More Experiments I

Hi my readers! We meet after a long time. All along, I was experimenting with some recipes which I would like to share with you in postings from now on.

After Kartikai Deepam festival, a lot of aval (Pressed rice) uruNDais were left over as none preferred to eat them. Since they were made from jaggery (ghur) in addition to aval, I had to devise a method of converting them into an acceptable product. I decided to convert them into KESari which is softer than the hard uruNDais. After this was done, everyone liked it, particularly the children. You may also try.

aval KESari from Aval uruNDais 

Ingredients:

Aval uruNDais GhI Shredded coconut Cardamom Cashew Nuts (optional)

5 3 tsps ½ cup 2 pods A few

Method:

Break the uruNDais into small pieces and soak them in about ½ a cup of luke warm water and if need be to cover the broken pieces you may add a little more water. Soak for an hour and then check if the aval has softened to touch. Then disintegrate lumps by hand to loosen the grains. Take a KaDAi (wok) and sauté the aval for a few minutes to vapourise the excess water. Then add the GhI with shredded coconut and sauté further till they become a homogenous mass like KESari or Pongal. Switch off flame and add cardamom after powdering the seeds. If you like, you can fry the cashews in GhI and add. You can serve either hot or cold with a few Vadais and chutney.

             aval KEsari

Multigrain VaDai

This is rich in proteins and recommended for children as well to grownups being nutritious too.

Ingredients: 

Urad dal (Skinless Black gram) Tur dal (Split gram/lentil) Green gram dal (Skinless Mung) Bengal gram dal (Skinless chana) Raw rice Green chillies Dried red chillies Chopped coriander leaves Curry leaves Salt Asafoetida Refined Oil

½ cup ½ cup ½ cup ½ cup ½ cup 2 long ones 2 pcs 1 tbs 5 to taste 2 pinches To fry

Method:

Soak all the pulses for 2 hours after washing them well in water. Drain the water and grind them into a batter of idli consistency together with other ingredients except oil in a mixie coarsely. Take a kaDai and heat the oil. Try to test by just putting in it a little batter. If it immediately jumps to the surface, add a ladleful of batter to fry both sides into a golden colour vaDai. This way, at a time you can fry 3 or 4 vaDais depending on the size of the kaDai. Fry all the vaDais and then serve hot with chutney. Simmer the flame from time to time whenever the oil is heated too much generating smoke.

         Multigrain vaDai

(To continue)