Anjali's Food Kaleidoscope

Summer at Saloh and Aata ka halwa

As a kid I had seen a picture in a calendar covering the most beautiful hillstations of India. I had particularly liked one picture of a makeshift wooden bridge on a stream .We visited a village by the name Saloh in Himachal  last summers and there I found something exactly like the picture I had seen more than two decades back.

 What I found most alluring in the villages of Himachal was that the golden fields of Wheat would come right upto the doorstep .So people would be sipping tea in their verandah and a few steps away were these golden beauties ready to be harvested.

   If a simple camera could capture such beautiful snaps imagine what a hi-tech camera  could do.

Wheat forms the staple diet of the north Indians and now I am going to present before you a simple yet most popular sweet pudding made with whole wheat flour.

There are innumerable ways of making the same sweet and trust me they are one better than the other. This proportion of the ingredients is followed by a dear friend Anita and is so convenient to make  that I decided to put it on the blog. Infact Anita is the one making the halwa in the pictures while I photographed it.

 Ingredients

You could use any measuring cup for this.

1.    ¾ cup ghee / clarified butter

2.    1 cup whole wheat flour

3.      ½ cup water ( infact a tablespoon less would be better)

4.      ¾ cup sugar

5.     Cashews , kishmish  and  almonds for garnishing ( optional)

Method

1.    Warm the ghee is a heavy bottomed pan.

2.    Add the flour in one go and keep stirring on low flame till the wheat starts giving out a pleasant aroma and turns one shade darker.

3.    Turn the gas off and add the water . Keep stirring and turn the gas on ,keep the flame low.

4.   As soon as the mixture starts to stick together and turns into a ball ,that will take about 20 seconds add the sugar and keep stirring for say about 30 seconds more till the sugar gets dissolved.

5.   Add the garnishing while the sweet is in the pan or decorate later to your choice.

I guess it goes without saying to serve it piping hot.