Chocolate pistachio fudge

I love Nigella Lawson's recipes. They can be described in two words: "easy to prepare" and "sinfully delicious". Okay that was more than two words, but well....you got the idea.

This is just the second recipe of her's that I have tried, next to her chocolate mousse, but I'm already crazy about her and have nearly all her recipes bookmarked.

As I've already hinted, this fudge is super-easy. Nada stumbled upon this recipe about half a year back, when she had come down to India for her vacations. She kept asking me to prepare it, and I would always be like "What's the rush? I'll prepare it someday". Then, about two day before her departure, I woke up about half an hur early, tiptoed into the kitchen, put all the ingredients into a saucepan, heated it and then poured it into dispsable container and refrigerated it and went to get ready for college.

When I returned from college, as usual, Nada began to ask me for the fudge and I was like "Go and get it from the fridge". My friend had come home that evening and we finished the fudge then and there.

After a few weeks, after Nada had left, this friend of mine began to ask me for this fudge. The lazy girl that I am, I kept telling her that I'd prepare it later. Then when Nada came down during her christmas vacations, my friend informed Nada of how she used to keep asking me for the fudge but I never prepared it. Immediately, Nada asked me to prepare the fudge for her. Now Nada's wish is my command. So I quickly went into the kitchen and my friend left my home in 15 minutes happily with a box of warm fudge in her hands.

This fudge is perfect for midnight snacking too. Somehow, unlocking the various doors that leads to kitchen and getting the fudge out of the refrigerator at midnight, trying to make as little noise as possible, seems like an adventure. And the pleasure you get when you return to your bedroom with the box in your arms..Lol! I am drooling over the keyboard.

I am sending this as an entry for Delicious Desserts. on What's cooking today!



Ingredients:

• 350g dark chocolate(chopped)
• 1 x 395g condensed milk
• 30g butter
• a pinch of salt
• 75g pistachios

Method

1. Put the chopped chocolate, condensed milk, butter and salt in a heavy-based pan on a low heat, and stir to melt.
2. Put the nuts into a freezer bag and bash them with a rolling pin, until broken up into both big and little pieces.
3. Add the nuts to the melted chocolate and condensed milk and stir well to mix.
4. Pour and spatch this mixture into a foil tray 23cm square, smoothing the top.
5. Let the fudge cool, and refrigerate until set. You can then cut it into small pieces approx. 3 x 2.25cm. Cutting 8 x 10 lines in the tin to give 64 pieces best achieves this.
6. Once cut, it can be kept in the freezer - no need to thaw just eat straight away.

Serves: Makes 64 pieces of rich fudge

Trip to Sakaleshpur

Wow!! It's been so long since I blogged. I'd really wanted to post on how I spent my christmas holidays, but as soon as the holidays were over, I became busy with never-ending assignments, projects and so on.
Anyway, better late than never. I enjoyed myself these Christmas holidays. Nada came down for a week. Most of my days were spent travelling, cooking, swimming, hanging out with cousins and simply lolling around. After many years, I got a chance to visit our family estate in Sakaleshpur, which is about 4 hours drive from Mangalore, including 1 hour on the Western Ghats. The ghats is a must-have experience. It is a series of sharp curves and turns, and the government makes the ride seem even more like a roller coaster by not repairing the roads.

It was fun on the estate, exploring the area. It was a sunday, so they were no workers around. Dad went on his own excursion, finding out which crop is yielding how much and all those business matters, and I and Umma went walking, looking at the plants, clicking snaps and trying to guess which fruit they yield. It is mainly a coffee and pepper estate, so we got to see a lot of pepper vines(oh, did you know they are actually climbers and not trees?) and coffee plants, both the arabica and robusta variety.

It is easy to differentiate the two. Coffee arabica looks bare with just a few leaves while Coffee robusta looks pretty with a lot of leaves.

Umma told me how she and her sisters used to eat the skin of the ripe seed and throw away the seed when they were small.

The coffee seeds are hand plucked,....

and dried under the sun.....

The husk(dried skin) is then removed,....

and sent to the factory for curing, that is for removing a very thin layer of skin and then roasting and grinding it.

Pepper was also a very interesting plant. First when I saw it I thought they were growing on trees.

But on looking closer, I realized that the pepper vines had actually coiled around the tall trees.

Man, they are really tall...

Dried pepper looks very pretty.

Then there were bananas, though they were still unripe.

Coconut palms...

papayas...

jack fruits...

The pumpkins were still in its flowering stage..

Wanna take a look at the traditional water heaters? Wood is heated under the pot in this pit...

and the upper region of the pot can be seen in the bathroom:

Let the pictures do rest of the talking..

Huh...turned out to be a very tiring day. We brought a couple of pumpkins home. And just in case you are wondering what the last pic is about, it is a butterfly sitting on a dried leaf...well camoflagued..the works of God are always perfect...:)