I'm Back with peerkangai kootu

Hi Friends,

Hope all of you are doing very well. Things have been going fine at my end too. Sorry for my uninformed disappearance in blogsphere. I had been allorting my leisure hours for gym and cleaning. Guess what.... I have lost 30 pounds so far. But I still have 20 more to go. I feel good now. But the bad thing is I have still not overcome my love for chocolates. It makes me cheat on my diet often. If not for this I would have lost more. Anyway, I'm a lot better now. Atleast I have developed a conscious to warn me every now and then.

The other things that had kept me busy was planning the birthday party for my son and doing some extra cleaning around the house as I'm expecting my in-laws from India next week. Anyway, I hope to resume blogging regularly from this post onwards. I'm sorry that I have not been able to reply to your comments . But I wanted to let you know that I truly appreciate each and everyone of your words. Thanks guys.

Meanwhile I did one more thing. I created another blog "ensamayalpakkam.blogspot.com" and copied all the contents there. I did it as I wanted another template. I tried changing the existing one but the alignment was going crazy that I decided to go to a new address. When I was almost done I realized that I would lose my site statistics if I give-up my old one , so I decided to stay with this itself. Anyway if anybody have some suggestions for my problem I'd really appreciate it.

Coming to the food part... I'll start with Peerkangai Kootu. Usually I use channa dal for kootu but this time I did it like my MIL . I mean I used boiled moongdal. This kootu is great as a side-dish for chappathi or it tastes great with rice. Try this simple dish sometime, you will surely love it.

Peerkangai Kootu:

Ingredients:
Ridgegourd/Peerkangai - 1
onion- 1/2 (chopped fine)
tomato- 1 big
green chillies- 4 or 5
boiled moong dal - 1 cup
coconut- 1/4 to 1/2 cup
jeera seeds - 1 and 1/2 tsp
salt - as reqd

Procedure:
Wash and cook moong dal with enough water and turmeric. You can either steam cook it or boil it. Next grind coconut and jeera with some water to a fine paste. Meanwhile scrap out the skin off the ridgegourd. You can either discard it or use it to make a thuvayal. Cut the gourd into small pieces and boil it with very little water with some turmeric and salt. The gourd cooks very fast so don't boil for long and make it mushy.

Next heat oil in the kadai and splutter mustard seeds, urad dal and curry leaves. Then add onions and chillies and saute for 5 mins. After that add tomatoes and cook till it's pulpy. Now add the cooked vegatable and dal. Add salt and mix well. Finally add the ground coconut and bring it to a boil. Serve it with rice or roti. It tastes just great.