Festive Sweetmeats & Savories!

I can understand God looking forward to us folks celebrating his birthday (pun unintended ;)). After all who could resist it if millions were busy making merry on your annual special day! But what beats me is why in this wide world would HE prefer the pure ghee (clarified butter) drenched sweets and oil-fried crunchy snacks? The only sane answer I can think of in his defense is, HE being the immortal deity, doesn't really have to dread the almost imminent side-effects of cholesterol or fat that afflict us mortals. That is just the tip of the iceberg though. It is common belief that if you ate the offerings that were presented to him, you are blessed and hence no harm (read as gaining a pound or two) will befall you. As you and I know, that is just a cock-and-bull story. I am a huge fan of the numerous exceptionally riveting mythological stories from the good old Indian epics. Though I haven't really laid my hands on an unabridged version yet, the retold English Amar Chitra Katha versions are good for me for a lifetime. Back home in India, on a dusty bookshelf in my now-not-so-used study, there sits an enormous collection of them. Amidst those very books, in some corner lies buried, my childhood. Some day, may be my kids or grandkids would inherit the treasure and I am hoping they will get as starry-eyed as I have always. A month ago, it was Lord Krishna's birthday and I being the new daughter-in-law, dutifully followed the customs and rituals that my new-found family has practised over the generations. I like to think that I had a great time doing whatever I was doing but it stirred up a lot of thoughts lying dormant. Over the centuries, man's interpretation of festivals and GOD has become pretty skewed, don't you think? I dislike sounding judgmental but IMHO the focus should be more on the lines of -

• remembering HIM for a few insightful moments (and may be the wondrous epics his life has been portrayed by),
• listening to some carnatic melodies sung by M.S. (Ah! Paradise!),
• being good all day by thinking fine thoughts,
• sharing life's joys with friends and family,
• spreading love and then doing something divine like helping a person in need,
• and last but not the least having quality F-U-N.

(FYI - I came up with this list after ransacking my brain for quite some time.)

In all the hustle surrounding festivals, people get so caught up coddling the Lord by performing austere ceremonies that the true spirit of the day lies around completely forgotten and shunned by everyone. When we overdo the petty things, the bigger more important tasks get thrown out of our heads. One could argue that that is exactly what preserving culture is all about. My philosophy is - preserve and pass on the culture to the next generation but do it in a way it will truly remain indelible.

Now that those thoughts that have been swimming around in my head have found their vent, I'd like to proudly present the goodies Amma, Vee and I made for Krishna Jayanti a.k.a Janmaashtami/Gokulaashtami. Though I am an advocate of health-eating, I couldn't help but gobble up indecent amounts of everything we made. Gosh! What a shame! As a repercussion, I am now constantly high strung, planning the extra hours I should be sweating out at the gym. Not fun at all! While walking around, I seem to be pouncing over my reflection on any shaggy bit of reflective surface to see if all that deadly gluttony has made me go pudgy. That kind of paranoia is gross indeed!

Mullu Murukku, Cashew Burfi, Rice Flakes Payasam, Rice Flour puffs (Uppu Seedai) - A collage! (Missing in picture - Appam and Jaggery Seedai)

Mullu Murukku

In this post, I am sharing only the lentil-flour thorny fritters' (mullu murukku) recipe. The other recipes will be posted subsequently as updates to this post.

Ingredients -
1) Deshusked Green gram dal flour (Moong Dal flour) - 1 cup
2) Rice Flour - 3 cups
3) Salt - 3tspns
4) White sesame seeds - 2 tspns
5) Asafetida - 1/2 a tspn
6) Hot Oil - 1 tbsp
7) Water - 1/2 - 3/4 cup (or as need arises!)
8) Oil - for deep frying

Paraphernalia needed-
1) Murukku Mold (or squeezer) with the star-shaped holes' plate! (Picture is at the very end of this post.)
2) Slotted spoon (I like to call it a hole-riddled ladle.)

Method-
1) In a large mixing bowl, mix well all the dry ingredients listed in 1 through 5 and make a well for pouring in the liquids.
2) Heat the oil and pour it in the well. Mix it in the flour after it is not too hot for your fingers.
3) The flour will still be dry at this stage but with a glaze to it.
4) The dough has to made in small batches, where each batch is not bigger than a lemon-sized ball. The stress here is on the size because you make enough dough for just one murukku. If you end up kneading all the flour, then it would dry up significantly and the murukkus would not come out good, I am assured by Amma.
5) In a deep pan, heat enough oil for deep frying.
6) Take a smaller bowl and add about a handful of the flour mixture into it.
7) Sprinkle water and knead it into a ball. It should be soft but not sticky. Sprinkle more water if required.
8) Press the lemon-sized dough ball into the squeezer after removing the piston part (bottom one).
9) To test the oil to see if the heat is enough to transform the sticky dough into some very crunchy fritters, drop a small bead of dough into it and check to see if it bobs right up to the surface.
9) Replace the piston into the squeezer. Hold it directly over the oil and press such that the dough that escapes out of the star shaped holes at the bottom falls into the oil. While doing so, remember to continually make circular motions with your hands in a very random fashion as though you are creating some kind of a squiggly solid.
10) After about a minute, the murukku can be turned over using the hole-riddled ladle if it has firmed enough.
11) Remove onto a paper napkin after the murukku gets a glowing brown color. (Ours turned out to have a greenish tinge because we used the green gram dal flour which was not dehusked!)
12) Wait for it to cool and the excess oil to get absorbed by the paper before storing away in an air-tight storage dish.
13) Repeat the process for the remaining dough and enjoy these mullu murukkus which are guaranteed to become a raging favorite of all in the family!

