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Apple (and any other fruit) compote is a drink that’s easy to prepare and can be very tasty.

Take 8-10 apples.

Cut them into pieces. Optionally you may also peel them first, but I prefer not to, because the peel itself is healthy to eat.

Put the apple pieces into a pot, add sugar (I added about 8 table spoons of sugar to this quantity of apples), add water (you can add water so that the volume of water is about 2x the volume of apples - this means that 1x will cover the apples and the other 1x will be extra water above the apples) and put them to boil on medium fire.

Leave them to boil until the mix becomes denser. When you get something like this, you can stop:

And this is it. You can server it warm, during a meal, or cold, as a refreshment. Enjoy!

Since every true programmer enjoys sweets, here is an easy way to prepare sweet rice for lazy programmers.

The rice will be boiled in milk, with sugar added. The ratio of milk to rice should be something like eight parts of milk to one part of rice. An important thing is the pot in which you boil the rice. The pot should be specially made for boiling milk in it. For example I use a pot with double walls, where you have to pour water between the walls. This way the fire heats the water and the water heats the milk, and so the milk does not get burned. The idea is that the rice and the milk will boil for as long as two hours maybe, so in a regular pot they will surely get burned.

I used this time 2.5 liters of milk, and 1 and half cups of rice. I didn’t calculate the exact proportion, to be 8:1, but I think it is somewhere around there.

So take the rice, wash it up, and put it in the pot.

The photos are not very clear this time, but you get the idea. Now add sugar. Lots of sugar. I add something like six table spoons for one liter of milk. So for two and half liters of milk, I added about 15 table spoons of sugar.

Then pour the milk in the pot.

Then put the pot on small fire, and let it stay there for couple of hours or so. From time to time you can come and check it, and stir a bit. Slowly the rice grains will inflate and will take up more and more volume in the pot. When the rice becomes visible, the boiling is close to the end.

Leave it there for a little bit more, then stop the fire and everything is ready.

As you can see this is indeed a recipe for lazy people. It needs about 10 minutes of effort in the beginning, and then just some stirring from time to time. What can be easier than this?

With the quantities that I’ve used here, if you are a healthy programmer, the sweet rice will last between 1 and 2 days, depending on how much and how many times you are used to eat daily. You can server it warm or cold, as you prefer. Enjoy!

This preparation is much like the previous one, but since I cooked it couple of days ago and I carefully took all these pictures, here I post it. Actually it does have something different: you will see rice being prepared next to the main preparation.

Like usually you start with getting together the vegetables that you will use. This time I used potatoes, carrots and bell peppers (actually I’m not sure if “bell pepper” is the most suited translation for what I used, but this is the closest that I found; anyway you’ll figure it out from the photos; read more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_pepper).

First the potatoes: take about 10 potatoes and peel them.

Cut the potatoes into pieces. Meanwhile put some oil into a frying pan and leave it on fire to heat up. When the oil is hot, start frying the potato pieces. Initially the pieces put into the oil will look like this:

After some more time they will start to really fry, and they’ll look something like this:

Depending on the size of your frying pan, it may take several turns until you fry all potatoes. It took me four turns, and in the end I got this:

Depending on your taste, you can fry the potatoes more or less. I prefer not to fry them too much, because in the end they will also get boiled a bit, so I rather let them half-fried, and leave the rest to the boiling. Of course, if you like the food to be more dry, you can just fry the potatoes some more. Here you can have a closer look, to get an idea about how much they got fried this time:

Now we leave aside the potatoes, and we get to the bell (or whatever) peppers. Take about 8-10 pieces of them:

Cut them in half and clean out the seeds:

Cut them into pieces and leave them aside for now.

Now the carrots. Take about 5 carrots and peel them.

Then cut them into slices.

At this point all the vegetables are prepared, so we’ll get to the last part: mixing them together.

An essential part of any recipe are the spices that you use. This time I used five spices: cumin seeds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumin_seeds) , black mustard seeds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_mustard), fenugreek seeds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenugreek), turmeric (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turmeric) and asafoetida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asafoetida). You start with frying a bit the spices, and then you gradually add the vegetables. It is a good custom to have all the spices prepared before you start frying, so that you don’t have to run here and there to get them. Usually you fry the spices only for some seconds, so if you realize that you missed something and you run after it, by the time you are back the other spices may be well burned. As an advice that I also received at some point, prepare two plates and in one plate put all powder spices (which have to be fried for 1-2 seconds) and in the other plate put the non-powder spices (which have to be fried for 30 seconds or even more). Here are my two plates:

You can see the fenugreek seeds in the top-left side, the cumin seeds in the top-right side and the black mustard seeds in the bottom side.

Here you can see the turmeric powder (the orangeish one, on the left side) and the asafoetida powder (the yellowish one, on the right side).

Now take a frying pan and put some oil into it. The frying pan should be big enough to hold all the vegetables mixed together. Put some oil into it and let it get hot.

When the oil is hot, put in the non-powder spices. If you are not sure when the oil is hot enough, just drop in a few cumin seeds and notice when they start frying. That is a good moment to add in the other non-powder spices. Let them fry for a while, stirring constantly.

