You know how you sometimes get that random craving, or see someone post a photo/video of some food online, and you just HAVE TO eat it? Seems to be happening to my husband a lot ;)

The other day he decided he wanted homemade jalebi. Well, challenge accepted!

The thing is, if you look up a jalebi recipe, they all seem a little complicated. Mixing at least two types of flour, adding curd/yogurt, leaving the batter for fermenting... Whaaat? Plus it's still a struggle to get any plain flour, so I kinda needed a recipe that would use self-raising! 

So after quite a bit of search, I finally came across some instant jalebi recipes, and decided it's doable ;) My recipe uses self-raising flour, but if you happen to have plain flour, add 2 teaspoons of baking powder for each 1 cup/150g. It's so easy and my jalebis got a lot of love from you guys on Instagram, so I thought I'll just put it up in time for Eid for those who could fancy trying it :)

Ingredients:

For jalebi:

For sugar syrup:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water
• optional: 1 tbsp kewra or rose water, or cardamom powder

Method:

Start with making the syrup. Place sugar with water in a pan, add the flavouring of your choice. Bring to boil, then lower the heat and gently simmer until the syrup thickens. Once thick, keep aside until cool.

To make jalebi, mix the flour, yellow colour (if using) and water into a creamy batter - a little thicker than you'd do for pancakes. Transfer the batter to the container you'll be using for piping - you could use a piping bag with a small round nozzle, but most common method is to use a sauce bottle like the one below:

Heat up some oil in a pan - we found it best to just use normal, shallow frying pan. If you try to deep fry them, the jalebi batter will sink to the bottom before it floats, and this will stop you from achieving the spiral shape.

Make sure the oil is really hot - test by squeezing a dot of batter out. Squeeze the batter out in the shape of a spiral, starting from the middle and working outwards - don't worry about the perfect shape though, mine were all over the place and still made quite an impression with the family in Pakistan ;)

Once they change colour to golden, take the jalebis out and dip in the sugar syrup for a minute or so - make sure you've let your syrup cool down first! This way they'll absorb enough sweetness, but will remain crunchy.

A month between posts again - that's going well, eh?

I've been quite demotivated with the whole lockdown situation. I thought I'd blog more, document it somehow... but to be honest the days just blend into one. Honestly, if I don't check my phone I don't even know what day it is now.

The school had provided learning packs, online resources and all... We made a basic homeschooling plan, just to have some kind of routine to make sure we do actually do a bit of homework - that went out of the window by now, we just go with the flow. After the initial lockdown period was extended, our school got us to join Class Dojo where teachers post activities for kids to do, and that's our only motivation now - apart from that we just do little bits as and when we feel like.

So, a month into the lockdown, the Ramadan started. I thought it would be a bit of an odd one, but you know what? Not really. We never really stock up ahead of it, we hardly ever host or go out for iftar. If anything, it's actually been a little easier - physically, at least. Without school, we don't bother with bedtime that much, and Adam is enjoying being able to have iftar with us every day. We plan our meals a little better - Mr just does a big shop on his days off, there's no little top-up trips every other day (and on empty stomach, we all know that doesn't end well!), we've been a bit more creative with our meals and trying to use what we already have. 

We've had the "big" announcement on Sunday, regarding plans towards ending the lockdown. If anything, that's left me more confused than before. The Government moved away from "Stay Home" slogan and replaced it with "Stay Alert", but still kinda advise staying home as much as possible... But also allow to go out more and even travel within England. I don't know about you, but I'm not planning to go anywhere just yet. I'm also glad that both my kids will still be staying home, at least for the foreseeable. Not sure who came up with the idea that EYFS are the best group to be sent back to school first, with kids that age virtually unable to practice social distancing, but I'm happy that Adam is in Y2 and not in the first group set to be coming back. Who knows though, by allowing people to go out more (not that some haven't before), we might get ourselves into second lockdown even before they go into the next proposed phase of easing the restrictions.

It's looking like Eid at home too - we're heading into the last 10 days of Ramadan, and there definitely won't be a change until then. I'm half expecting to see our street full of people visiting each other against the rules, but my plan is to decorate the house, get kids' gifts out, dress up, make a nice meal and just stay home - maybe a little outing to the park if the weather's nice.