Wholewheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

Blogging Marathon# 64: Week 3/ Day 3

Theme: Wholewheat Dishes

Dish: Wholewheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

So for the final day of 'Wholewheat dishes', I have my kids absolute favorite cookie, Chocolate chip cookie. They were so happy when I made them and I was happy that they are made with wholewheat flour are a little more nutritious than the ones with all purpose flour.

Whenever I'm making any baked goodies for the family, I usually sub at least half of the all purpose flour with white wholewheat or wholewheat pastry flour. I don't care if the texture suffers a little bit with the substitution but I feel better serving the family something that is a little more nutritious than just empty calories. My next focus is in cutting down sugar -- lets see how that one goes.

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Rajasthani Dal Dhokli

Blogging Marathon#64: Week 3/ Day 1

Theme: Wholewheat Dishes

Dish: Dal Dhokli

We are starting our 3rd week of blogging marathon today and my theme for the week is 'Wholewheat Dishes'. For the first day I made a hearty and comforting dish popular in both Gujarat and Rajasthan, Dal Dhokli. This has been on my list of dishes to try for a very long time and finally got a chance to try it out.

Dal dhokli is a filling one pot meal where dhoklis aka Indian style wheat pasta :-) are simmered in dal until cooked through. From what I read, Rajasthani version is slightly spicier than Gujarati version. I tried the spicy version and it was amazing, both my kids loved it too. I told them this how close an Indian dish can get to Italian pasta and they were very happy to try.

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Wholewheat Zucchini Bread for #BreadBakers

It's time for #Breadbakers again and I'm so excited to host it this month. The theme I picked is 'Breads using Summer Bounty'. So any bread, quick or with yeast, using fruits, herbs and vegetables from your garden or fresh from the farmer's market can be made. We have a delicious list of breads from the lovely bakers, don't forget to visit their blogs (listed at the end of the post).

I planted a zucchini plant in my raised vegetable bed this year. It started flowering beginning of July and I was hoping for a bumper crop of zucchini. Little did I know that not all flowers become fruit. With no zucchini in sight even after 3~4 weeks, I started to panic. A quick google search even led me to think that there were no bees in our area to pollinate the flowers and I might end up zucchini-less after all. Then one day I saw these 2 big ones -- not sure how I missed them the whole time. Then the next day I found a gigantic 13" one -- I might have to get my glasses checked now. I'm glad that my zucchini story ended on a positive note. Not sure if I'll get more though -- I see flowers but no tiny or big zucchinis :-(

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Strawberry-Chocolate Chip Pancakes with Strawberry Maple Syrup

Blogging Marathon# 54: Week 2/ Day 2

Theme: Kid's Delight -- Fruits in any form

Dish: Strawberry-Chocolate Chip Pancakes with Strawberry Maple Syrup

For the second day under Kid's Delight -- fruits in any form theme, I made strawberry pancakes and served them with strawberry maple syrup. My kids love pancakes and waffles for breakfast, but I rarely make them. After a lot of nagging from them, I finally treat them with some pancakes.

Last month, we went strawberry picking and seeing all the beautiful strawberries we got too excited and picked way too much than we can really handle. Strawberries are quite fragile and need to be treated very gently. I sorted them out and put them in a single layer on paper towel lined baking sheets in the fridge.

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Basic Sourdough Sandwich Loaf

BM# 51 -- Baking Marathon: Day 4

Bake of the Day: Breads -- Basic Sourdough Sandwich Loaf

I have had sourdough starter for more than 4 years now, but as a family we are not much into crusty breads. So I don't call myself a sourdough baker, I have a sourdough starter that I use along with quite a bit of yeast to make soft, everyday not-so crusty breads. Real sourdough bakers utilize the starter itself to leaven the breads instead of relying on yeast.

As I was looking for sourdough sandwich bread, I found this beginner bread recipe on the Kitchn blog and one look at the pictures I knew this was exactly what I need to bake with my starter. I followed the recipe to the 'T' and the bread turned out just perfect. Here's my just fed, bubbly sourdough starter. Here's the post with the recipe for the Sourdough Starter.

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California Veggie Pizza Recipe on Whole wheat Crust

I have missed the last edition of International Food Challenge because of summer vacation and possibly poor planning on my side. Even this post is late, but I didn't want to miss the 1st Anniversary of IFC. Hearty congratulations to Saras and Shobana for coming up with the event idea and completing 1 successful year.
For this month's challenge, Saras picked 2 dishes from each of the previous years challenges. It was quite tough picking just one and I ended up making California Veggie Pizza that Joanne T Ferguson suggested.

My son has been asking for a pizza and I thought I can shoot 2 birds in 1 shot :-) I wanted to try whole wheat pizza crust and voila King Arthur has an amazing recipe for whole wheat pizza crust. One thing to keep in mind while making this crust is that the dough has to be refrigerated overnight, at least 18 hours, so plan accordingly. Don't tell your kids you are making the pizza until you are ready to put it in the oven or you will be in a night long trouble.

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