Roasted Green Bean Bundles (Thanksgiving Side dish)

Continuing with the Thanksgiving recipes, here's an interesting roasted green beans recipe. Traditionally green bean casserole is made for Thanksgiving or during the holiday season, but I'm not a big fan of creamy mushrooms, so this individual bundles of seasoned, roasted green beans sounded like a perfect alternate.

This dish needs a little bit of prep work. Beans need to be blanched, drained and tossed with dressing. Then they are formed into bundles and roasted. So the best thing to do is to blanch and keep the beans ready the day before and then they can tossed with dressing and roasted just before the dinner starts.

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Rajasthani Badam Halwa (Almond Pudding for ICC)

For this month's Indian Cooking Challenge, Valli gave us Vaishali's recipe for Badam Halwa/ Almond Pudding. My mom makes awesome badam burfi, but I have never tried badam halwa before, so I really wanted to make it before the deadline. I knew I had some whole almonds in the freezer and this is a great recipe to use them up before I go buying for more. Holiday season is a great time to stock up on nuts, flour & sugar since many of the stores have them on deep discounts. So if you have the pantry space, then this is the right time to go shopping for dessert & baking staples :-)

Sorry, I digressed. Coming back to this amazingly delicious badam halwa. Recipe had clear instructions to use non-stick pan to avoid sticking, so I used by brand new ceramic coated pan that I bought from India and it worked like a charm.

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Curly Kale with Caramelized Onions (Thanksgiving Side Recipe)

I am continuing with my Thanksgiving recipes again for this week's Cooking from Cookbook challenge and today I have a healthy & delicious side dish made with Kale. It is quite simple to make too.

Kale is one of the tougher greens and needs to be cooked a little longer. This is one of the more time consuming dishes which involves caramelizing the onions and cooking the kale till tender. But thankfully the dish can be made ahead of time and refrigerated until ready to serve. If you want to make it ahead of time, then caramelize onions and cook the kale -- cool and refrigerate. Reheat just before serving and then drizzle with vinegar and garnish with almonds.

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Limeade with Brown Cane Sugar (Agua de Papelon)

Blogging Marathon# 46: Week 2/ Day 3
Theme: Lemon/ Lime Recipes
Dish: Agua de Papelon (Limeade with Panela/ Jaggery)

For the final day of 'Lemon/ Lime recipes', I was thinking of making something sweet. But I'm not a big fan of lemon flavored desserts -- I prefer vanilla or chocolate flavors. As I was looking through 'Viva Vegan' cookbook, I found the recipe for a Limeade with Panela or South American unprocessed cane sugar.

I bought a slab of panela a while back but totally forgot about it until I found this recipe. Papelon or Panela (as it's called in Venezuela and Colombia) is produced by cooking the juice of freshly squeezed sugar cane down to a solid, crystallized mass. I wasn't sure how it would taste because it was really dark in color, I thought it will have a molasses-ish taste but I was pleasantly surprised that it tasted just like jaggery (our own unprocessed cane sugar from India).

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