Carrot-Chayote Squash Kootu

As you've all noticed, I've gone traditional. I am enjoying picking Amma's brains of dishes that she used to make when we (my brother and I) were children. I'm enjoying recreating those dishes at home. I find that when I grind a masala for a dish that Amma's just finished telling me about on the phone, the aroma that hits my nose as soon as I open the mixer jar transports me right back to my childhood. When I get ready to eat, if my dish tastes just like what Amma used to make, then I'm all set for a trip down memory lane all through my meal.

This kootu featured rather regularly on Amma's weekly menu. While I didn't think much of it then, I'm sort of hooked now and I must say, this features quite regularly in my kitchen too.

1/2 cup Chayote Squash, peeled and diced

1/2 cup Carrot, peeled and diced

1/2 cup Moong Dal
2 tsp Sambar Powder
2 tbsp Coconut, scraped
1 tsp Cumin Seeds
1 tsp Urad Dal
1-2 Green chillies, slit
1 tsp Oil
1/4 tsp Asafoetida
Salt to taste




For the Tempering:


1/2 tsp Oil
1/2 tsp Urad Dal
7-8 Curry Leaves

Pressure cook the diced carrot and chayote squash along with the moong dal and the sambar powder.

Heat the oil in a frying ladle and add the urad dal. Fry till the dal turns golden brown. Add the slit green chillies. Grind this along with the cumin seeds and the coconut. Add this paste to the chowchow-carrot-moong dal mixture along with the salt. Add the asafoetida and mix well.

For the tempering, heat the oil in the frying ladle and add the urad dal and curry leaves. Add this to the dish and serve hot with steamed rice.

A very traditional dish to celebrate a festival. Wishing all of you a very happy new year. Iniya Puthandu Nalvazhthukkal.

Masala Keli

I joined the Great Vega'N Vegetarian project some time ago. I noticed that Cynthia had written a post about steamed plantains for breakfast. It took me back to a time (and place, more importantly) when plantains were easily available. As a child, I don't remember having eaten steamed plantains. I ate them as an adult when someone told me they made for an ideal breakfast.

This dish, however, is one that my mother dished out whenever she could lay her hands on the nendrampazham. A very typically konkani dish that is sweet, spicy and sour, all at once. I asked a colleague to get me half a dozen of these plantains and when he did, I made this.

4 Ripe Plantains (Nendrampazham/Rajali Keli), peeled and diced

3-4 tbsp Coconut

2-3 Green Chillies, finely chopped

1 tbsp Jaggery, grated

2-3 tbsp Coriander Leaves, chopped

2 tsp Tamarind Paste

Salt to taste

For the tempering:

2 tsp Oil

1/4 tsp Mustard Seeds

1/4 tsp Asafoetida

1/2 tsp Turmeric Powder

In a pan, heat the oil and add the mustard seeds. When they splutter, add the asafoetida and the turmeric. Add the green chilli and the diced banana pieces and fry for a couple of minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients and cover and cook for 4-5 minutes. Remove the cover and allow the banana pieces to caramelize a bit.

Enjoy this dish for breakfast or as a tea time snack. I can't seem to ever have enough of this. Let me know what you think.

Purple Carrot Thuvayal

There’s this woman we all know in the blogosphere. She’s more of a temptress, really. She’s made me crave so many things that I’ve sometimes wanted to dash across the city and insist that she feed me. She even obliged one time and brought me some home made Goda Masala so I could make her Spicy Nutty Cluster Beans. I remember looking at her Kadhi Pakoda and feeling hungry all over again. I think that was the dish that got me hooked to Anita’s blog. A year ago, on this very day, she posted Black/Purple Carrot Kanji. I wanted some because it looked pretty and I had heard so much about it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to make it myself. My colleague’s mother sent me enough, coincidentally the very next day!

This year, I bought the purple carrots with the sole intention of making Kanji. I did everything but that. I waited for the purple carrots to appear, I had bookmarked Anita’s recipe anyway, and was all set to make kanji. But fate intervened. I used one carrot in this dish and made a thuvayal with the others. I will be making this again and again, whenever these beauties are in season. Hopefully, I shall also make kanji!

