Weekly digest - Lunch experiments :)

Now trying out cool stuff for lunch to beat the summer heat :)

Today’s plan was maanga saadham. Then diversified to add thenga saadham also as there was lot of thenga stock at home :). Then to make the meal complete added curd rice to the menu with yesterday’s leftover plain rice :)

And the recipe - here goes its quite simple:

1) Maanga saadham:

Get a good long kilimooku maanga preferably :)

Peel off the thol (outer skin) of the mango first

Then scrape it in scraper or cut the maanga into small pieces and shred it in mixie

Heat a kadai, add oil and let some mustard seeds sputter - then add a dash of manja podi. Then add the scraped/shredded maanga and saute nicely in oil till it becomes slightly cooked, now add required quantity of salt. Maanga saadham mix is ready (you can add chilli powder or chillies as per your preference, but I like the mango flavour without chillies)

Keep plain rice in cooker and cook with 1:2 ratio of rice and water. Once cooked, take the rice out of the cooker and let it cool in a large vessel so that the rice separates out nicely which is important for the kalandha saadham varieties :)

When rice has cooled down and is nice and fluffy, add the maanga saadham mix prepared and mix well  while taking care not to mash the rice - you can also toss it in the air and mix it if you are an expert in that ;)

Serve with vadam or “OB adichufy” with potato chips :)

2) Thenga saadham

Procedure is pretty much similar

Heat a kadai, add oil and let some mustard seeds sputter - then add a little split urad dhal and red chillies (Keep the exhaust fan ON at this time to avoid cough due to frying of chilli - but I forgot this today :-| )Then add the scraped/shredded thenga and saute nicely in oil till thenga becomes slightly brown in colour, now add required quantity of salt

Same procedure for making plain rice, mix the thenga saadham mix with it   and serve with vadaam

3) Thayir saadham

For this rice has to be a little more cooked. You can cook rice with water in the 1:3 ratio. Or you could mash yesterday’s left over rice after heating it a little if dry and use it instead.

The main thing for thayir saadham is the seasoning part.

Here’s what I use for seasoning:

2 teaspoons oil, 1 tsp mustard, 1 tsp split urad dhal, one long green chilli split across to let the seeds give the required spicyness, a few curry leaves and coriander leaves, salt as desired. You could also add a couple of spoons of shredded carrot and pomegarante seeds if you like to make the rice more colourful :)

So how you do the seasoning is - first heat the 2 tsp oil in a seasoning vessel (check in local stores how to get one) - then keep the stove in low heat and add the mustard ( the oil should be hot enough that the seeds sputter and not so hot that it burns/carbonizes the mustard (for lack of a better word ;)). Never add the mustard and urad dhal together - because each needs varying levels of heat - so mustard goes first, then urad dhal, once urad dhal becomes slightly brown switch off the stove and add the curry leaves, green chilli and coriander leaves - these can sizzle in the leftover heat, that should be sufficient

for the thayir saadham add a little milk to the mashed rice first - mix well then add some curd - how much curd you add depends on when you prepare the curd rice and when you are going to eat it. If you prepare it too early add more milk and little curd and if you prepare it just before lunch then add less milk and more curd. Finally mix the seasoning part with the required salt and serve with nice homemade mango pickle made by home elders :-P or with some nice pickle from the supermarket shelf :)

Warning: Having this for lunch will make you want for a nice nap post lunch :) To avoid that you can do some brain alerting activity like I did writing this piece for example :)

Until later,

bye folks!