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