Today I made Malpua and Fried rice. I had guests coming home and I wanted to cook something special for them. Being a foodie, I have eaten fried rice at every possible food joints but I have never cooked it at home. I love smoky and hot fried rice. So, I chose to do that for mains and Malpua for dessert. I got recipe for both from Hebbar’s kitchen. I first made a list of all the ingredients to buy and rushed to more, one stop market for all groceries. I got everything I wanted.
I patiently chopped all the veggies into small pieces as they were going to shallow fried and steam cooked. I diced carrots, beans, onions, spring onions, capsicum into thin slices. I chopped garlic into small chunks. Btw, it was going to be burnt garlic fried rice. Once I was done with my prep for fried rice, I started prepping for malpua. I chose to do this dessert as I had all the ingredients at home. I was waiting to finish the milk powder which I bought to make kowa for cham cham.
I mixed maida, milk flour, sooji, crushed saunf and whisked them for 5 minutes by adding milk. I then allowed it to rest for 20 mins. Since the milk was hot, I chilled it down before adding it to the mix.
As I waited, I then kept Basmati rice to be cooked for fried rice. It was my first time cooking Basmathi too. I got the ratio of rice and water from sister. So, normal sonamusuri takes 1:3 ratio whereas Basmathi needed just 1:2.
I also made the sugar syrup needed for dipping malpau. 1:0.5 is the ratio of sugar and water. I added sugar to water and brought it to a boil while all the sugar dissolved.
As the whistle blew once, I turned off the flame. By this time, my batter for malpua was also ready. I kept a kadai with oil and waited for oil to heat up. As the oil heated up, I prayed to God and poured the first laddle of batter onto hot oil. It condensed into a thick mass unlike a flat surface. It looked like a frog to me. I thought the mixture is too dense and added more milk and whisked. Next batch was slightly better as it started taking flat shape, but still dense. I made most of them with this consistency.
As I reached out to make the last batch of malpua, I thought of adding more milk to thin the batter and give it a final shot. There you go! All it needed was another half glass of milk. There it was! Perfect round and thin malpua cooked to golden on both the sides.
I kept adding the deep fried ones to sugar syrup. I let them rest in the syrup for 5 minutes.
On a parallel note, my cousin jumped in to help me with fried rice. Veggies were ready. Rice was cooked. All that was left was giving the veggies a toss in oil and sauces followed by mixing with the cooked rice. We started with burning the garlic to almost black and led onto frying onions to golden brown. What a majestic combination of flavours that was! We then added chopped ginger which took us to another spice land. Beans followed later as it needed more cooking time than the rest of the vegetables. After frying beans for few mins, we added carrots. I had not sliced the beans thin enough so it needed more cooking time. So, we added some water and allowed it to cook for 5 mins. Once it was cooked, we added spring onions and capsicum and continued to fry. Once all the vegetables were fried well, we added salt, pepper powder, soy sauce and red chilli sauce. The masala was ready.
We then mixed the masala with the cooked rice and it blended perfectly.
I pulled both the dishes off in 2.5 hours with both being my first attempts. A happy me at the end of the day. 🙂