4 Purple Carrots, peeled and diced


2 tsp Oil


1/s tsp Mustard Seeds


3-4 Red Chillies


2 tsp Urad Dal


1/2 tbsp Tamarind paste


Salt to taste






For the tempering:


1 tsp Oil


1/2 tsp Mustard Seeds


1/2 tsp Urad Dal


1/4 tsp Asafoetida


1 Red Chilli, broken








Heat one teaspoon of oil in a pan. Add the mustard seeds, red chillies and the urad dal. When the mustard splutters, add the diced vegetable. Saute for a couple of minutes and cover and cook for 5-7 minutes. Allow it to cool. Grind this along with the tamarind paste and salt.




In a frying ladle, heat the oil for the tempering. Add the urad dal and mustard. When the mustard splutters, add the asafoetida and red chilli. Add this to the ground paste.




Mix this thuvayal with some hot rice and add a little bit of ghee. Mix well and enjoy the purple sensation.

Cabbage Thuvayal

Amma calls me the "Thogayal queen". Whenever I cook a south Indian meal (Konkani, Tamil or Telugu) I try and make it a point to make a thuvayal. It serves many purposes:

• 
  
  There's one more vegetable dish
• 
  
  Mix it with rice and you've got one entire course
• 
  
  It removes the need for a pickle with curd rice
• 
  
  It makes for a good bread spread/side for idli and dosa, so the next morning's breakfast issue is solved
• 
  
  It gives S the feeling of a somewhat "complete" meal
• 
  
  I get another dish to blog about

I have a lot of processed vegetables in the fridge and freezer and these come in very handy when I'm putting meals together on weeknights. And I have been known to make thuvayal/thogayal with just about any. I am putting this up thanks to a lot of pressure from folks at work who can't seem to get enough of this. (K, this post is especially for you. I do hope you find it useful.)

There's another version of this at Talimpu and Nandita blogged about her adaptation of that recently. Mine is slightly different. In fact, all my thuvayal recipes are very very similar. Replace the vegetable in any recipe and it yields a completely new dish. Someday, I shall blog about my family favourite "Thengai Thogayal". Until then, we shall focus on 5-a-day!

1 cup Cabbage, chopped

2 tsp Oil

3-4 Red Chillies

2 tsp Urad Dal

1/2 tbsp Tamarind paste

Salt to taste

For the tempering:

1 tsp Oil

1/2 tsp Mustard Seeds

1/4 tsp Asafoetida

7-8 Curry Leaves

Heat one teaspoon of oil in a pan and add the chopped cabbage. Saute for a couple of minutes and cover and cook for 5-7 minutes. Keep aside.

In a small pan, heat the other teaspoon of oil and add the urad dal. When it turns slightly brown, add the red chillies and fry for a minute. Grind this along with the tamarind paste, salt, and sauteed cabbage.

In a frying ladle, heat the oil for the tempering. Add the mustard. When the mustard splutters, add the asafoetida and curry leaves. Add this to the ground paste.

Happy Rama Navami everyone. I will be making Panakam, Neer Mor, Rama Navami Pachadi and Kadalai Paruppu Sundal. What festive foods are you cooking?

The Singing Chef's turn on Tried & Tasted, this month at Divya's Dil Se. (Thanks for the logo Ksenia).

Spiced "Fruit" Cake

This has been one long overdue post. I baked this “healthy” cake for Amma’s birthday in December. I cut it myself while wishing her over the phone and we promptly ate it. I took the cake to work the next day and it was gone in no time. I played around with this cake because I have seen a lot of people blindly bring ingredients together and bake a cake. I have always wanted to stick to a recipe. This time, I tried that and wasn’t in the least disappointed with this cake.

1 cup Flour

¾ cup Wheat Flour


2 tsp Baking Powder


¼ tsp Baking Soda


1 tsp Salt


¾ cup Jaggery, grated


1/3 cup Carrots, grated


1/3 cup Beetroot, grated


3 Bananas (overripe), peeled


1/4 cup Applesauce


¼ tsp Cinnamon


¼ tsp Allspice


2-3 tbsp Oil


2 Eggs


Oil and Flour to dust the tin
Icing Sugar to dust the cake

Heat the oven to 350F. Grease and dust a loaf tin.

Sift the dry ingredients together.


Combine the bananas, eggs, applesauce, oil and jaggery in a bowl. Using an electric mixer, blend all these to a rough paste. Pour this mixture into the dry ingredients and add the grated carrot and beetroot. Mix well and pour into the prepared cake tin.


Bake for 35-40 minutes (or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean). Cool on a rack for a few minutes and dust with icing sugar.

