My day of cooking lessons and learning recipes

I had a very full day of getting cooking lessons/recipes from two great families in our apartment complex. We have lots of snacks/treats and they each sent us home with samples of their family meals for the day to try (egg curry, drumstick (a vegetable) curry, dal, rice).

First we started off at a friend house making chikki. This is a jaggery syrup mixed with groundnuts (peanuts).  the key is getting the syrup to the right consistency before adding the freshly roasted peanuts.  Other chikki I have seen in stores have till (sesame seeds) in them too.

The larger pot is the jaggery syrup, the front one is for a veg curry. 

This is the end product, then you break it up. 

This is what the kitchen looked like. She had milk that she was making yogurt/curd and butter from, and check out all those tomatos. 

This is us with her maid who wanted a picture with the kids to send to her kids. 

This is the egg and potato curry they send us home with to try. YUM.

Then after some time at the pool we headed over to one of T's friends houses to learn to make laddos (from Chotto Bheem the Hindi cartoon the kids are obsessed with) and murkulu.

Here's me and T's friends Grandma making laddos.   This is the last step where we roll the laddos. You put Ghee (clarified butter) on your hands so the dough won't stick and you roll.

These are the end product, about 70 or so I think we made. 

 Here's some of the murkulu, they end up as savory crunchy treats. You make this dough, then it is pushed through a press into oil and fried.

okay I can't get this picture to turn correctly.
This shows the press , the dough and the oil pot. 

 

The finished product. 

These are the finished products for the day.....

Fun quotes of the day while we were at T's friends place.  I asked his mom (who provided me with lots of recipes to try) what the difference between a pickle and a chutney is (both are sauces). 

Her response: A pickle is like a husband and a chutney is like a boyfriend.  Pickles you can keep for a long time, but chutneys are only good for a day or two.  (Pickles are essentially sauces that are shelf stable for months)