The Accidentally Awesome Halwa

What started off as a chhanar payesh (cottage cheese pudding), ended up as a awesome halwa. How? Read on!

My cooking spree was on till Vijaya Dashami too (in continuation to my last post), and it was time for some sweet dish today. So I had this idea of making chhanar payesh which is a very authentic Bengali dish and Durga Puja is all about celebrating the Bengali culture. I was all ready with whole milk and a 300g pack of cottage cheese. One good thing here is that cottage cheese is available readily, though it is tad bit salty, it is dry and has no lemony smell. So I boiled the milk a lot ... till almost half and the added sugar and then added the chhana. And then i did the mistake ... I left it boiling. After two minutes when I came back, everything was cottage cheese. That was a real super disaster!

And they say chhorano is the mother of invention. Well chhorano is a Bengali slang which means "to really mess things up". So, what I did afterwards is here step by step to mend the mess and how I got an awesome halwa.

Ingredients:

• Cottage Cheese: 400 gms
• Suji/ Semolina: 1 cup
• Sugar: 1 Cup
• Ghee/ Clarified butter: 1 tablespoon
• Cashew nuts: Handful
• Raisins: Handful
• Vanilla essence: 2 drops

Procedure:

• Everyone knows how my 300 gms cottage cheese became 400 gms.  Still if you are unsure (or don't have cottage cheese available at the store), just boil whole milk and then add lime juice to it. This will curdle the milk, you can drain the water to get pure cheese. Then add sugar to it.
• At the end of my misadventure, I had sweet cottage cheese. I blended it to a smooth consistency with a hand blender.
• Put a pan to heat. Melt the ghee in it.
• Lower heat and then add suji, and roast it by stirring constantly.
• If you want you can fry the nuts and the raisins in the ghee first and then add suji. I did the opposite.
• The suji is done when it has become light brown and gives nice smell.
• Pour the suji and nut/raisin mixture in your blended cheese mixture.
• Put the pan to medium heat and mix well so that no lumps of suji are there. If the suji starts forming large lumps, that means it was nit fried well.
• Suji usually takes lot of water to get cooked. So if you are using the coarse variety, maybe you will need more water. The finer variety cooks easily.
• Add vanilla to this and mix well. Stop heat. If you like more Indian flavours, then you can add crushed cardamom instead of the vanilla.
• You can eat this with puri or just like that. You can give it shape by letting it cool in a flat pan and then cutting into diamond shapes.

This turned out to be a very tasty halwa, the vanilla added nice flavour. All my colleagues loved it, one even though I added chocolate to it. You can use pineapple or saffron too.

Next up: The real chhanar payesh!