Tag: fruit

Watermelon Aguas Frescas

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BM# 100: Week 3, Day 2
Theme : Let’s have a toast!

Summer means watermelons and mangoes in India. Drinking Watermelon juice is very common to help cool the body down. It’s a straightforward no fuss recipe of blending watermelon with sugar.

Now coming to the recipe here, it’s the Mexican version of watermelon juice. Agua means water and fresco means cool in Spanish. Agua frescas means cool water and are not limited to just watermelons. It can made with a whole bunch of fruits and sometimes even cereals. Water and fruits are blended with sugar or sweetener of your choice and served with ice. I have seen some interesting recipes like tamarind agua Fresca and cinnamon rice water. You can read more about it here.

Read on for the recipe and prepare it this summer please :-)!

Makes 6-8 servings

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups diced watermelon
  • 4 cups water
  • 1/4 cup sugar, or per taste
  • Ice cubes

Method:

  1. Blend the fruit with 2 cups water and sugar.
  2. Pour it into a pitcher and add the remaining 2 cups of water. Taste test and add more sugar if needed.
  3. Serve immediately with ice cubes.

Check out the Blogging Marathon page for the other Blogging Marathoners doing this BM#100

Strawberry lemonade Mocktail

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BM# 100: Week 3, Day 1
Theme : Let’s have a toast!

It’s time for a toast.

Raise your glasses please.

It’s time to celebrate.

But what are we celebrating?

Well, a milestone…and a wonderful one at that. This is the reason why my blog is alive after all these years. A reason why I have a group of friends to whom I can ask about anything and everything and will get a reliable answer in a few minutes!

It’s time to celebrate being a part of the Blogging Marathon and to celebrate its 100th edition :-). Let’s raise our glasses and join in a toast.

Congratulations on the 100th edition, Valli! May this be the first of the many more to come!

Serves two

Ingredients:

  • 6 strawberries
  • 4 tablespoons (brown) sugar
  • 1/2 lemon, cut into 4 pieces
  • 2 cups water
  • Ice cubes
  • Lemon wedges for serving

Method:

  1. Blend the strawberries coarsely with the sugar, leave some chunks on. Set aside.
  2. In a steel glass, add the lemon wedges. Using a fork (I used my pestle) or a wooden spoon, crush the lemon wedges so that it releases the juice as well as some of the citrus oil from the peel.
  3. In a pitcher or a bowl, add the crushed strawberries and the muddled lemon together. Add two cups of water.
  4. Refrigerate until the time of serving. Serve in a glass filled with ice and some lemon wedges for decoration.

Check out the Blogging Marathon page for the other Blogging Marathoners doing this BM#100

Strawberry jam

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1strawberry-jam

BM # 70
Week 2, Day 1
Theme :Fruit based Recipes

This post is a little rusted, its been sitting in the drafts for almost an year. I wasn’t (and still am not) sure how to click inside my not so well lit kitchen without over exposing the shots. The light situation isn’t great – you either have the sun coming in directly or its dimly lit. Diffuser doesn’t help much and stepping into the balcony is not much of an option because of the weather. But worry not, I will find my way through. By that I mean I am planning to keep a jacket in the kitchen than figure out a way to work with the light!

Anyways, let’s get ready for the holidays with some bright red strawberry jam. Its adapted slightly from Aparna’s space. The jam hardly lasted a few weeks. When it was almost over, I remember adding  milk to the bottle and shaking it vigorously with the lid on to make some instant milkshake. The recipe seemed simple enough for me to try and I was glad I did!

Read on for the pictorial. This post goes to Blogging Marathon# 70 .  Check out this page to see posts from other participating bloggers.

2strawberry-jam

Add 5 cups strawberries cut in halves with 2 cups sugar. Mix and refrigerate overnight. The sugar needs to be adjusted depending on the tartness of strawberries. You can add more, if needed, when cooking the jam.

The next morning, you will find a lot of liquid from the strawberries and sugar. Add this to a thick bottomed wide pan tall enough to allow the sugar to froth. Finely chop one apple and tip it in as well.

Bring it to a boil and cook (medium to low heat) until the liquid evaporates and it reaches a jam consistency. About 15 minutes or so, keep stirring in between. Mash a little to break a lumpy jam. We like it with fruit chunks, so didn’t mash a lot.

To check whether the jam is done, do the “plate test”. Bottle the hot jam in sterilized bottles. I got about 2 bottles of 500 gm jars.

3strawberry-jam

Watermelon Juice

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My parents have named me ‘Rajani’. They named me after the goddess Durga, but a more common meaning of my name is night/darkness.  And funny how things turn out to be, I live upto my name!

Try as I might, I cannot sleep early. I sleep well past midnight, and try as I might, I am not able to get rid of the habit.

I am at my in laws place now, where they sleep at decent hours like normal people. Once everyone sleeps off, I sneak out to the living room and sit there wondering what to do next. The computer is in the bedroom, so I can’t access it and the only alternative is television.

My faith in television has been long lost. Its only tragic incidents in the news channels, drama in the Hindi channels and advertisements in the rest.

Its nights like these, that makes me realize how much I am dependent on the internet. Its my main form of information and entertainment. I can’t imagine a day without internet! No wonder its now counted among the basic necessities along with food, water, clothes and shelter.

Like I cannot imagine a life without the internet, I cannot imagine summer without mangoes and watermelons. Both these fruits have started making an appearance in the market now.  Here is a simple watermelon juice, made with sweet water melon.

Ingredients:

  • Watermelon  Cubes            :   1 cup, roughly chopped
  • Water                                        :    1/2 cup
  •  Lemon juice                           :    1 tbsp
  • Sugar                                         :     1-2 tsp

Method:

  1. Blend all the ingredients together till the sugar is dissolved.
  2. Serve chilled.
  3. You can try adding kala namak (black salt) and a pinch of pepper for a different take.

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