Spicy Bread Upma

Wake the sense of smell and taste and spice up your morning by swapping the daily toast to this simple savory bread upma. Turn your dry bread pieces into soft and spicy bites.  This is a dish you can make in a snap as it takes hardly 10 mins of your time and its guaranteed that the plate is gonna be emptied once served. Here goes the recipe and have a great morning.

Ingredients:

4-5 Whole wheat bread (1" pieces)

1/2 medium Yellow onion (finely chopped)

1 Roma tomato (finely chopped)

4-5 Curry leaves

3 dry red chilli (broken)

1/2 tsp Cumin seeds

1/2tsp Mustard seeds

1/2tsp Urad dal

1 pinch Asafoetida

1tbsp Oil

Salt

How to:

• Heat oil in a skillet, add the mustard seeds, dry red chilli, urad dal and asafoetida.

• Then add onions and curry leaves along with some salt, followed by turmeric powder and saute until tender.

• Now add the tomatoes and cook until its completely mashed up.

• Add the sliced bread pieces and mix well to coat the bread with the mixture.

• Saute for 2 -3 mins, switch off and garnish with chopped cilantro.

• Serve hot with tomato ketchup.

Limoncello Granita

This is a sweet-smelling lemony dessert, smooth and creamy, that you can't stop licking the spoon. It is perfect after a heavy meal as the limoncello helps in digestion. Limoncello is an Italian lemon liqueur, made from lemon peels. One of our very good friend gifted us this fine bottle, after their visit to Italy. It has strong lemony flavor without any sourness or bitterness from the lemon. Granita is a semi-frozen dessert made from sugar, water and other flavorings like lemon, orange, coffee, chocolate and so many. The texture of this frozen mixture will be semi-solid and creamy like yogurt, and the lemony flavor will leave you light and refreshing. The lemon zest gave the dessert nice yellow hue here and there, and every bite was absolutely yummy.

Come on, its cheese, liqueur and sugar, you cannot go wrong. Senthil gave 2 thumbs-up and me, very happy :)

Ingredients:

1 cup Mascarpone Cheese (8oz)

1/2 cup Limoncello 

1 1/2 cups Lemon simple syrup

9x13 Baking dish

 For Lemon Simple Syrup:

1 Lemon's Zest

3tbsp Lemon juice

1 cup Sugar

1 cup Water

How to:

• Heat a saucepan at medium heat, add the sugar, water, zest and lemon juice. Gently stir and bring it to a boil.

• Then reduce the heat and simmer it for 5 mins. Switch off and bring it to room temperature.

For Granita:

• Add the room temperature mascarpone cheese, limoncello and the lemon simple syrup and process until its smooth. (I used mixie and pulsed it 3 times. I guess food processor works even better.)

• Pour the mixture into the baking dish, wrap it and freeze it for at least 4 hrs.

• For serving, scrape the top layer with a fork or spoon and serve it immediately.