It was Diwali a few days ago: The Indian festival of Lights. There are more reasons why Diwali is celebrated, but I will stick to the festival of lights because it is also symbolic of how we look forward to being more positive by defeating our own demons.
This Diwali I made Wheat Kheer. It is a dessert that is delicious but a little time consuming to make. You can reduce the cooking time by ½ if you use a pressure cooker.
The Wheat Kheer is made with simple ingredients but the cooking did take a long time. About 2 hours to be precise.
Let’s start.
Ingredients
Wheat grains – ¾ cup
Coconut milk – 1 cup
Water – 5 cups
Grated coconut – 4 tablespoons
Cardamom Powder – 1 teaspoon
Salt – ¼ teaspoon
Liquid Jaggery - ¾ cup
Ghee – 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon
Dry fruits – I used almonds, Raisins and Chironji (also known as calumpong nut) I think you can get this most Indian grocery stores.
Method
Wash the wheat grains.
Add the wheat grains in a large pan and add 5 cups of water and 1 teaspoon of ghee and cook until the wheat grains are almost cooked. This took about 1 hour for me. Looking back now, I could have cooked this in a pressure cooker for about 6 whistles. When I make this again, I will cook it in a pressure cooker.
Once the wheat is almost cooked, add the coconut milk, salt, grated coconut (I made a coarse paste of the grated coconut in a mixer, before I added it to the wheat) jaggery, cardamom powder and half the dry fruits that you have taken for the recipe. For me it was roughly around 1 tablespoon of raisins, 2 almonds and 1 teaspoon of chironji.
(It doesn't look all that appetizing here, but trust the process, it will all come together)
Now, cook it in on low heat for about 30 – 40 minutes. The kheer will thicken. At this stage, you can taste and adjust the sweetness of the kheer. If you think it is too thick, you can add some regular milk to dilute it just a little bit.
Once the kheer is done, switch off the flame.
In a small pan, add ghee, almonds, raisins and chironji. Once it turns fragrant and the almonds turn slightly golden. Add it to the Kheer.
You can keep this in the fridge for about an hour. I like this dessert chilled.
And that’s it.
Thank you for reading.
I cook every day. Well, almost every day. And there are days where I cook multiple recipes. Having said that, I am not an authentic or professional chef. Many of my recipes are experiments as I try to adapt and use the ingredients I already have.
My mantra is you should cook food just the way you like it. I don’t mean any disrespect to traditional methods of cooking or any cultures where the cuisine originates from. But I merely try to cook it with what I have and what is available to me and sometimes, I add ingredients that I want to use up.
All photos are my own.
All photos are shot on a mobile phone.