Matodi Palya / Matawadi Palya

Matodi Palya also called as Matawadi Palya is a dish made of soaked Bengal gram or Chana Dal and fenugreek / methi leaves. It is one of those dishes which fall under the category of extremely tasty but time and oil consuming ones! You need to plan ahead as it needs the dal to be soaked for a few hours, the methi leaves picked, washed and chopped. Hence this is made as part of a special meal on a festival day or a weekend when you can over eat and play couch potato. This vegetable or palya as it is called in Kannada is quite crumbly by itself, making it necessary to add more oil (gulp!) when it is mixed with rice. It is eaten as a special combination with curd based gravies such as Majjige Huli or Hasi Majjige and even gojju or sweet and sour gravy.

There are again different versions of preparing this delectable dish. Just Bengal gram and sometimes a combination of both Bengal gram and Toor Dal are used here. Would like to add that this is also made with raw bananas or sometimes with cluster beans in place of the methi leaves. You could add a whole lot more than the amount of methi leaves mentioned here. The dal or dals are first soaked for a few hours till soft. Then ground with spices, green chillies and coconut till smooth. Then comes out your big kadai or frying pan. Biggest one actually! Folks don't take to it kindly if you don't serve this very generously at least twice a day, leftovers are lapped up without a murmur of protest!  The ground paste is fried till all the moisture evaporates and you get a divine aroma wafting through your home. Health conscious and lazy folks prefer to steam this paste as we steam idlis, then add a lesser amount of oil and fry for lesser time. I am yet to try making Matodi Palya this way, but definitely sounds like a promising idea. I personally like to eat this with plain steamed rice and oil, then with loads of rasam and then with curd rice. Oh, yes! Its heavenly!  If you have never tasted this, I urge you try it, you will surely love it...

This is my mother-in-law's recipe and boy was I glad she made a lot of it!! I won't tell you that I hogged on this and how!!

Ingredients:
Bengal Gram / Chana Dal 1 1/2 Cups
Fresh fenugreek / methi leaves, chopped - 1 cup firmly packed ( you could use 2 cups too, more doesn't hurt)
Green Chillies - 5-6  large
Asafetida / Hing - A generous pinch
Fresh Coconut, grated - 1/2 cup
Jeera powder - 1/2 teaspoon
Oil - 1/4 cup plus 1 or 2 tablespoons more as needed
Mustard seeds - 1 teaspoon
Bengal Gram - 1 teaspoon
Turmeric powder - 3/4 teaspoon
Curry leaves - A few
Salt to taste

Procedure: Wash and soak the Bengal gram in enough water for about 3 hours or till soft. Think Masala Vadas! Grind the dal to an almost smooth paste using as little water as possible. A few whole grains here and there is fine. Grind the coconut, jeera powder, hing and green chillies to a smooth paste. In a large bowl, mix the ground dal, coconut paste, turmeric powder, chopped methi leaves and salt to taste. The ground mixture may taste spicy now, but once fried it will be less spicy. At this stage you could steam the mixture till cooked and then carry on with the rest of the procedure.

Heat 1/4 cup oil in a large broad, thick bottomed frying pan. Add the mustard seeds, chana dal and curry leaves. Add the dal mixture and fry on high heat for a few minutes, stirring continuously. This lot of oil will disappear like magic! Don't worry, it will resurface sometime later...

Lower the heat, cover the pan with a lid. You need to keep mixing the palya every 5 minutes or so for about half an hour. The raw smell should disappear, the dal cooked, crumbly and oily when done.

 Serve with hot rice and oil, gojju / majjige huli / hasi majjige...The above quantity serves 3-4 people.

Green Apple Sasuve - Green Apple in Sweet & Sour Coconut & Mustard Sauce

Apples -To most of us in India, it meant one hugely popular variety of fruit- red, crisp, juicy and sweet. Most of the times eaten as a snack. Then often used in crumbles, pies, fruit based custards and other desserts. And now with Washington Apples offering a wide variety of apples in different colors, taste and textures, we have apples which are sweet and buttery, apples which are tart and hold their shape when baked, apples which are mildly sweet etc etc. So apart from snacking on this delicious fruit, we can add apples in our salads, soups, chutneys, desserts and also a whole lot of dishes we eat on a daily basis, including our traditional recipes. Yes, we are now spoilt for choice even while buying the ubiquitous apple! 

