Chilli Garlic Fried Rice

I have had this recipe in my archives for very long time and just recently tried it out. The recipe is very simple, and delicious. You just need very few vegetables, or you cam make with out any vegetables at all since garlic and chillies are used for main flavour. Since I love garlicky flavour, I love this rice. Here goes the recipe.

Ingredients:
1 ½ cups basmati rice
Water
Salt
6 large cloves of garlic
2-3 dried red chilli (seed them if you like it less spicy)
1 tbs Soya sauce
¼ cup frozen green peas (optional)
¼ piece capsicum diced (Optional)
½ medium onion chopped (½ cup)
3 tbs vegetable oil
1tsp sesame oil
A knob of butter

Preparation:
1. Wash rice and cook it in plenty of salted water by keeping the lid OPEN ,until the rice is just soft. Drain and run cold water over the rice to cool the rice completely. Keep the rice in a colander to drain off the excess water.
2. Grind/grate garlic in a grinder and keep it aside.
3. Heat a large saucepan, add the vegetable oil and sesame oil. Add the chopped onions and the garlic chilli paste to this and sauté until onion becomes translucent.
4. Add soya sauce and sauté for few seconds.
5. Add peas and capsicum (if using) and sauté just until the capsicum goes soft.
6. Add rice and mix well and adjust salt. When it is heated through completely add a knob of butter and close the lid. Serve hot with any chinese curry.

Salad with Caeser Dressing

After a quite long break, I’m back with this wonderful Salad. But I may go on a break again I guess. Don’t know when. Guess what happened? Few days back our compueter fell down and broke crashing the hard disk completely along with all my recipes, pictures and all other stuffs. Thankfully just couple of days before the crash, we saved some of our old pictures, So at least that is saved. But it is so sad that I lost all my recipes. The only ones left are the ones in my little blog :(. I wont be able to blog regularly until the laptop get fixed;this is my husband's friend's notebook that my husband brought from him to do some paper works.
Well, this is an easy to prepare salad and delicious too. I’m not a great fan of salads but this is one of mine and my family’s favourites. I sometimes have it for my dinner. Here I have used the vegetables that I had in my fridge. You can also use a chicken breast boiled in salted water and then cut into chunks. It’s all up to you.
Ingredients:
½ cup tomato diced (1 medium size)
1cupful cucumber diced
1 carrot diced (1 large one)
Few lettuce leaves torn roughly
2 slice bread (50 gm) (for making croutons)
Olive oil-just a few dashes(to sprinkle on bread)
For the Caeser Dressing:
4 tbs Good quality Mayonnaise (1/4 cup)
1 tbs Olive oil
1 tsp Lemon juice
1 clove of Garlic, finely chopped
½ tsp Dijon Mustard paste
1/8 tsp pepper powder(that is half of a quarter tsp)
Salt to taste

Preparation:
1. In a small bowl, Mix all the ingredients of the dressing using the spoon until well combined.
2. For making croutons, remove the crust from the bread and rub or sprinkle some olive oil on the slices. Toast them in the toaster until golden and crisp. Cut them into cubes of 1 ½ cm. Adding oil really makes them crisp.
3.Just before serving, add the dressing to the vegetables and add the bread cubes and mix well. Season with salt and pepper.

Tips and notes:
For making the croutons, instead of toasting the bread in toaster, you can cut them into cubes and bake them in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius until golden and crispy. You can also fry them by cutting into cubes and then frying in few dashes of olive oil in frying pan until golden. But I always go for the toaster method..Cos that’s the easiest. But you have to be careful. Since the bread is drizzled with oil, it can really get hot.