Tomato & Garlic Thokku

This is my mom's recipe. Can you believe that something with four ingredients would taste so good? Try it out and you'll agree.

Ingredients

• Tomatoes - 5 medium size
• Garlic - 1 bulb ( 8-9 cloves) finely chopped
• Red chilli powder - 2 table spoons
• Fenugreek powder 1 teaspoon (if you don't have this, use sambar powder instead)

Method

• Blanch the tomatoes by cooking in boiling water for 5 minutes
• After this cools, peel skin and chop the tomatoes into small pieces, preserving any juice that flows out.
• In a skillet heat some oil and temper with mustard seed and some asafoetida.
• Add the chopped garlic and stir fry until it gets golden brown.
• Add the chopped boiled tomatoes, salt, red chilli powder and fenugreek powder.
• Cook on medium heat until oil starts leaving the edge of the pan.

Red chilli powder tends to be very spicy, so watch out. Add half the amounts mentioned above for a low to medium spicy dish that can be eaten with rice/chapatti. The spicier version of this dish is to be eaten like a pickle.

Check out my picture, mm I want to eat some now :)

Long hiatus, mixed lentils pongal

I haven't been posting for the last year and a half due to various complicated reasons I don't want to get into. Hopefully 2012 is the year of food blogging for me. I will be posting GFCF recipes as that's what we are all eating these days.

Today was Pongal, the south Indian spring/harvest festival. I got really homesick, mostly because the hubby was away playing racquetball, and I talked to my parents (my sister & BIL were visiting them). I so wanted to be there with them. Nostalgic memories of past Pongal days flashed through my head. My sister and I never cared so much about the actual significance of Pongal but we sure did enjoy the food. :) I decided to make venpongal, only to realize that we were out of Moong dal. I did have this mixed lentil soup mix from whole foods. It has red(masoor), whole green(toor), black(urad), yellow(moong) and white lentils. Voila, here comes mixed lentil pongal -

Ingredients:

Mixed lentils as described above - 1 cup

Rice 3/4 cup

Whole peppercorns - 2 tbsps

Cumin Seeds

Cashew cut into small pieces ~ 1/2 cup

Ghee - Clarified butter. (See my note at the end about this).

Curry leaves - 4-5

Method:

• Mix the lentils and rice and let them soak for half an hour. Pressure cook, waiting for at-least 5 whistles to ensure soft texture.
• Mash half the peppercorns into a coarse powder. I just used a sheet of paper and a heavy porcelain cup to do this since I don't have a mortar and pestle. (Note to self - buy one :)
• Heat the ghee and add the peppercorns, cumin seeds and cashews, fry until the cashews are light brown. Ghee can burn really quickly so watch out.
• Add the curry leaves after turning your stove off. The heat from the ghee is sufficient to roast the curry leaves.
• Add the cooked lentils and rice mix, salt to taste.

We ate this with this tomato gojju on the side. I omitted the onions from that recipe since we were out of those as well.

* I should warn readers that this pongal looks strange, its mostly a grayish-green color because of the black lentils and whole toor dal, but tastes yummy! Hopefully, I'll get better with adding pictures to my recipes this year.

** Ghee is made from butter but does not contain casein. The process of making ghee, turns it into 98% fat. See http://www.gfcfdiet.com/bakingcanning.htm for more info.