On The Gravy Train, Again

I only rarely used coconut in my cooking till I got Mikcee. I don't think we've ever used it that much for me to miss it but I miss the old-style traditional rotary grater, which looked something like this. Grating coconut was a breeze with those things.

Then in the last few years, a store we patronised began offering grated coconut but we couldn't really use it well because I had a fancy food processor which couldn't do many tasks that an Indian kitchen demanded, so between the lack of a grater and a mixie, our coconut consumption was pretty limited.

I finally traded in the food processor for a regular, no-frills Indian mixie because the former was occupying too much space, and it's one of the best decisions I've made. We consume a little more coconut now in the form of gravies and avial.

I like mixed vegetable gravies and recently went looking for recipes for something a neighbour had given us long ago. It may have been Poricha Kuzhambu but none of the recipes in the first few searches were printable. I didn't have the patience to write them down. So I kept surfing and searching till I came across some recipe that used tamarind, another that used dal, another that used coconut and others that used all these and more!

I combined all these into one and only halfway through remembered a colleague telling me that poricha kuzhambu was made without tamarind. But the recipes on the Net said otherwise and anyway, I had soaked some tamarind already so I just went ahead with my concoction.

I had had more than a cup of soaked and boiled field beans in the bridge, and some broad beans as well (a dozen), which I boiled and chopped into big pieces.

I ground

1/2 a cup of coconut bits 
2 red chillies
A teaspoon of cumin
More than a teaspoon of peppercorns

I put a spoon or two of oil into a pan, heated it and sauteed a chopped onion.

Then I added the beans and the vegetables and sauteed them.

I cooked it for a bit in tamarind extract - a lime-sized ball in a cup of water.

I then added the ground paste and let it cook for a while.

At this point, I remembered I had some cooked toor dal (pigeon peas) in the fridge, so I added a ladle of it to that.

It was wonderful!

The next week, I did the same thing with a mix of 10-12 broad beans, one green banana, some soaked and boiled black channa and a drumstick. I omitted the dal, didn't miss it at all.

There are a lot of beans in the first dish and more than a handful in the second one, so I'm sending off this post to MLLA 55 hosted by Susan of The Well-Seasoned Cook.
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