Peas Pulav

Ingredients:
Basamati Rice - 2 cups
Water - 1.5 cup of water for 1 cup of rice so you will need 3 cups of water
Onions - 1 big onion cut thinly into slices (not chopping), cut it lengthwise
Mint leaves - 6-10 leaves (eye ball it) and roughly cut it (if need leaves are big).
Green Chillies - 2 chillies for 1 cup of rice so you will need 4 chillies, cut it lengthwise into 2 or 3 pieces
Ginger - 1/2 inch of ginger root, finely chopped or crushed
Garlic - 4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped or crushed
(sometimes I use Ginger Garlic paste (2.5 tsps) that I have in handy if there is a time constrain)
Frozen peas - 3/4 cup (its up to you add how much ever you want. Also you can add other veggies or soya chunks, you can customize it)
Oil - 3 tbps
Butter - 1 or 2 tsps ( for taste if you have it or have oil)
Salt to taste (I add about 2-3 tsps, check it out)

Spices
Soombu
Bay leaf
Cinnamon stick
Couple of cloves

Preparation:

Heat the vessel. Melt the butter and add oil, once oil is warm add all spices mentioned above.
Add cut onions, mint leaves, finely chopped/crushed ginger and garlic and Green Chillies.
Saute it until the onions turn colorless. Add green peas and other veggie.
Add water and salt, let it boil and then add the washed/cleaned basmatic rice.
If cooker, let it whistle for 2 times and switch it off. If you are using a stove top vessel, you can keep checking if the rice is done or not, you can add extra water if the rice is not well done when you check. Let it stand for a little time and then open it and fluffy the rice making sure nothing got stuck to the bottom of the vessel / burnt.
To garnish, add some cilantro and paneer/fried onions (if needed). Serve it hot.

Bitter Gourd recipe

Ingredients :

Bittergourd - 5 med
Yogurt 3 cups

To grind :
Urad Dal - 2 tsp
Channa Dal - 2 tsp
Green Chillies - 5 to 6
Mustard - 1 tsp
Peanuts - 2 tbsp
coconut - 4 tbsp

Seasoning :
Mustard - 1/2 tsp
Jeera - 1 tsp
Red chillies - 2 to 3
Curry leaves
Garlic - 5 pods crushed

Preparation:

Scoop out the seeds from the bitter gourd and cut into small pieces.
Mix with about 1 tsp salt and let it stand aside for 30 minutes.
Mean while, with a little oil, fry the Urad Dal and Channa Dal separately until they are roasted and are reddish in colour and set aside.Toast the Green chillies in the same pan and set aside.
Toast the mustard seeds until they start spluttering and set aside. Roast the peanuts and remove the husk (can use dry roasted peanuts).
Grind these with coconut and mix them into yogurt. Add water to thin the mixture if necessary.

Squeeze the bittergourd pieces and fry them in oil and add it to the above mixture.

Season and serve.

Vegeterian & Chicken Stuffed Taquitos

Vegeterian Stuffed Taquitos

Frozen spinach (thaw in the microwave and squeeze out all the water)
Black beans (canned)
Sweet corn (canned)
Artichoke (canned)
Shredded cheese (You can use monterey jack )
Flour tortillas

Preparation:

Mix all these up in a bowl. No specific quantity. If you don't want to use all of it, then use up what you want and store the rest in plastic containers in the fridge for future use.
Added some salt, pepper and jeera powder.
Preheat the oven to 400
You'll need the flour tortillas. Heat a few tablespoons of oil in pan. Once oil is warm, dip the tortillas very briefly in the oil on both sides so it gets soft.
Then add the filling and roll.
Set the rolled tortillas on baking tray seam side down and bake for 12 mins.
You can prepare these in advance and bake just before you are ready to serve.

Chicken Stuffed Taquitos

Chicken stuffed Tacquitos are is easier to make. You can get the rotisserie chicken or make your own chicken. To the chicken, add black beans and sweet corn so that it's healthier. Use flour tortillas vs corn. The recipe doesn't require cheese but it can be added if kids like it.

