GREEN TOMATO GRAVY - WITH A LINKAGE TO MY BLOG NAME

As I think more seriously of blogging regularly on weekends, I created a page in FB last week with the thought to make it more useful for someone.  Thanks to all who are supporting me in terms of likes, comments and private messages.   It is all you who is making my passion grow stronger. 

Some of my readers have sent me private messages asking the meaning of my blog name, Enthaligai.  It is a pure Tamil word where “En” means “My/mine” and “thaligai” refers “cooking”.  It means “My cooking”.  

To me, cooking is very intimate thing.  I just do not cook for the sake that I need to do this job but cook with real love.  When I invite someone on the dining table and serve my cooked food, I invite them to my life.  In my blog, I touch up on the recipes with little story because I never wanted this blog just for documenting my cooking style but wanted to use this space to share my thoughts/opinion/feel/life/my people.  When I get old or my son gets old, when we turn on these pages of these chapters, I am sure this would give us previous memories.

Without deviating much further, I will write about today’s stuff.  It’s about gravy prepared using Green tomatoes.  I first tasted this dish in a hotel in Chennai some months back.  I liked it very much.  With the taste, I tried to capture the ingredients that could have been used in this dish and reserved it in my mind.  Until then, I never knew green tomatoes can be used for cooking.  When we went to market place few days back, I found green tomatoes and grabbed with the thought of trying out in my kitchen.  I recollected the taste and tried out at home.  It came out perfect at first try.  When I checked with DH for the taste, he nodded his head which is an okay sign for me to try again :-).

Ingredients:

Green tomatoes – 1/2 kg

Kidney beans – 100 g

Moong dal – 1 small cup

Salt – to taste

Oil – 1 tsp

To temper:

Mustard seeds

Curry leaves

To grind:

Coconut – 1 small cup

Green chilies – 3

Jeera – a teaspoon

Preparation:

1. Soak kidney beans overnight and pressure cook for 4-5 whistles.  Pressure cook Moong dhal with little water along with that in a separate container.

2. Wash green tomatoes and cut into four cubes as shown below.

3. In a pan, add oil and the tempering ingredients when it is hot.  When the mustard seeds crackles, add curry leaves, then green tomatoes, required salt, and later tumeric powder. Once the salt and turmeric powder blends with tomatoes, transfer this to a container and pressure cook for 2-3 whistles.  This is done to save the cooking time of green tomatoes. Unlike red tomatoes, green takes longer time to cook. Hence I preferred to pressure cook.

 

4. Meanwhile, grind the ingredients given the list (Coconut, green chillies, and jeera) and keep aside.

5.  Once the pressure releases, add the ground paste and cook for 2 minutes.  Then add the cooked kidney beans and later moong dhal one by one.  

7. Check for salt, let this boil for 3-5 minutes until all the ingredients blends together nicely. 

 

This can be served as a side dish for rice or rotis.