Washington apples come in different varieties such as Red Delicious - bright red with a mildy sweet flavor. Suitable for snacking and for use in salads. Golden Delicious -Sweet again. Can be used for baking, snacking and in salads. Granny Smith - green colored, tart, crisp and juicy, you could use them in cooking, baking and in salads. Gala - apples with pinkish orange stripes, crisp and sweet. I absolutely LOVE this variety for snacking. Fuji - These are supposed to be super sweet, crisp and hard textured, retain their shape when cooked making them ideal for baking - I must, must try a crumble with this one now!! And then there is Honeycrisp which is tangy sweet, suitable for snacking and baking, Cripps Pink which is firm and tangy tart,  Cameo which is sweet and crunchy and holds it texture for long. Whoa - isn't that quite a range?

The taste factor apart, apples are antioxidant rich, have high fiber content, have almost no fat and no cholesterol. They can help lower your risk of heart disease, aid digestion and weight loss and also help prevent colon cancer.

Thanks to The SCS Group who organized an event on Washington Apples, we got an invite for a live cooking demonstration of Washington Apples by Chef Vicky Ratnani at 100 ft Boutique restaurant, Indiranagar. Chef Vicky demonstrated a Colonial Apple and Pumpkin Bisque - different varieties of apples and pumpkin cooked with herbs and Madras Rasam powder and it tasted too good (surprisingly so, I must admit, given the unusual elements in it)!! We ate an Apple and Jackfruit salad which was just as good and then a Green Apple Risotto with hazelnuts. We won't leave without eating a dessert, will we - we had Apple Crumble with Ice cream.

                                                            Picture courtesy - Shubhada

The best thing about such events is it really does widen your horizons about cooking. Reading and knowing that you can use apples in different ways is so different from actually tasting a variety of dishes made with apples. Now am really really going to be doing my homework before I go apple shopping for what variety of apples I could buy and what I could make out of it. Eating this very healthy fruit on a regular basis need no longer be monotonous. 

Since Granny Smith apples are tart and crisp, I have used this in a traditional recipe suitable for sweet-sour fruit...So here's to more of apples in our diet and with so many possibilities.. Here I have used it in a dish called as Sasuve, basically a dish made with ground coconut and mustard, usually made with a sweet-sour vegetable or fruit... The recipe Green Apple Sasuve.

Garlic And Herb Potatoes

 Heaving a sigh of relief as my son's exams see the last! Whew! No assignments or tests for the next couple of months and I am so pleased about that. The kids have to go to school for a few days post exams as they will have a project show on the last day of school. Isn't that an even better thought?  - them going to school (half a day though) and me not having to worry about any homework ;-). They are so excited that they get to showcase to parents all that they have learnt during the year. My four-year-old daughter's big aim is now to go to the next class, Lower Kindergarten. I shamelessly blackmail her sometimes as the last resort at times - going to LKG undoubtedly the carrot I dangle in front of her cute little nose. It works most of times and I quickly have to find a new thing to blackmail her with once she is gets to her current dream destination. Yes, yes am a wicked Mom! Son's an easier nut to crack, thankfully, a game of bey-blading and cycling with his peers takes care of most his woes in the 9th year of his life. Innocent childhood...it touches me so much at times...

I remember watching the movie Masoom all those years ago when the kids were still not in the scene. I dare not watch that movie now, as I am very sure, Jugal Hansraj will leave me more than a tad misty eyed ... being a parent makes you relate to the innocence of childhood and that over-whelming parental love. If you are already a parent and you have watched Taare Zameen Par- you have heard the joke- you will not yell at your kids for one full day after watching the movie:-) When the kids are ready to do anything to make you smile at the sight of your crest fallen face, it makes you cry. When you are ready to throw anything at them just for a moment of much wanted peace, that makes you cry too, albeit in a different sort of way:-).

Well, when life throws lemons at you, you make lemon pie, when all you have is a bag of baby potatoes at snack time, you dish up some hearty, filling and easy Garlic And Herb Potatoes...

Chips Nu Shaak / Batata Nu Shaak And An Award

Yummy name for a dish right?? I don't know anybody who doesn't love taters. You can seldom go wrong with them. Which makes the humble potato a great choice when entertaining people, particularly when you are not sure about their preferences. Nine out of ten times, when I ask my kids to guess what they would get to eat at a meal, they chorus potato curry!! So all I need to do to make my kids happy is make a potato curry with some rasam and rice.

