I am a sucker for Tamil style cooking. My first experience was a lovely home- made Tamil style meal prepared by Paati at a family friend’s house. At meal time, there were seemingly complicated and confusing etiquettes about curd being in the outer circle and a few other that I can’t remember right now. Well, I was a kid and no one bothered me with any rules. All I remember is that taste of amazing stir fries, yummy varieties of rice, awesome sambar, and at the end of it a very satisfied and full stomach. I remember one dish was a finely chopped suran, stir fried to crispiness. I have never liked suran much in any dish, except that.
Later in life, when I moved to “south India” I found that there are lots of regional and cultural variations within Tam style of cooking. When I visited Chennai first, I went berserk at the heavenly taste of Saravana bhavan sambar! It was not the spicy reddish sambar that I usually had with dosas at the Udupi style restaurants. This was different. It was subtle, but very tasty and satiated my taste buds perfectly. I guess they add ghee to it, but the husband doesn’t agree. Anyway, I can not understand why Saravana bhavan can go all the way up to Delhi and set up a shop, but they won’t do it in Bangalore.
The closest you get to Saravana bhavan style Tam food is Adyar Ananda Bhavan. And this is where I discovered this amazing one pot wonder called Sambar saadam (Sambar rice), which is what I was supposed to be talking about today.
Sambar rice is a one pot wonder, prepared with rice, tuvar daal and lots of vegetables. It has carbohydrates from rice, protein from the daal and vitamins and other goodness from the vegetables. I also like saving a little sambar rice for my toddler, before I add the masala. I feed him the plain salted sambar rice, after blending it. He loves it a lot and it saves me the extra trouble of making separate baby food.
For Sambar rice (for 3 people) , you’ll need
- 1 heaped cup of rice
- 3/4 cup tuvar dal (arhar dal)
- 10 sambar onions (shallots)
- 15 curry leaves
- 1 small carrot, peeled and cubed
- 3 french beans, cut into 1.5 inch long pieces
- 1 medium potato, peeled and cubed
- a handful of green peas
- 1 medium sized onion – cubed
- 1 tomato
- Oil – 2 tbsp
- Mustard seeds – 1 tsp
- Jeera seeds – 1 tsp
- Hing (Asafoetida) – 1 pinch
- Turmeric powder
- Sambar powder – 2 tbsp
- Dry whole red chillies – 4
- Salt to taste
Method of preparation
- First wash and soak the rice and daal in enough water for about half an hour. As it soaks, chop up the vegetables.
- Heat oil in a pan. Add mustard, jeera, red chillies and hing. Add the curry leaves, chopped onion and a pinch of salt and stir fry for a minute or so.
- Then add all the vegetables, except tomatoes and turmeric powder and stir fry for another couple of minutes.
- Add the soaked rice and daal to this mixture, add lots of water. I started with about 4.5 cups of water and added more later. The consistency of this dish is like that of khichdi. It is not meant to be dry like rice, but not watery either. It has to be of porridge like consistency.
- Once the water comes to a boil, stir it once, add salt and cover with a lid. Let it cook on low or medium-low heat for about 15-20 minutes. The times are approximate here, so keep checking every 5 minutes. If water seems to be drying up, keep adding water.
- When the rice is tender and the daal well cooked and tender, add the tomatoes. Cover and let it simmer for another 3-4 minutes and then add the sambar powder. Check and adjust for salt if required.
- It is best served hot as if you have to reheat this, the consistency suffers. If you add water, it loses its flavour. So vahchef suggests that you can add some sambar if you need to liquidify it a little while reheating. Apparently, that’s what they do in restaurants.
You can serve it with a little boondi and chopped coriander on top, and curd or raita on the side. Do try it and let me know how it went. Happy cooking!
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