

One of the joys of fatherhood is the opportunity to make food for kids that is appealing to them. Jaya is rather finicky with her food, and makes me jump through hoops to eat anything that is put in front of her! Then one day I had a brilliant stroke of imagination...how about enlisting Jaya's favorite characters in the task of keeping Jaya well fed? Viola! Out emerges Animal Dosas!

I admit others have thought of this idea before (Animal Crackers, anyone?), but this one involved me having to learn how to pour dosa batter on the skillet in such a way that it retained animal shapes. First one was Mickey Mouse (sorry Disney!) but now, my mastery has gone further into the animal kingdom, and the Giraffe below is an example of just that!

So, how does one make it? Here is the recipe...
Rice: 2 cups
Urad dal: 1 cup (found in Indian grocery stores)
Salt to taste
Skillet, Blender, Oil

Soak Rice and Urad Dal separately overnight. Next morning grind to a fine batter. Add sufficient water to make the final consistency pan cake batter like. Cover the batter and leave it in a warm place (such as an oven with pilot lamp) overnight for fermentation. The next day it should taste sour doughy which means that the batter has nicely fermented. The batter may have also slightly risen during the night. Mix the batter well and add salt to taste.

Making the Mickey Mouse Dosa (Pancake)

On a hot skillet, pour a small quantity of oil and wipe it with a wet cloth. Do this carefully as the skillet is hot and the wet cloth and hot oil combination makes the oil crackle! (don't ask me why I do this - my mother told me this is how is done!)

Take a spoonful of the batter and pour on a hot skillet such that it looks like a nice round pancake. Before the pancake (lets call it pancake 1) gets cooked, pour a little batter just beyond the upper edge of the pancake on the right side till it meets the pancake 1, to make the right ear. Quickly, pour some more batter on the upper left side of pancake 1 to make the second ear. The trick is to pout the batter quickly enough for the three packages to merge into one. Otherwise the ears will fall off when you flip the pancake!

Pour some oil around the edges of the pancake and cover for a couple of minutes. When the pancake is cooked, flip it over carefully without breaking the ears. A minute or two later, the mickey mouse dosa is ready!!

Serve with some sort of chutney - I prefer coconut chutney, but you can serve any chutney found in the Indian grocery store. Kids love to eat this pancake with butter too, so you could just give them a dolop of butter on top of the pancake and they would be perfectly satisfied!

Interesting thing is, now we have Jaya's friends coming over to eat mickey mouse dosa and giraffe dosa! Not only do I get compliments on the dosas, I often get requests to make various other animals! I'll admit that sometimes the requests are difficult to satisfy. But as you can see from the Giraffe dosa, intricate animal dosas are indeed possible! Its just a matter of practice!