Ingredients:
2 cups shredded rotisserie chicken
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 can chopped green chiles, 4 ounces
A few leaves fresh cilantro or parsley, finely chopped
Vegetable or canola oil, for frying
12 (6-inch) corn tortillas

Preparation:
Season the chicken with cumin, oregano, salt and pepper and mix in the chiles and cilantro or parsley. Dip the tortillas in 1-inch warm oil to soften. Tightly roll a couple of forkfuls of chicken up in the tortillas. Place seam side down and bake 12 minutes.

Serve it warm. Happy cooking!!

Tech Bits on MP3

Here is some info on the hype that is going on over here...recently its been a craze for MP3s...its actually a music file which we can downloaded from the web. Nowadays most songs are in the MP3 format..just like "anyname.doc" format for WORD documents and "anyname.txt" format for text files... "anyname.mp3" is used for songs...to get to know more about this you can just visit this site...
http://webopedia.internet.com/MP3.html

Recently there was an hype for some software called Napster(and it still there)...its a music software which allows people to exchange music on the internet...but that company is beening under trail now...because they were allowing people to exchange copywrited songs..by which the number of CD's that were sold got reduced.....so the musicians and the cassette companies have got this company and a few more companies on trial.....so beware, though some of these cool stuffs sound very cheesy and nice, they have traps like this....

On the other hand...if you want to hear some MP3's for English songs you can go to www.scour.com which has got lot of english song collection from which I have dowloaded some songs and for tamil songs we can go to any tamil sites like:
http://www.geocities.com/arrmp3

(or)
http://www.tfmpage.com/listening_ple.html

You will surely get good music...but it will take lots and lots of time to download those music files...if you want, you can try..but to hear those songs you got to have any of these players Winamp or Real Player or any other music players in the computer...

You can download them from www.winamp.com or www.realplayer.com

So thats the news I can come up for this week...I hope I can continue to do something like this for every week.

Thats all for this edition of Tech Bit!!!
Have fun reading or trying this...
Any Questions!!!! They are always welcome...

Tech Bits on E-Commerce

We have this section mainly to enlighten poeple who are so ignorant about the recent technologies. If you are really interested in getting to know about any new technologies or if someone had driven you nuts by using some techy words, don't worry just email us the topic, we are always here to explain it to you. We will keep you posted through Gettoknow.com.

Here is a sample of our Tech Bit on E-Commerce:

Hello All, Here we go for this week's Tech bit!! Its on the internet's buzz word "E-COMMERCE"!!! I know you would have heard this word lot of times..... Actually what it means is:

"The buying and selling of products and services by businesses and consumers over the internet. Such a practice has exploded in the past year alone, as security issues have improved, and more and more consumers are buying goods and services online also called ecommerce. Typically there are three types of ecommerce transactions: business to business (Cisco), business to consumer (ie etailers), and consumer to consumer (eBay).also called ecommerce."

If you want to know on how it is exactly working in detail you can visit this site at:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/ecommerce.htm. This is a great site,which we recently found very interesting, if you get time just go visit the site....as you can infer from the address, it tells you how ("any kind of") stuff works?

E-commerce is been widely used and its the hottest technology for now...most of the shopping stuffs that are done on the internet are implemented using e-commerce.For example, you can visit some of the site that use e-commerce:
www.amazon.com
www.jcpenny.com
www.barnesandnoble.com
and many more like airline websites..

To get more info on how e-commerce is doing in India visit the site given below.It has some links to other IT magazines which we would get in India.
http://www.asiasource.org/news/at_mp_02.cfm?newsid=1446#indiatech

There were lot of security issues that were broughtup because of this... infact they were implemented too...they mostly use "Secured Socket Libraries"..There is an easy way to find whether a site is secured or not by just looking at the URL or the htpp://..address.

Normally, a secured site will have a "s" attached to "https://...". This will tell us that the site is secured. For example:
"https://www.anyname.com"
You can see a "s" is tagged onto("http")the address. Yes, that tells us its a secured page or site.Another thing I got to say about this, the entire site WON'T be secured, only some pages, like the pages where you submit you personnel information , credit card information, your login pages and a few more will be secured. It is secured because nobody else can view your info....thats "The PRIVACY" the site can give the users..

Thats all for this week's Tech Bit's edition.

Any Feedback or Questions are always welcome...