Zucchini Moong Dal

Since I had to cook fairly traditional meals over the last three weeks, I did a lot of “food-processing” over the weekends. I peeled kilo after kilo of sambar onions that I brought back from Bangalore, diced carrots, beetroots and zucchini and chayote squash, chopped beans and cabbage and filled my freezer with different “vegetable mixes” – for sambar, avial, kootu and pulao, in addition to everything else. I used to do this sort of thing earlier (in my somewhat more organized avatar) and I stopped when I started paying my maid to chop vegetables for us. Now, I find it easier to do things myself than explain to my perennially appearing harassed maid how I want something done. One side of me begs me to not “waste” my weekends, but the more practical side of me tells me I should know better than to have vegetable related stress on a weekday.

Zucchini is in season. And it is has been robbed of its “exotic vegetable” status. When a vegetable is sold at the same price as or cheaper than the other seasonal vegetables, it can’t retain its exotic tag for very long. Not in my books, at least. And that is the same fate that Zucchini met with in my kitchen this spring. I am surprised I haven’t made sambar with mushrooms yet, but then again, mushrooms didn’t exactly reach the price nadir this year.

I opened my freezer to find a bag of frozen Zucchini and decided to make lunch with it. This dish turned out to be finger licking good and we mopped it up with rotis at lunch.

2 meduim sized Zucchini, chopped

1/2 cup Moong Dal, washed

1 tsp Oil

1/4 tsp Cumin Seeds

1/4 tsp Asafoetida

7-8 Curry Leaves

1 Green Chilli, slit

1/4 tsp Turmeric Powder

1/2 tsp Chilli Powder

1/4 tsp Cumin Powder

1/4 tsp Coriander Powder

Salt to taste

Heat the oil in a pressure pan. Add the cumin seeds and asafoetida. When the cumin crackles, add the curry leaves and green chilli and fry for a minute. Add the dal and saute for another minute before adding the turmeric and chilli powders. Add the zucchini pieces and salt along with the cumin and coriander powders. Add 1 cup of water and cover and cook for 1-2 whistles. Garnish with coriander leaves if you like.

Serve hot with rice or rotis.

Spiced Potato Onion Buns

I love baking. I just don't bake often enough. I have been putting off baking with yeast and had promised myself that I would start when spring came. It is already hot and I realized that the "blink and you miss it" nice weather in these parts is not going to last very long. If I didn't act soon, it would be too hot to think of cooking and baking. I did have inspiration from the weather. If that wasn't enough, Rachel announced her edition of Bread Baking Day, the theme of which was buns.

I'd also bought a few cookbooks recently and one of them was a book about breads. Most recipes in this book asked for fast action yeast. So, I wrote to my friend, D, and asked her to get me a few packets and her husband brought them for me. Now, I had everything in my (and the buns') favour, and only needed to shake off the shroud of laziness.  I was glad I did because, as I type, we've already polished off about 5-6 of the 10 buns I'd made. I shaped the rest of the batter into my loaf tin and baked it. I think the recipe would yield 16-18 small buns. I modified the recipe and used some of the Southwestern Spice Blend as well.


4 1/3 cups Flour
1 cup Potato, cooked
1 cup Onion, sliced
1 tbsp Oil
2 tbsp Butter
1 1/2 tsp Cumin Powder
1 1/2 tsp Fennel Powder
1/2 tsp Turmeric
1/2 tsp Paprika
1 1/2 tsp Fast-rise Yeast
2 tsp Sugar
2 tsp Salt
1 tbsp Southwestern Spice Blend (optional)
3/4 cup Warm Water


Mash the potato and mix it with the butter. Keep aside.

In a pan, heat the oil and fry the onions for 4-5 minutes. Add the cumin, fennel, paprika and turmeric and fry for another minute or two.

In a mixing bowl, place the flour and add the yeast, spice blend, salt and sugar and mix well. Add the mashed potato mixture and the onion mixture. Add the water, a little at a time, and knead until the dough comes together and forms a ball. Cover and allow to rise for 10-15 minutes.

Divide the dough into 16 balls and form each ball into a bun. Place the buns on a greased plate and allow to rise for an hour.

Preheat an oven to 200C/400F and bake the buns for 20-25 minutes. When done, split the buns in half and spread some butter. This stuff is better than anything you could buy at your local bakery. After all, you'd have made these yourself.