Pink Dosa with Green Chutney

Few years back Loksatta used to publish series of articles on food. I had kept some paper cuttings of same.Now after all these years,these cuttings are helping me in planning for some delicious meals. I found an interesting breakfast receipe which is a bit different than usual dosa receipes. This is a "Pink Dosa" prepared with masoor dal. All you need is 1 cup masoor daal, 1/2 cup urad daal, less than 1/4 cup rice. Soak all ingredients together for 6-8 hours. Grind to smooth paste and let it ferment for 5-6 hrs. When you are preparing dosa add some flavourings like finely chopped onions, green chillies, corriander leaves, jeera/cumin seeds and ofcourse salt. With this batter prepare dosa like any normal dosa.

I served the dosa with green pudina chutney. This chutney was prepared by Sudha. Sudha is my son's caretaker and luckily she is good at cooking as well as in other household work.

For pudina chutney, you need 1 bunch of pudina leaves and 1/2 bunch of corriander leaves cleaned and pat dried.In a pan add 1tbsp oil. Fry pudina leaves, 1 medium size onion, 3-4 green chillies in the oil. In mixie pot add 4-5tbsp grated coconut, fried pudina leaves, onion, green chillies, 1tbsp tamarind pulp, salt to taste, 1tsp jeera/cumin seeds with little bit of water and grind till you have smooth chutney paste. You can serve this chutney with any dosa/dhirade/peetha or even apply on bread slices.

Kadhi without curd

When I heard this for first time, I did not believe it. But when I saw the demo and prepared it myself, it was refreshing and tasty. I saw the recipe about 2 weeks back on Saam marathi channel on a program called Sugaran. It was some summer special program I think. And nothing defines summer better than mangoes; be it raw or ripe. So don't just bookmark this recipe but try it immediately.

• Pressure cook 2 tangy raw mangoes. You can keep the skin while cooking the mangoes.
• Once cooled, remove the skin, and take out all the pulp.
• Grind in mixie once. Then add 2-3 tbsp of besan, 1/2 tsp red chilli powder, salt and jaggery as per taste. Mix it well.
• Now in a pan/kadhai, heat 1tbsp oil..For tempering add 1/2 tsp cumin seeds, 1/2 tsp mustard seeds, 10-12 karipattas, 2-3 green chillies (vertically slated).
• Add the mango pulp to the tadka. Add required amount of water and simmer the kadhi for 5 min.
• Serve it hot or cold.

Methi with moong dal diamonds

Recently I was so bored of eating same dishes, I was dying to try something new. So I was going though my cooking bibles "Ruchira Part1 & 2" and "Perfect Receipes". From these books, I suddenly had inspiration to cook something with methi and daal. So here is my dish called Methi with moong dal diamonds

For Moong daal diamonds

- Soak 1 small cup moong dal for 2-3 hrs.

- Roughly ground about 1tsp of saunf, ajwain, coriander seeds. You can dry roast this masala if you like. You can easily replace this masala with any other spices per your liking

- In same mixer pot, add soaked daal and roughly ground same with masala.

- Add salt (to taste), red chili powder, turmeric powder, sesame seeds, kasuri methi pinch of baking soda/eno to this mixture.Make sure that the batter remains thick.

- Steam cook this mixture for 10 minutes. I spread the batter on small thali and put it in pressure cooker (without whistle).Drizzle oil on the thali before pouring batter.

- After batter is cooked, cut into small diamond shapes and keep aside

For the Saag

- Wash and dry 1 bunch of methi leaves.Roughly chop the cleaned leaves.

- In a pan heat 4-5 TBSP of oil for tadka. Add chopped garlic (4-5 cloves), red/green chillies (2-3), jeera, mustard seeds,hing, turmeric in the heated oil.

- Add the moong dal diamonds in the tadka and fry till its golden.

- Add the chopped methi leaves next with pinch of salt. Mix saag well and cook for 2 min. You can add grated coconuts (2-3 TBSP) if you like.

- Cover the pan and cook saag for 2 more min and then take it off from heat.

- Saag is ready to be served.
 
Note: When I prepared this dish for second time, I did few variations and it also tasted good. Instead of using just moong daal, I used combination of Moong dal, masoor dal and chana dal. I added ginger paste to the batter and about tbsp of oil and baked it for 20-25 min in oven at 180 degree C. And in tadka I used Paanch phoran instead of jeera and mustard seeds.
 

Sweet Idli

India is such a vast country both geographically and gastronomically. Sometimes you will be surprised to see some dishes which are eaten across two ends of the country with same love. Recently I had same experience while eating breakfast of Idlis. We are now so used to eating Idli-Sambhar and chutney, that we might not think about any other combination. In Orissa, people used to eat sweet Idlis for breakfast without any need for chutney or sambhar. These idlis are prepared in similar fashion like normal idlis.

All you need is to idli batter (2 cup rice + 1 cup urad dal soaked for 6-8 hrs and grounded to paste). Make sure the batter is fermentated for 6-8 hrs (or overnight). Add salt to taste. For the sweet filling, mix grated coconut and jaggery in equal proportion (adjust amount of jaggery depending on your sweet tooth). Now pour the idli batter in the idli moulds. You can add the filling on the batter or you can have layers like batter then filling and then again batter. Steam the idlies for 10-15 min.

You can eat these idlis as it is for breakfast.

Or if you want to serve some special sweet then, you can prepare sweet idlis in coin form and serve with chilled rabadi.

Grapes Muramba/ Grapes in Sugar syrup

My MIL has a sweet tooth. For dinner she alwyas likes to have something sweet to eat with roti. So over this weekend to impress her ;) I prepared this muramba or fruit cooked in sugar syrup. At my mother's place, we always used to have such preparations with different fruits like raw mango, ripe mango, banana, apple, basically any fruit. This was my first attempt at preparation and it turned out pretty good. Other than grapes, sugar and obviously water; all other ingredients are optional. I wanted to enhance grape flavour so I decided on using raisings and black currents which are dried form of grapes.

The receipe is very simple and you don't need lot of ingredients.

Ingredients

• 20-30 grapes
• 1 small bowl of sugar
• 10-15 sultanas/raisins and black currents (optional)
• 4-5 almonds (optional)
• 1tsp elaichi/cardomom powder
• water
• 1-2 tbsp lemon juice (optional)

Receipe

• Thoroughly wash grapes ,pat dry and then keep aside.
• In a heavy bottom pan add sugar and enough water to just cover the sugar. Keep the pan on low flame and let it simmer. Keep stirring in between.
• Once sugar syrup starts bubbling check the thickness of syrup at regular intervals. It should not be very watery. It should be almost thick as honey.
• While sugar syrup is getting ready, thinly slice almonds and clean raisins and black currents.
• When the syrup thickens add all the remaining ingredients, mix them well and cook for another couple of minutes. Then remove the pan from burner and let the mixture cool.
• Check after 10 min. or so to see if sugar crystals are getting formed. If yes, then add some water and reboil the mixture for another 3-4 min and then cool the mixture.
• For some this receipe might taste too sweet, so counter attacking it with sourness of lemon juice is good idea.