Day 44 - Cooking Kheer (the Indian rice pudding variation)

Kheer means thickened milk in many of the Indian languages. However, kheer is never really consumed on its own - it always has another ingredient added to it for texture and taste.  Each region in India has its take on the Kheer - some like to cook it with rice, some with rice vermicelli, some with cream of wheat, Indian cottage cheese or paneer, and even some mild-tasting vegetables!  Yes, and fruits of course!

I made the variation with rice, having my roots in the eastern part of India, where rice is the staple for most of the population.  I adapted the recipe to my own tastes and usually add a little bit of desiccated coconut, raisins, lots of almonds, pistachios, and a generous splash of rose water.  Different flavours come together to make this really decadent.  And since this is the dessert of choice for my first batch of students, I had to do a dry run to fine-tune the process.

The pictures of the nuts and raisins were handheld - I was feeling too lazy to get the tripod out.  And I also feel a little constrained with the tripod as far as angles go.  If I want a bird's eye view of the food, I would have to put it on the floor, which I really hate doing (since my dining area was really dark today with the weather being so gloomy)!  These photos were done with my kit lens.  

I also used my new speedlight powered down to 1/16 in the third photo to illuminate the background a little bit.  Since I can't sync my flash with my camera yet, I had to handhold the flash and sync it with the shutter release.

P.S. I recently realized that my camera doesn't have a PC connector either.  So, I'm going to get hit with buying two universal translators as opposed to just one for my speedlight.  :-(