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Monday 11 August 2014

Nachni Ladoos- Some more cravings & more cooking!


One thing that one gets in abundance when you are expecting is ADVICE. Lots of advice, good advice, bad advice, not so good advice and the completely ignore advise.

I have a sweet tooth and I crave for something sweet post my meals. I happened to mention the same to a colleague in office and she ADVISED me to try Nachni Ladoos. Nachni- I wasn’t too sure of, Ladoos- yes I am all for it. Now any advice that pertains to sweets has my interest. I decided to google it & it turned out that this was actually some good piece of advice :) Nachni ladoos is a good to have sweet when you are expecting.

In fact Tarla Dalal’s website http://www.tarladalal.com has a host of great Nachni recipes that are recommended for consumption during pregnancy. Nachni or Ragi is also known as finger millet and is a good source of Iron, Calcium, Vitamin A & Vitamin B. Since its high in fiber content it is also known to regulate the digestive system and prevent constipation.

So I decided to give it a shot. I was pleasantly surprised since this was not just easy to cook (not very time consuming) & the ladoos turned out very tasty.
I referred to this recipe by Tarla dalal.
http://www.tarladalal.com/Nachni-Ladoos-(-Nutritious-Recipe-For-Pregnancy)-22452r

As always tweaked this to suit my taste buds and to make the cooking process as simple as possible

Ingredients

1 cup ragi (nachni / red millet) flour
5-6 tbsp ghee
4-5 tbsp powdered sugar
1/4 tsp cardamom (elaichi) powder (2-3 elaichis should suffice)
2 tsp roasted poppy seeds (khus- khus)

Method

- Heat the ghee in a broad non-stick pan, add the ragi flour and cook on a slow flame for 4 to 5 minutes or till it turns golden brown in colour, while stirring continuously. This can be a little tricky, you don’t want to overcook it or undercook it. Look for change of colour and a nice fragrance of cooked flour.
- Remove from the flame, add the sugar and mix well. Be careful at this step since the mixture is very hot. Use a spoon for mixing this together. You may increase or decrease the quantity of sugar depending on how sweet you like the ladoos to be.
- Add the cardamom powder, and mix well.
- Transfer the mixture into a greased plate and spread it evenly and keep aside for 10 to 15 minutes
- Refrigerate for 15 minutes and keep at room temperature for 5 minutes.
- Before making the ladoos you may want to grease your hand with a little ghee as it helps to shape the ladoos better. Then scrape the ladoo mixture & using your hands roll each portion into a round ball. I made small ones so the mixture yielded about 18 ladoos. The idea behind making small sized ladoos was to Control the portion of consumption. A small ladoo would satisfy sweet craving while  keeping the number of calories under check :)
- Roll each ladoo in lightly roasted poppy seeds till they are evenly coated from all the sides.
- Store in an airtight container.
Give it a shot & do let me know if you enjoyed making & eating it.

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