The Murukku maker with the star-shaped squeeze pattern

Spiced-up Lentil Fritters (Paruppu Vadas)

I am not a sucker for deep-fried stuff and have very few faves in that category. I rarely tread into that territory and try to limit my visiting it to 3 or 4 times a year.

Top 5 reasons why I dislike deep frying anything -

1) It screams UNHEALTHY right on your face. High in saturated fats that can make you see a spike in your LDL levels.

2) I end up undoing 50% of my work out sessions. (Oh what an utter waste of all that determined dragging-my-lazy-self-out-of-bed at 5:30 in the morning!)

3) The kitchen vent starts spinning the smell around and my house starts reeking of the carbon-deposited oil. (Ugh!)

4) My mane absorbs the microscopic oil particles that are aloft in the air so efficiently that at the end of the session, I am forced to wash my hair lest I end up looking like I've run out midway from a hot-oil massage session.

5) Vee would get addicted. Sounds crazy but true. The last thing I would want is to have him start craving for those "goodies".

So what business does this recipe have in my blog, you may very well ask. When I was a kid (a rotund one), I hardly had any of the worries listed above. My parents used to take me to Malai Mandir (Hill Temple) in Delhi once every month and I remember being intrigued by these trips. The reason being everything about these trips was so very TAMIL-ian. My mother used to say I had been brought to Delhi when I was an 80-day old baby. Since I had spent the prime of my childhood in Delhi, I had little association with tamil and the tamilian culture itself. Those monthly temple visits used to feel like I was transported to a different world! Now, after all the worshipping was completed, we used to find ourselves on the verge of hunger and that's where the vada-seller comes in. Outside the temple were lined small roadside shops. Amidst the flower sellers, was nestled a homely shop that sold out-of-the-world spicy paruppu vadas! It had become a ritual to stop over at the shop to savor the vadas before returning home in the 620 bus. Given the fact that south-ey food (madraasi food) was sparse those days in Delhi, the vadas seemed all the more delicious. The pics posted here were clicked on Pongal day (Harvest Festival day on Jan 14th) when we (Vee and I) made these at home specially because it was our "thalai Pongal" (the first pongal festival after marriage).

Hot Paruppu Vadas

Amma's recipe follows -

Ingredients -

Main ones -

1) Bengal gram Dal - 1 cup
2) Toor Dal - 1 tspn
3) Red Chilies - 2
4) Curry leaves - few
5) Asafetida - a pinch
6) Salt - to taste
7) Grated coconut - 1 tspn (optional)
8) Cilantro - a few sprigs (finely chopped)
9) Oil - for deep frying

Spiced-up variations - (Omit if you are making the plain vadas.)
1) Aniseeds - 1 tspn
2) Onion - 1 medium-sized (finely chopped)
3) Garlic - 1 clove (optional) (I didn't add it.)

Method -
1) Soak both the dals together for 1 hour after washing well.
2) Drain the water and collect it in a cup and use it for grinding as needed.
3) Grind coarsely adding as little water as you can along with the red chilies, asafetida, curry leaves, coconut and salt. Also add in the aniseeds and garlic while grinding for the spiced-up variation. (I use Sumeet blender for this. I did try this once with the blender I bought in the U.S. and it turned out to be a disaster since I was forced to add some extra water.) The dough should be as dry as this illustration here.
4) Mix in the chopped cilantro leaves and onion and make small lemon-sized balls of the dough.
5) Place the balls on a piece of cloth or kitchen towels (napkins) for 10-15 minutes so that the excess water gets absorbed.

The dough balls drying on kitchen towels

6) Heat oil in a small (deep) frying pan.
7) Flatten the balls slightly and shape like fat saucers before dropping them in the hot oil.
8) Fry over a medium flame until the bubbles have subsided along the edges of the vadas. Turn over once.
9) Drain on kitchen towels so that the excess oil is absorbed and the fritters look dry.
10) Serve as a snack with tomato ketchup or chutney.