Anarsa

Diwali is just a few days away, and it's time for some nice faraal. We get almost everything in the Indian stores. But karanji and aransa's are something that we can't get. So I have been making these two for every Diwali. Since anarsa's take lot of time, I started it well in advance this time. I am sharing it here today. For the first-timers it is not straight forward, but definitely worth a try. If you succeed once, you would definitely make this every year!!

To Make the dough

Ingredients:

• 1 cup rice
• 3/4 cup jaggery (finely grated)
• Water

Method:

1. Wash rice two to three times. Soak it in the water for three days. Change water everyday.
2. After three days, drain water completely. Put the rice in collander to drain any remaining water. Leave if for about 10-15 minutes.
3. Spread a clean cotton cloth on a plain surface, and spread rice on it evenly. The cloth will absorb remaining water.
4. Take half cup of rice in a mixie at a time, and grind it to fine powder. Repeat this for remaining rice.
5. Sieve this to get fine powder.
6. In a bowl, mix rice powder and grated jaggery. Mix it well to form a nice mixture of rice powder and jaggery. Knead well to make a dough. If you are not able to make the dough right away, just store the mixture in a container at room temperature.
7. Keep it for 3 to 4 days. In cold weather it may take more days to get the dough as desired.
8. Once the dough is ready, you can store it in the refrigerator for 6 months or so.
   

To Fry

Ingredients:

• Ghee
• Poppy seeds
• The dough

Method:

1. Take some dough and let it come to room temperature.
2. Knead it with some ghee. If it's too dry add very little amount of milk.
3. Make about 1 inch balls of the dough. Take poppy seeds on a flat surface.
4. Put one ball in the poppy seeds. Apply some ghee on your finger tips, and flatten the dough to form a circular disk of anarsa. The anarsa should be about 3-5 mm thick depending on how crispy you want it.
5. Heat a wok on medium heat, and add some ghee. The amount of ghee should be such that the top of anarsa is not covered it. Now put in the anarsa with the poppy seeds on top. With a spoon, sprinkle ghee over anarsa from all sides. Make sure it's done in the center. All this needs to be done quickly without letting the anarsa burn.
6. Remove the anarsa from ghee and serve hot.

Tips:

1. For step 4 of dough, I prefer to stop the mixie and blend the rice after every few seconds. I repeat this 3-4 times than doing this in one go.
2. The anarsa's may splutter if there is more jaggery in the mixture. For this reason, I usually make some extra powder so that we can add it to the dough.
3. For more sweetness you can add powdered sugar while frying the anarsas.