Panfusine

Its that time of the year again, Diwali, a.k.a the festival of lights.. The brain rewinds to memories from long ago of childhood, the aroma of Diwali savories deep frying in a variety of oils, Peanut oil for the 'mixtures' (as chivda is known down south) & 'omappodi' , coconut oil for the 'murukku' & 'thenkozhal' and lots and lots of ghee for the sweet stuff. Every family had  (& still does) its traditional set of munchies. My favorite memories are that of waking up from my afternoon nap to the aroma of curry leaves being sauteed with asafetida to be added to the 'Miccher' (mixture). There would be a one foot high hill of various ingredients piled high on layers of newspaper to be mixed by hand before being ladled into the large stainless steel containers.(to be unopened, preferably, until Diwali Eve. Yeah, like that curfew was ever obeyed!!). Fast forward to this century...Start the Car, drive to Edison , NJ , pick up boxes of ...

My initial idea was to call this post 'Eating your mistakes' but it turned out to be such a delicious deviation of intended results, I just did not have the heart to tag it as such. It started out with the intention of making a beloved bengali dessert the 'Sandesh'. My memory cells are pretty much swamped by gustatory inputs about classics like 'Rosgolla' & Cham Cham, that I do not have many memories about the third in the triumverate of Bengali sweets. So I turned to a classic bengali food blog, The Bong Moms cookbook and sure enough, came across this elegant recipe for bhappa sandesh . Scrolling down the list of ingredients, mentally 'checking' off the ones I had on hand...Ricotta, condensed milk (check & check... YAAY I was on a roll here) & I flew off to try this out, entirely forgetting the remaining list of ingredients which I did not have on hand, or a serious look at the simple technique described. That was the end of the Sandes...