Carrot Halwa / Carrot Pudding

As a kid, I always liked to munch fresh carrots. I still do love to eat it raw. The other day when I was picking up carrots at the grocery store, an old lady came up to me and said, "You wouldn't stock up these many carrots unless you have a rabbit at home".... I just smiled. What else was I supposed to respond? That I am the rabbit at our house :P.... Oh that reminds me, I kind of skipped having them for a week or two and I was surprised to see those organic carrots still fresh in the refrigerator. Hmm..that makes me wonder, how organic are those "organic labelled" carrots ?

Anyways, it was usually during winter that we used to get these fresh red carrots, that my mom would make the carrot halwa out of it. And we would stay near the kitchen premises to check out every now and then if it is done :).

Carrots being rich in Vitamin A, a normal amount of it being added into your diet could help improve vision. I had a weird liking towards wearing glasses when I was a kid. I would come up with silly reasons of headaches, pain in my eyes etc. so that Papa could take me for an eye test. I have been taken to many doctors - some would send me off even without a prescription and some would be kind enough to not disappoint me and prescribe eye drops to keep my eyes cool. Noone understood my real intension of visiting them. Finally when the time came that I started working on the computers that I took an anti glare glass and was so happy to have wore them :). Long story short, I believe carrots do help improve vision.

Today I realized that I have so many pending drafts to publish. May be I just kept cooking and eating and hardly published anything. So I am gonna work on my drafts strictly else my hard disk will be left with no more space to store those pics. So let me start with this recipe.

Ingredients

1. 3 tbsp of ghee/ butter
2. 4 cups of grated carrots
3. 1/4 cup of sugar
4. 1/2 cup of milk
5. 1-2 cardamom crushed
6. 2 tbsp of roasted and chopped Cashews and almonds

Method

• In a pressure cooker, melt the ghee/ butter. 
• Add in the grated carrot and cook it on medium heat. 
• Once the carrots get tender, add in half of the sugar, milk and cardamom.
• Mix it well and let it boil.
• Once it starts to boil, close the pressure cooker with the lid.
• Pressure cook it on high heat for about 2 whistles.
• Remove it from the heat and once the pressure gets down, open the cooker.
• Adjust the sweetness of the halwa by adding the left over sugar, as required. Add the chopped nuts to it.
• Place it on heat and stir it continuously untill the milk gets thickened.
• Garnish it with cashews and serve it hot/ cold as desired.

Tips

1. Do not overcook the carrots in the pressure cooker, as it would turn out into a paste. Carrot halwa should have the feel of the grated carrots in them :).
2. Carrot Halwa gets delicious when ghee/butter is added in the amount that is given above. However, if you do want to avoid using too much ghee, you could cut down the amount and it would still render a tasty dessert. 
3. To make it richer, you could add Khoya/ solidified milk and raisins to it. I haven't used these in the above recipe.