Diwali 2009

Diwali this year was celebrated on a grand scale at the Sawaikar residence. The wife made the 'faral' the sweets and namkeens that are served as snacks during this festive season. The items on the 'faral' list included:

1. Patal pohyacha chivda - a namkeen made of thin 'poha'. This has a tempering of curry leaves, green chilly, groundnuts, and puffed chana daal.

2. Sweet Shankarpale - these are diamond shaped fried snack made out of semolina & maida, sugar milk etc

3. Namakpare - thin, long strips of fried maida which has ajwain & salt.

4. Shev - again a fried snack made up of besan, and a few spices

5. A long-ish flat shev - a snack I found to be loved by local Indians, ingredients are same as the shev, only difference is the disk pattern used while frying.

6. Chakli - this is an all time favourite at our home, but this time I did not make it with the usual 'bhajani'; I just used the locally available ready mix and added some sesame seeds, a bit of black pepper & red chilly powder to it.

7. Besan laddoo - this one is coming to be a favorite with me & Aadu ; this is not your usual besan laddoo; in this method the besan is kneaded into a dough, then rolled into thick pooris, and fried, once this is cooled down it is processed in the mixie to make a thick powder; then a sugar syrup is made in proportion to this fried besan powder; once the syrup is ready, the powder along with huge amount of desi-ghee is added & this mixture is cooked till it becomes thick & a spoon can stand in it (that thick). Dry fruits are added along with elaichi powder & then this is rolled into laddoos....they turn out very delicious.

8. Olya-naralachya-karanjya (karanji made of fresh coconut) - this one I made for the first time, and they turned out quite a hit with the crowd.

This is the 'rangoli' I made outside our home during Laxmi-puja, it shows how inept I am at the art, I am very poor at doing the traditional 'dot-dot' wala rangoli patterns, that others find sooooooo easy to make....well I have my own ways...

This is the rangoli that Amol drew freehand with a chalk, and then we sat together and filled in the colors; it is actually a dot-dot wala design, but he being a better artist than me, he just flashed his arms around and voila the rangoli was drawn !!

Thus Diwali of 2009 was celebrated at our home in KL !!