My experiments with diversity in food: Day 1: Tamilnadu

I am very blessed that I was born in India. I got to experience a culture rich in food, art, music, language, and diversity first hand. While living in India I had an idea of diversity in India,  but only after coming to the US
, I realized that my knowledge about diversity in India was equivalent to a drop in an ocean. Here, I met people from different parts of India mile away from home and experienced the difference in culture and food in depth. 

India is a country of 29 states and 7 Union territories. It will not be a lie when I say that each state is tremendously distinct from each other. Each state has its own culture, customs, the different language in many of them, and one thing that stands apart the most is the cuisine in each state. Each state has its own rich culture and stories about their cuisine that developed based on the availability of resources, people travelling and bringing back different ideas, and people who came from outside but made their home in respective state and thus also introduced a new culture to an existing one.

A culinary documentary named, "Raja, Rasoi, and Anya Kahaniyan" inspired me a lot to learn more and research different foods from all those places. All these and the thirst of trying new food encouraged me finally to take a step in the direction of exploring the abundant and rich culinary heritage of India.

I wanted to do this from some years now, but it's better to be late than never. This is not a recipe blog, just the blog to decide a recipe, try it, and writing my experience about it.

I finally started my journey on January 4th 2021 with the help of google ;). I used a name selector tool to select a state. My pick of the day was the state of Tamilnadu. 

Tamilnadu is the southernmost state of the Republic of India. It is the tenth largest state in area, and 6th largest in population. This is the state with a rich culture and heritage that is older than 3800 years ago. Tamilnadu had been a house for various empires in past. Tamil cuisine is very popular and has a lot of vegetarian recipes. Use of tamarind to make food sour is very particular from southern states of India and thus is the norm in Tamilnadu also. Typically food is served on banana leaves. Rice is the staple food in Tamilnadu. I do not claim to know a lot about Tamilnadu, but when the name comes in my mind, it brings the memories of dosa, idli, sambhar, and the language Tamil :).

As I am a vegetarian, my exploration is limited to meatless recipes. Again, with the help of Google, I tried looking for recipes that are different than what I know and have eaten in past. From a food blog, I came across the name and recipe for Kara Kozhukattai. The name can be loosely translated from Tamil to English as spicy dumplings.

I used the recipe from the blog https://www.kannammacooks.com/kara-kozhukattai-kara-kozhukattai-recipe/.

Kara Kozhukattai is made from the smooth paste of soaked rice. The dumplings have the added flavours of onions, green chillies, ginger, salt, and curry leaves. I made a tomato-Onion chutney to eat with dumplings. The whole preparation and cooking of dumplings took me 3-4 hrs (this includes soaking of rice for more than 2 hrs).

The chutney I made is inspired by Tamilnadu's red chutney but with some modifications. Chutney I made had lightly sauteed onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, green chillies, roasted chana dal, and coconut powder. I blended all this and tempered it with mustard seeds, jeera, dried red chilly, and curry leaves.

My verdict: My husband and I love the chutney. It was an experiment that turned our favourite thing. The dumplings were tasty and different from foods we have eaten so far from Tamilnadu. They were little sticky for our taste but never the less were an extremely interesting and a different experience. 

Will I make it again: 6/10 I shall definitely try them again sometime, but not in near future. I might try changing some ingredients to add more flavour to them.

According to Mann, they lacked flavour, therefore, next morning he chopped them up into small pieces and sauteed them with cut onions and bell peppers. And, the experiment turned out a really good breakfast with hot tea for us :)