usha manohar wrote:
Kalyani Nandurkar wrote:
Thanks for the link Usha. It contains breakfast items that are traditionally made across the country. I make kane pohe, and pohe of other variatns by adding other veggies such as potato, cauliflower, peas etc. Upma, idli, dosas, among other items.
Pohe is one of my favorites too and when you add vegetables , it becomes very nutritious and tasty ! In Mangalore we even make a sweet dish by adding grated coconut, crushed Jaggery, Honey, Cardomom powder and chopped Bananas to it, basically just mixing everything together. It is very tasty and we serve it with Neer Dosa , a variety of Dosa made with thin rice batter.
I loove neer dosa. I was recently in Bangalore and had my fill. Actually I am a huge foodie. I must have eaten all kinds of grub (as long as it wasn't moving). The more alien the better. And the thing is that I am a pretty decent cook, though I say so myself (I have been told by my satisfied customers), who gets easily bored by the same stuff. And being one yourself, you probably know that one tends to get into an unimaginative cycle with breakfast. Cereal, sandwiches, puttu, poha, upma, pattiri (I haven't eaten the fried version of pattiri. So one is always looking for fresh ideas. The pattiri in the photo resembles a puri. Which reminds me, if you haven't you could try beetroot or methi with puris. Its even better than the usual aloo-baji. Though it will leave a lot of red colour.
I was going to make idiyapam tomorrow for breakfast because there's this new version of the contraption you make it in, which looks very heavy, but is actually convenient to use. But now I'm thinking I'll try one of the others in this collection. Its a very well designed site. Most useful. Thanks! I've had most of them at some point, except a few variations hear and there. Including the ragi version of idiyappam. And I don't recall seeing paniharam in this list, those tiny fried savoury idlis. I stuffed myself on those too in Bangalore.
Thankfully I'm not obsessed about weightgain, because I do my one and half hours yoga when it pleases me. So I'll let myself go for a period, then think, "okay, now I feel fat," and start yoga.
For my taste, ragi doesn't always taste great. I tried MTR's ragi upma, thinking it would be healthy and I felt like a sickly diabetic. It was so weirdly bland. It wasn't very appetising. Or maybe I didn't cook it properly. I have never heard of the Chettinad seera, though I'm familiar with the cuisine. It's their version of bonda I guess. And I don't know anything about Sindhi cuisine. So that Loli, Lola thing was a discovery. Though basically its your double fried paratha.
I have only been in Kerala for a month after three years. I've actually been working in Delhi for ages, and that's foodie paradise. I've eaten the meetha version of paratha at my Punjabi friend's home for breakfast. And of course you must have tried the sheermal roti. It's rich, doughy sugary with notches on the surface I think the origin is Lucknawi. Its a very Nawabi cuisine flatbread.
There's a chain of restaurants called Karim's whose original is in Old Delhi. Sheermal is one of Karim's specialities.
Apparently the original owner's family used to be with the Mughal Emperor's kitchen (probably Bahadur Shah Zafar before he came down in the world or maybe it was one of Aurangzeb's other descendants). Of course in Delhi and Lucknow and possibly Hyderabad, you'll usually hear older restaurants trace their roots back to Nawab or Mughal kitchens. And u don't know who is telling a tall tale to brand themselves. But it is a known fact that there have been lots of unusual experiments with food, and very elaborate recipes because of royal patronage. Apparently some of those guys had loads of time on their hands and used to tell their chefs to play around as much as they liked with expensive and unusually presented dishes. It often had created entertainment value at the table.
What's also a good thing is that earlier some of the more traditional recipes were more time-consuming (a lot of South Indian ones tend to be), so people started to veer to ready-to-use stuff. But I guess Mom's always have to keep reinventing to keep kids interested, and in the process, people also have designed better kitchen equipment (like the idiyappam thingummy), so you can have fresh do-it-yourself recipes like your mom and grandmom made from scratch. Instead of using a packet.
I had planned to ask a question about easy to make recipes for homemade bread. There is stuff on the web. But when you ask more people, someone somewhere might have their own spin, which is unlisted on the web. If anyone has a recipe that doesn't involve having to keep the dough overnight kindly contact this space.