If you use black mustard seeds, they will give a good indication when to move to the next step. At some point the mustard seeds will start to crazily jump in all directions. Just let them jump for a while, not too long, and then add the powder spices. Be careful here, because now you need to be quick. The powder spices need to be fried for about 1-2 seconds. If you leave them too long, they will easily get burned, and they can spoil the entire preparation. So make sure that you have the carrots close to you, reachable.

After you add the non-powder spices, stir quickly for 1-2 seconds, then grab the carrots and throw them in the pan, and stir again to mix everything together.

Now let the carrots get half-fried, stirring from time to time. To know when the carrots are fried, just test one of the slices by trying to cut it with the edge of a spoon. If it gets cut easily, then the carrots are fried, if it doesn’t get cut, then they are not fried. If it’s in between, then they are just good. They will have time to get fried completely after we add the other vegetables too. Next add the pepper:

Continue stirring and let the pepper get fried. You can get it fried almost completely. Then add the fried potato pieces.

Since the potato pieces are already fried, what we’ll do is add some water, until the mix gets almost covered by water.

Now add three-four tea spoons of salt. Then stir from time to time, and wait until the water level drops and the mix becomes solid. You have to be a bit careful, because in the end the mix can get burned if all the water evaporates and you don’t take it off the fire. In the end you should get something like this:

Part 2: Plain rice

It is nice to serve the sabji preparation with plain rice. Plain rice is easy to prepare. Basically you need to fry the rice a bit in the beginning, then boil it in water. The initial frying will help the rice grains to not stick to each other while they are boiled. What is important is the ratio of rice/water to use. I use a ratio of one cup of rice to three cups of water, and it gives good results.

So grab a cup of rice, and wash it up. Put it on a plate and leave it for a while, until it dries up.

After the rice is dry, take a frying pan, put some oil into it, and leave the oil on small fire until it gets hot. Then put the rice into the hot oil, and stir continuously until the rice gets a bit fried. You should not leave it too much, because at some points the rice grains will start to become brown, and you don’t want that.

Here it is worth to mention that instead of oil you can use clarified butter, also known as ghee. But since this time I had no butter in the house and I was too lazy to go down to the shop after it, I just used regular oil. We’ll see about clarified butter some other time.

After the rice is fried a bit, add three cups of water (or as many cups as needed, depending on how much rice you used, and respecting the proportion of three parts of water for one part of rice). The mix should look something like this, with some oil coming up to the surface of the water:

Now here comes the last part. Leave the mix on the smallest possible fire, and don’t touch it until all the water evaporates. Ideally you should not stir the rice. Of course, for this you need some frying pan which does not burn the rice. If it’s really needed, in order to not burn the rice, stir from time to time. The stirring will probably break the rice grains and will make them look less nice in the end. If you have a good frying pan and you don’t stir the rice, after the water evaporates it will look like this:

As you can see, this time it all went fine and the grains remained intact.

End results

In the end you should have nice sabji and nice plain rice. Serve warm and enjoy!

If you want to quickly put up a preparation, here is what I did one of these days. I’m a vegetarian, so you won’t find any meat, fish or eggs in the ingredients list.

The list of ingredients is as simple as possible. You can see it in the picture below. I’ve used 4 potatoes, 5 carrots, 4 tomatoes, 1 eggplant, 2 peppers and a handfull of dill.

First you attack the potatoes and you peel them.

Then you cut them into small pieces.

Then you prepare some oil in a frying pan and you put the potato pieces to fry. You will let them fry just as if you would want to prepare fried potatoes.

Next you attack the carrots and you peel them.

Then you cut the carrots into slices.

Then it’s the turn of the peppers

You cut the peppers into small pieces.

Then you peel the eggplant.

And you cut the eggplant into small pieces.

The you will peel the tomatoes. Normally tomatoes are difficult to peel, but if you first boil them for some minutes into hot water and then you cool them down into cold water they become very easy to peel. So in a pot you put some water to boil and you place the potatoes into the pot.

Then you peel the tomatoes.

You cut the tomatoes into pieces.

At this moment all the vegetables are prepared for the actual cooking. Basically they will be fried in oil, in a pan that is large enough to hold all the ingredients.

Of course you will use some spices too. Here you can improvise. I used black mustard seeds and kalonji seeds. I started by frying them into a little oil. You have to be carefull not to fry them too much, because if they get burned they will give a burned taste to the entire preparation.

Then you add the vegetables, but not all in the same time. You add them in order, starting with those that take the most time to get fried: the carrots.

When the carrots are half fried, you add the peppers.

When the peppers are half fried, you add the eggplant.

When the eggplant is almost fried, you add the potatoes. Remember that the potatoes were fried separately in another pan, so there is no need to fry them anymore.

You also add the tomatoes now, right after adding the potatoes.

You mix together all the ingredients, and you add some water, until the mix is almost entirely covered by water.

Then lastly you add the dill.

You mix the dill with the rest of the ingredients, and you let it boil on small fire until the water level decreases and the mix becomes consistent. Be careful not to let it boil too muc, because if all the water evaporates, the mix will get burned. In the end the preparation should look something like this:

And that’s it. If you are quick at peeling and slicing the vegetables, you can have the whole preparation ready in about 40-45 minutes. You should serve it while it’s hot, with some rice garnish and with some cream.

Bon appetit!

Let this first post be the first in a long sequence of interesting and helpful posts in the years to come.

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