Ganapati holidays Recap

The 10-day Ganesh festival has come to an end. The kids had a 6-day mini-vacation for this social festival in Mumbai. People come together to celebrate and worship Ganesha. Our building also had a Ganapati kept for 5 days and people came together for Aarti and activities. It is most exciting for the kids. My daughter didn't miss a single evening aarti or any of the activities organized for the kids.

Ganapati in the building

The daughter was quite excited about the kids activities and I was surprised to see she wanted to practice for them. :) I hadn't seen that much enthusiasm for school work. These festivals are a way to make childhood memories by breaking the routine and bringing on excitement. There was lemon and spoon race, musical chairs and a drawing competition. She was sad she didn't win anything but kids being kids, she quickly recovered from it. She also wanted to go for visarjan but we had other appointments that day. So, she sportingly agreed to wait till next year.

Ganapati drawing for competition

We had our share of fun in the house too. On the first day, we tried to make some clay and sculpt a Ganapati out of it. First, we tried a mix of Fevicol glue and cornstarch (corn flour). That didn't work out so well. The daughter commented it looks like we made the Ganapati from ice cream and he is melting. Later, we tried a cooked clay using salt and cornstarch. We used the first recipe from here and halved it. We also added a bit of turmeric powder for colour. This turned out much better. The daughter made two Ganeshas out of it.

glue and cornstarch clay	salt and cornstarch clay

I also made ukadiche modak that afternoon. I followed Madhura's recipe from this video but used the measurements from this video. They were not perfect but they were alright for a first try. The rice flour covering was a bit thick and a tiny bit cracked in a few of the modaks. They can only get better from here each year. :)
The daughter also shaped a couple of the modaks.

A tiny modak made by the daughter	A tray of steamed modaks	A bite of modak

The previous night we put mehndi on each other's hands. :) Taking advantage of the school holidays to the fullest.

We had also gone to a friend's house for Ganapati stapana. There, they served us fried modak as prasad, among other things. The daughter loved them. Ukadiche modak is a more grown up taste while fried ones are loved by almost everyone. All of this to say, I also made the fried modaks one day. I did not follow a particular recipe. I talked to my mom about her recipe and based on what we tasted that day for prasad, I made the modaks one evening.

For the covering, I used 1 cup maida, 1 cup whole wheat flour, a pinch of salt and added 2 tablespoons of very hot ghee. Mixed the ghee with a spoon and then added water to make a stiff dough. For the stuffing, I added chopped cashews, almonds, pistachios, melon seeds, charoli, cardamom and nutmeg powders to the leftover steamed modak stuffing (coconut, poppy seeds and jaggery). Shaped into modaks and deep fried them on medium heat.

Since I was covering all the modak bases, when I came across a modak curry recipe, I had to try it. Instead of the dough recipe as mentioned, I used leftover alu wadi batter and added more besan to it to form a dough. Maybe due to this, the modaks did not become soft after boiling in the gravy. The gravy itself was quite tasty. I added jaggery to it instead of chillies because that's what I do. :)

One of the days, I also made a sheera for prasad at the building aarti. Although I followed the method, I halved the amount of ghee and sugar. It was still plenty of ghee and sugar for us.

The daughter is very much into slime making so that was a regular occurrence during the holidays. One of the days, she gave me and herself a slime spa. Here's what it looks like :)

After all the fun, it is back to the routine now. I was looking forward to getting back into the routine after all the fun.