Cookies for Diwali

Every festival brings home the cascade of memories, flip, flip, flip, they run like a virtual movie strip, unfolding the dormant anecdotes, so very vivid and real, that it fastens to the psyche like a fresh Meta tag. 

Every festival I miss my mom.

During Diwali festival, mom would be super-active. Two weeks before the actual festival, there would be spring-cleaning. The house would vibrate with sweet fragrance of freshness.

“The house should be spick-and-span during Diwali,” mom would say, “Goddess Laxmi only walks into clean homes”

Diwali, a festival of joy and splendor, brightness and happiness, it would brighten up my home. Every detail would somehow fall into place, like splashes of colours of different shades, making it a picture perfect.

On Dhanteras day, mom would go to the gold market to buy some gold ornaments/coins from her savings. 

“This is the day of investment for the future. It is a good habit” mom would say, “Some percentage of our saving should be invested in gold. We never know when we might need it”

Mom had this habit of hoarding things, I was to discover many years later that it added its worth during the period my sisters were of marriageable age.

During Diwali, Mom would dedicate her entire morning to making sugary candies of different shapes and sizes. The whole kitchen would be transformed into mayhem of colours and sweet fragrances. I would make numerous trips to kitchen, each time offering my help to taste her food, slyly sweeping off the crumbs of the sticky sweet morsels off the plate and sliding under the bed to relish the sweetness in peace.

Cookies were my mom’s favorites. She would make dough and take it to the bakery, at the corner of the lane, to bake it. (We had no oven at home). The number was not less. It would run into 100’s and it was distributed evenly to all my aunts and their families.

Today all those memories come rushing back when I enter the kitchen to make the cookies.

I followed my mom’s recipe and am quite pleased with the results.

Nankatai

Cookies

Ingredients

2 cups refined flour

1 cup gram flour

1 cup powdered sugar

1 cup ghee

1 tablespoon pistachio, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon almonds, thinly sliced

Method

1. Preheat an oven at 200 degrees.
2. Mix together refined flour, gram flour, sugar and ghee to make dough. Set aside for 1 hour
3. Make small round patties and press few sliced pistachios and almonds on the top.
4. Bake it for 20 minutes
5. Store it in air-tight containers