Re-posting recipe: Today’s recipe is from my great-grandmother, as remembered and occasionally replicated by my mother.
Thuvaram Paruppu Koottu
Time taken: 1 hour, plus soaking time of dal about 3 – 4 hours
Serves 4
Ingredients:
Toor dal/ Thuvaram paruppu – ½ cup
Onion – ¼ + ½
Garlic – 2 + 2
Cumin powder – ½ tsp + ½ tbsp
Fennel powder – ½ tsp
Asafoetida – pinch + pinch
Salt – ½ tsp + more, to taste
Oil – 1 tsp + for deep-fry+ 1 ½ tbsp
Fenugreek – 1 tsp
Tomato – 1 big or 2 small
Dried red chillies – 3
Coriander powder – 1 tbsp
Grated coconut – 3 tbsp
Turmeric powder – ½ tsp
Pepper – 1 tsp
Tamarind extract – ½ cup (thin)
Water – ½ cup + ½ cup (optional)
Method:
Soak the toor dal for 3 – 4 hours.
Chop up ¼ onion and 2 garlic cloves and fry them in 1 tsp oil in a pan.
Add ½ tsp cumin powder, ½ tsp fennel powder and a pinch of asafoetida to the pan. When the spices combine and their aroma starts coming out, add ½ tsp salt.
Add the toor dal to the pan and mix well and quickly remove from heat.
Grind the toor dal mixture, without water or just a little so that it can be made into a slab.
Steam the slab of spiced toor dal.
Cut the steamed block of toor dal into pieces and deep fry.
Make a spice paste by grinding the scraped coconut and chopped chillies with 1 tbsp coriander powder, ½ tbsp cumin powder, ½ tsp turmeric powder, 1 tsp pepper powder and a pinch of asafoetida.
Heat 1 to 1 ½ tbsp oil in a pan and fry the chopped onion (½ onion), 2 garlic cloves and the fenugreek seeds.
When you get the aroma of the fried onion and garlic, add the spice paste, mix well and fry.
Add the chopped tomatoes and ½ cup of water and let the tomatoes cook.
Once the tomatoes are cooked, add the fried pieces of toor dal chunks and ½ cup of thin tamarind extract.
Cook for about 10 – 15 minutes on low heat. If you prefer more gravy in your curry, add ½ cup of water.
Re-posting recipe: This is my grandmother’s recipe, as remembered and replicated by my mother. For my mother’s recipe, check out this post.
Drumstick curry
Cooking time – 25 minutes
Serves 3
Ingredients:
Drumstick/ Murungai – 1
Potato – 1 large
Onion – ½ medium sized
¼ fresh Coconut ~ ½ cup of scraped fresh coconut
Curry powder – 1 tbsp, can add another 1/2 tbsp for more spiciness
Salt to taste
Method:
Cut the drumstick into 2’’ pieces and chop up the potato and onion.
To the scraped fresh coconut, add some water and squeeze out the first coconut milk and keep aside. Reuse the coconut flakes and squeeze out the second milk by adding some water. If you don’t like to squeeze out the coconut milk by hand, simply use a blender and strain out the first and second milk. An alternative is to use ready-made coconut milk but the different consistencies expected in this dish will not be there. The first milk is richer in consistency and fats while the second milk is thinner in consistency.
In a sauce pan, add four cups of water to coconut milk obtained the second time – the second coconut milk.
Add the cut vegetables (drumstick, potato and onion) to the pan as well as the chilli powder and cook the vegetables.
Once the potato and drumstick pieces are cooked, add the reserved first coconut milk and salt and let it simmer for five minutes before taking off the heat.
Serve hot with rice or pittu or stringhoppers.
A slight variation in my great grandmother’s drumstick curry recipe is that she did not add potatoes to the drumsticks. Just before taking the curry off the heat, she lightly fried some chopped onion, dried red chillies and fennel seeds in a separate pan and added the tempered seasonings to the curry. This gives a nice aroma and flavour to the dish.
Decided to take a break this week and re-post a few recipes from the initial days of this blog.
