Malpuas by Chance.

Friends, my last few blogs dealt with some heavy duty topics like anger, jealousy, hunger etc, so I felt its time to talk about something lighter and that is making of ‘malpuas” and that too without its season. I think  more or less every Indian must be acquainted with this sinfully sweet delicacy prepared with frying batter of refined flour and milk with added assortments like raisins, dried dates and coconut pieces and mashed ripe bananas then dunk it in sugar syrup. The ripe bananas is the main  protagonist in our sweet  story! Actually, a few days back, my better half brought home, a dozen of bananas, while returning from office, which he bought  earlier in the day and that too wrapped in a ubiquitous polythene carry bag, in spite of my duly furnishing him with cloth bag , in his office bag.  Old habits  die-hard,  “never mind”, he says non chalantly and matter of factly, that, I can’t  alone bring down the use of polythene bags . Let the debate wait for some other time, we should not transgress, we were talking about ripe bananas.

You could easily imagine, what would have happened to those hapless bananas! Kept for so long trapped in confines of a polythene bag. They were so over ripe that they could be relegated to non edible stage very soon. I  made all the four members of my family, devour six of them immediately. As they all know I’m dead against wastage of food, they readily complied. Now it was the matter of employing the remaining six of them, in  banana bread, smoothie were the options but suddenly the idea of malpuas struck my mind. The malpuas are so inherently connected with ‘Holi”, the festival of colours that making them some other time of the year is like out of season.

The preparation started in right earnest, fortunately, in this complete lockdown days in Kolkata,  all the other ingredients were present at home, specially the  milk and refined flour. I took half liter of milk and two cups of flour and two tablespoon of semolina, mixed the cut dried fruits, I mentioned earlier and the mashed bananas into it and kept the batter aside for half an hour. Then prepare a light sugar syrup, adjusted the consistency of the batter with adding water as required. The batter should be thicker than that of pancakes and yet pouring consistency. Rest of the process is simple, deep fried  the ladle full of batter in a large woke untill golden brown, in medium heat, then dipped them in the sugar syrup. Picked it out after sometime and the ritual continued.
The end result was simply marvelous! The malpuas tasted  heavenly! My husband and daughter are such ardent fan of malpuas that they kept on hovering around the kitchen,  after finishing their allotted qoutas of the delicacy. Swearing to do extra bit of work out (which they seldom follow) managed to wangle the remaining malpuas, blaming the other one all the time of eating  more. Isn’t it endearing to see two grown ups behaving like kids! Thanks goes to malpuas that in this gloomy time we found something to smile and relish.

So, friends, try to make something out of the box and sweetly surprise your family members . I vouch for it to be a great mood enhancer which we acutely need  at this juncture. Hopefully the pandemic situation improves till the Durga Puja festivities starts in October. Let’s all pray to Mother Goddess to keep her children safe and healthy.
Adieu for now.

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