The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

I don’t exactly have a sweet tooth. The effort needed to prepare most desserts doesn’t match up to the high I get in eating them. So I doff my hat to Sailu’s recipe for til laddoos – the simplicity and attractiveness of these sweets shook my no-dessert spell. Here is my version – sesame almond laddoos. As an almond fan (or shall we say, "nut nut"), I hiked the amount of almonds to make up for the omission of oatmeal. The result was not bad at all.

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Aamras literally means "mango nectar" and that’s exactly what it is – flavored pulp of ripe mangoes. A summer regular on any Gujarati thali, this dish is unusual in that it isn’t an end-of-meal dessert – it is part of the main course, eaten with pooris and parathas.

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My initiation into the kitchen was with tea-making – masala chai is all I knew how to prepare for many long years.

Chai is Hindi for tea, a word unknown no longer outside the Hindi-speaking diaspora – it’s usual for people to say "tea" when they mean Western-style tea, and "chai" when they’re talking about Indian-style tea.

As an ardent tea lover, I am especially excited to share this recipe with you. I hope you enjoy this aromatic tea made the Indian way as much as I do.

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