This is a traditional recipe from the North of Sri Lanka made from a palmyrah product. My mother tells me her grandmother used to make this for them on special occasions. While this is typically a spicy sea-food dish, it can be a vegan dish if one omits the seafood.
So, I am sharing my great-grandmother’s odiyal kool recipe, as remembered by my mother.
The base for this kool is ‘Odiyal’, a healthy and nutritious root that is dried before making into a flour. One can purchase the ‘odiyal flour’ from Katpaham marketing outlets around Sri Lanka, run by the Palmyrah Development Board, and might be found at Sri Lankan stores outside of Sri Lanka. However, if ‘odiyal flour’ cannot be obtained, corn flour can be tried out as a substitute.
Odiyal Kool
Cooking time – 45 minutes
Serves: 8 – 10
Ingredients
Odiyal or Odiyal Flour – 1 cup
Chopped mixed vegetables (brinjal/ katharikkai, jackfruit seeds/ palakottai, yardlong beans/ paithangai, small green leaves/ pasali keerai or murungai ilai, manioc, ash plantain) – 100g each
Last week, I had been planning to bake Poppy‘s delicious chai pear cake a second time but didn’t get around to it. Finally, my mother rescued the pears and went ahead and baked me her lovely version of a pear citrus cake. So, today’s recipe is part of the fruit cake series.
Pear Banana Citrus Cake
Time taken: 1 ½ hours
Serves 5
Ingredients:
Pear – 1
Banana – 1
Orange – 1
Lime – 1 + 1 tsp (for icing)
Sugar – ¼ cup
Oats – ¼ cup
All-purpose flour – 1 cup
Margarine – ¼ cup + ½ tbsp (for icing)
Cloves – 2-3
Banana essence – few drops
Vanilla essence – few drops
Baking powder – 1 tsp
Baking soda – ½ tsp
Icing sugar – 2 or 3 tbsp (for icing)
Method:
Chop up the pear and banana. Blend the pear and banana together with the cloves.
Cream the sugar and margarine in a bowl. Whisk in the vanilla essence, banana essence, juice of one orange and lime and the blended pear and banana. Mix well.
Add ¼ cup of water to the bowl and stir.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and baking soda.
Alternatively add the oats and flour mix to the bowl of wet ingredients, mixing it well so that there are no lumps.
Transfer the cake batter to the baking tray and bake at 170⁰C/ 338⁰F the cake for about 45 mins to 1 hour.
While the cake cools, make a simple icing by beating together ½ tbsp margarine with 2-3 tbsp icing sugar and 1 tsp lime juice. Spread the lime icing evenly over the cake.
Slice and serve the pear banana citrus cake with a cup of coffee after a meal.
When you have some ripe mangoes at hand and you don’t feel like eating them just sliced as you usually do, then you could try out this quick to make, dessert for one.
Willard Mangoes
Mango pudding
Time taken: 10 mins
Serves 1
Ingredients:
Mango – ½ cup, ground
Sugar – 2 tbsp
Vanilla essence – ¼ tsp
Orange juice – 1 tbsp (optional)
Yellow colour – drop or two
Corn flour – 3 tbsp
Raisins – ½ tsp
Cashewnuts – ½ tsp, crushed
Vegetable oil margarine – 1 tsp
Method
Blend the mango without water.
In a saucepan, heat the ground mango with 2 tbsp sugar, ¼ tsp vanilla essence and 1 tbsp of water, stirring continuously for a minute or two. If you like a little citrus flavour to your pudding, add a tbsp of orange juice.
Add the corn flour, stirring in a tbsp at a time. Continue stirring for 3-4 mins. If making for more than one person, consider using corn starch dissolved in water instead of corn flour.
Add the raisins and crushed cashewnuts and stir for a min.
Add the margarine and mix well. Remove the saucepan from stove and transfer the pudding to a mold.
Roti with sambal has always been one of my comfort foods. Today’s recipe is one of my mother’s new versions of vegetable roti – this time, with beetroot.
