I love the colorfulness of this week's dish for the Yummies from Blogosphere series...one of my biggest inspirations, which propelled me towards active blogging was the immense beauty of all the foods portrayed in simple digital images all over blogosphere...it totally made my mind boggle to see Indian food and of course, other foods too(that we cook and eat everyday) presented with such elegance...and it was not just the complex, difficult-to-make dishes but also simple recipes that looked almost ethereal when captured so tastefully on film.
This week's dish was very simple to prepare, but so extremely beautiful to look at, you would think it took hours...I love almost all the dishes presented by this blogger, Tina of kaipunyam.com...in fact she is just awesome at baking up the most beautiful yummies I have ever seen. But I chose this dish because of its traditional nature and immense ease of preparation. Also, I feel the more I can add beets to our diet, packed as it is with nutrients, the better it would be.
It is a wonderful yoghurt-based beetroot side-dish wonderful with rice and curry as well as with chappathis/bread as a spread/dip. I know a lot of people who dont use beets as much as they should, just because they are afraid its deep colors are going to stain their work surfaces and require a lot of clean-up!!!! I hope these kind of dishes wil inspire more people out there to try this awesome veggie more often!
Notes/Variation: In this dish, I did very little in terms of modification, because its flavor lies in the minimal number of ingredients...the only thing was, that I added some channa dal(split yellow gram) and some grounduts to the seasoning items. Also, since I dont add much coconut nowadays to my dishes, I reduced the quantity of coconut to 1/4cup. Suggested garnish: Yoghurt topping
Thank you for this simply elegant dish, Tina!!
Link: Original Recipe for Beetroot Pachadi at kaipunyam.com
Recipe for Beetroot Pachadi
Serves: 4
Prep/cook time: 15-20 mins.
Ingredients:
Beetroot 1 big
Onion 1 med
Chilly 5 to 7
Yoghurt 1/2 to 3/4 cup
Coconut 1 cup grated
Ginger 1 small piece
Shallots 1 to 2
Curryleaves
Fenugreek
Mustard
Water
Salt
Oil
Method
Clean the beetroot. Finely grate it and cook it (in little oil) with chopped onion, ginger, chilly, salt and little water.
Grind together coconut, onion, chilly and little mustard seeds. Add this paste into cooked beetroot.
After cooling down, add yoghurt into this and mix well. Season it with shallots, fenugreek seeds, mustard seeds and curry leaves.