Hubby is not much of a rasam person, though he will not mind a bit eating it with a very generous serving of potato palya. Well, I wouldn't mind either.. piping hot rasam with hot steamed rice, some ghee and plenty of potato palya. Aahh... heaven!!

This extremely versatile vegetable finds its home in baskets in most Indian homes. What life savers these can be when you have no other veggies on hand!  A look at the menu of  a dhabha can give you quite a number of combination this vegetable can be cooked in:-) Unlike a lot of other vegetables, this one can be cooked directly in the pressure cooker or microwave without even chopping. Well, peeling hot potatoes in a hurry is another story and I have scalded my fingers many a times, trying to do this in the morning rush hour.

 A culturally rich and diverse country like ours has innumerable ways of cooking potatoes among hundreds of other things that is. This is a Gujarati dish called Chips Nu Shaak or Batata Nu Shaak.

I think this dish is traditionally cooked only in oil, which helps it keep fresh for a day or two outside the fridge too.  Supposedly a perfect accompaniment with theplas while travelling. Reminds me of the tall multi-compartment lunch boxes filled with a variety of yummy food which Gujaratis carry on long train journeys. Boxes replete with rotis, subjis, dal, rice, farsan, pickles and dessert too!!! How many times, I have felt so envious of those guys, having gourmet food on journeys too, while we would eat our humble puliogare, curd-rice-pickle / chapati-curry/   sitting just across the seat. Sigh!! Have a heart people!! Its tough to tear eyes away from such sights or close your nose to the delicious wafting aromas.

I loved this recipe for its sheer simplicity and quite unique taste. It is also very delicious, and on its way to becoming a regular on our dining table.

Dal Lucknowi

What happens when I get a chance to watch a live cookery show of Master Chef Sanjeev Kapoor?? The legend of Indian cookery shows who with his charm, mouth watering recipes and friendly smile has had us addicted to Khana Khazana since ages??  The show makes me finish cooking my break fast on Sunday mornings by 9.30 or defer it till 10 am :-). I have been a huge fan of Sanjeev Kapoor since my college days and love the way he makes every recipe seem so simple, easy and do able.

I got a chance to watch this live cookery show at Kitchen Yatra show thanks to Madhuri. It was on a weekday and I somehow manged to get hubby to baby sit the kids(anything to grab the opportunity of a lifetime!!) It was great to watch him cook and also get to taste the same. And of course also ask him endless questions which were answered in his true witty style. It was a show to remember.

Well, it brings me back to the question, what happens when I get a chance to watch a live cookery show of Master Chef Sanjeev Kapoor?? I read more of the Chef's books and of course tried some of the recipes. I tried  Lucknowi Dal from his fantastic new collection, "Simply Stylish Entertaining at Home'. Do absolutely check this book out, I simply loved the recipes, more coming here.

This creamy Dal is subtle in flavor, is extremely easy to make and is a wonderful, elegant accompaniment to rotis or rice. Perfect for entertaining when you are pressed for time or have unexpected guests.

This recipe is also my entry to Sara's 'Cooking with Cumin Seeds' event

Soppina Palya

 Do you sometimes like or dislike a particular vegetable, not for its taste, but for its Feeding Capacity Quotient? Well, I do! (No, there is no such phrase, u know what I mean to convey!) . Veggies like ridge gourd, grated radish and greens like methi and spinach. They shrink to 1/4 their original volume when cooked, which just won't be enough whatever quantity you get them in, particularly if you hog veggies like we do. We are the kind of folks who eat rice with veggies, chutney with idlis and not the other way round:-)).  I need to have lots and lots of rasam or vegetable or gravy with my rice or chapatis to have the satisfaction of having eaten a good meal.

One such vegetable is 'Dantina Soppu' when I need to make palya. I don't have any grouses against this leaf when I make dal with it as it behaves well, quantity wise . But, when I have to make  palya, I need to take care of the FCQ. The below recipe is one delicious way of making Soppina Palya, using flour to increase the quantity. I love to make this in large quantities so that I can first eat it with rice, then with rasam and rice, then with curd rice. This tasty preparation is a delight for people like me who love rasam and rice and if its with Soppina Palya, it makes a simple meal a scrumptious one...