Beetroot Roti
Time taken: 40 mins
Makes 4
Ingredients:
Beetroot – ½ cup, grated
All-purpose flour -1 cup
Onion – ½ , chopped
Green chillies – 1 or 2, chopped
Coconut – 1 tbsp, scraped
Salt – as required
Low fat oil – 2 tbsp
Method:
Heat the grated beetroot with ¼ cup of water and a pinch of salt in a saucepan. Cook the beetroot till the water dries up.
After the cooked beetroot has cooled, add the flour, chopped onion, chillies, scraped coconut, salt and oil to the grated beetroot.
Mix well and stir in water to make the roti dough. Divide the roti dough into 4 balls.
Let the balls of dough rest for about 15 mins before rolling out the dough balls to make a flattened roti disk.
Cook each of the roti on a griddle, with 3-4 mins on each side.
During my online search for blogs with a focus on Sri Lankan recipes, I came across Rice and Curry. I invited the author to share one of his recipes on this blog and he kindly agreed. So today’s guest blogger is Skiz Fernando and he will be sharing one of his favourite vegan recipes.
As a second-generation Sri Lankan-American, one of my main connections to the Motherland has been food. My mother used to make us rice & curry a couple of times a week, and we also used to get it at the various dinner parties thrown by the small community of Sri Lankans living in Baltimore, Maryland, where I grew up. Aside from cutlets and patties, which are any Sri Lankan kids’ favorites, I also developed a special affinity for brinjal curry. Since these dinner parties were usually ‘pot-luck,’ with everyone contributing a dish, I came to discover that the same lady was always responsible for bringing the brinjals, and that lady was none other than Aunty Manel.
Eggplant curry
All the Sri Lankan ladies living in Baltimore were great cooks, so it just goes to show how special Aunty Manel’s brinjal curry was by the fact that it returned by popular demand to table after table, and dinner party after dinner party. I was not even really into vegetables at the time, but these brinjals were too sublime and tasty to be vegetables. It probably helped that they were deep-fried–as anything deep-fried tastes good–but it wasn’t obvious to me at the time. Only years later when I bugged Aunty Manel for the recipe, did I realize how labor-intensive this dish actually was, as you had to deep fry the eggplant before sautéing it with spices and coconut milk. Today, even though I have the recipe, the dish is challenging, but still worth the time and effort. Speaking as one who never liked eggplant, I always tell people that this is going to be their favorite way to eat the vegetable from now on.
Pan Asian: Aunty Manel’s Special Eggplant Curry
1 lb. (500 g) eggplant
1/4 tsp. turmeric
oil for deep-frying
2 tbsp. oil
1 onion, sliced
2-3 green chilies, sliced
1 sprig curry leaves
2 inch (5 cm) stick cinnamon
3 cloves
1 tbsp. raw curry powder
1-2 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 tsp. brown mustard seeds, ground
1/2 cup (125 ml) coconut milk
salt to taste
3 cloves garlic (A)
2 inch (5 cm) piece ginger (A)
1 tsp. sugar (A)
1 tsp. salt (A)
1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar (A)
1/2 cup (125 ml) water (A)
1.) Wash and cut eggplant into 2 in (5 cm) strips. Rub with salt and a dash of turmeric.
2.) Deep fry eggplant until golden brown. Drain on newspaper.
3.) Blend (A) list ingredients in a food processor.
4.) Heat oil in pan. Sauté onions, green chilies, and curry leaves until onions are translucent. Add cinnamon, cloves, and dry spices.
5.) Add (A) and bring to a boil.
6.) Reduce heat and add eggplant, coconut milk and salt. Toss well and simmer for 3-5 minutes.
Recipe Source: Skiz Fernando.
Short bio of Skiz Fernando:
Journalist, musician, and filmmaker, Skiz Fernando is the author of Rice and Curry: Sri Lankan Home Cooking (Hippocrene Books, 2011), a New York Times notable cookbook. He guided TV host Anthony Bourdain on a culinary tour of Sri Lanka for an episode of the popular Travel Channel series, No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain.
A Taste of Sri Lankan cuisine 