Ribbon Pakoda

A nice fried snack.

Ingredients

Besan 2 cups
Rice Flour 1 cup
Salt to taste (about 3 tsp)
Red chilli powder 3 tsp
Asafoetida
Butter/ Ghee
Oil for frying

Get Cooking!

1. Mix the above ingredients well.
2. Add a little water to make a thick pasty kind of mixture
3. Heat up the oil in a kadai for frying
4. Once the oil is warm, take the batter in sev maker with the ribbon pakoda plate (will have small slits which are parallel to each other)
5. Squeeze out the batter, swirling it around to spread it inside the oil.
6. Keep frying until the ribbon pakoda is cooked well flipping it often.

Tips

A ladle of hot oil can be used instead of the butter/ghee. Do not mix up all the flour together with water. Do so little by little, just the amount you can use in the sev maker. This way, the ribbon pakoda will not brown up and come out nicely golden brown each time.

Deepavali marundu

Generally given with savouries on Deepavali day. This aids in digestion, so can be given if suffering from indigestion too.

To make lehiyam to amount to a small coconut the following is the recipe.

Ingredients

Black pepper seeds 2 tsp
Cumin seeds 2 ½ tsp
Coriander seeds 2 ½ tsp
Oregano seeds ¼ cup (around 25 g)
Kandathippili (Thesavaram) 10 – 12 sticks
Dry ginger piece about the size of a quarter
Cardamom 2
Ghee ¼ cup
Jaggery about 100 g (about equal amount to the ground paste)

Get Cooking!

1. Grind all the herb ingredients coarsely.
2. Soak the above powder in water for about 10 – 15 minutes.
3. Grind the soaked herbs to a soft paste sprinkling the water in which it was soaked little by little.
4. Add about ½ cup water and mix up to get kozhambu consistency.
5. Pour the above into a heavy-bottomed vessel (like an uruli or stone vessel), cook on slow heat stirring such that it does not get burnt up.
6. Once this becomes thick after the water evaporates, put in the jaggery pieces and stir.
7. Add in the ghee little by little.
8. Take off the heat when it starts bubbling, and it becomes a nice mixture.

Tips

If you don’t have all the ingredients, do it with whatever you have. I always seem to not have kandathippili 😉