Carrot Milkshake

Are the children and youth of today any different than the children and youth of yester years?  Are they worse off or better off than the previous generations?  Have they a brighter future?  We have given them a world of instant gratification – instant meals, remote controlled environments and instant information at the press of a button in the form of Google.  I taught my children to use the dictionary – something they claim that most of their other class mates do not know.  Of course they rebel against using it and call us old-fashioned. 

Since I am involved in helping my son with his studies now that he has not been performing as well as we would have liked him, I realize that they do not any more study text books and do extra research like we used to do for our exams.  No – that is too much trouble and not worth the points.  They just browse through their notes and read twice over through the highlighted portions of those notes.  Definitions in physics are reinvented in their own words – they do not know how to by-heart definitions any more.  All in all, they have the attention span of a gold fish.  I read the gold fish has the shortest attention span among animals of 15 seconds.  I think my son could break that record – his is far less at the moment.

Preparation Time: 30 minutes

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

12-15 medium size carrots

1 ½ cups sugar

1 liter milk

¼ cup slivered almonds

1 tablespoon clarified butter

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

¼ teaspoon saffron

1 teaspoon cardamom powder

1 teaspoon pistachio powder, for garnishing

Method:

1. Wash and skin the carrots.  Cut into ½” pieces.  Cook with enough water.  Make sure that the water is 2 inches above the carrots in a pressure cooker.  
2. After the carrots are cooked, cool and grind them in a blender.  Keep adding cold milk to obtain liquid consistency.
3. In a separate pan, fry almonds in butter till they are lightly browned.  Add half the quantity of almonds to the blended carrot milk and blend for 2 minutes to make sure that the almonds are coarsely ground.
4. Place a thick bottomed vessel on the stove on low heat.  Add the rest of the almonds, saffron, cardamom powder, carrot milk, vanilla essence and the sugar.  Mix well and stir on medium heat until the carrot milk boils.  Remove from heat.  
5. Cool and chill carrot milk, drizzle pistachio powder before serving in tall glasses.