Punjabi Aloo (Spicy Potato curry with Yogurt)

Blogging Marathon# 62: Week 4/ Day 1
Theme: No Tomato Gravies
Dish: Punjabi Aloo
We are starting the final week of this month's marathon and my theme for the week is 'Gravies with No tomatoes'. When I signed up for this theme, I wasn't expecting it to be as difficult as it turned out. I realized that I'm very much dependent on tomatoes for making gravy curries. I have fresh tomatoes, canned tomato paste and puree always in the pantry. Coming up with 3 tomato-free gravy recipes was quite a challenge.

I have tried 3 curry recipes using different ingredients to give the gravy consistency. For the first day, the curry is thickened with yogurt and a little bit of heavy cream. I was skeptical if my yogurt-hating husband would like it or not. But he didn't really notice the yogurt that much, so this curry goes into our recipe rotation.

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Mysore Rasam Powder

Here's the recipe for the Rasam powder I used in this Mysore Rasam. Like I said in that post, I don't usually make spice powders from scratch. I know freshly homemade spice mixes add a lot of flavor to dishes but I get lazy to make them.

But when I saw this Mysore rasam in Dakshin cookbook by Chandra Padmanabhan, I was tempted to make the spice mix. Glad that I made it because this is one of the more flavorful rasam powder (I'm comparing it with the store-bought rasam powders).

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Pepper Poriyal using Poriyal Powder(Dry Green Pepper Curry)

Blogging Marathon# 58: Week 2/ Day 3

Theme: Dry Vegetable Sautes

Dish: Green Pepper Poriyal

For the final day of this week's blogging marathon, I made yet another poriyal from Dakshin cookbook. This recipe is flavored with a homemade poriyal powder and is quite different tasting from yesterday's masala beans poriyal.

Poriyal podi aka curry powder is made with dals (lentils), coriander seeds and dry red chilies. Making a big batch of this makes it easy to make quick dry curries. It can be used to make potato fry, arbi (colacassia, chamadumpa) fry and so on.

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Rice with Urad dal spice powder (Ulundu Ogaray)

Blogging Marathon# 58: Week 1/ Day 1

Theme: Bring on your Rice

Dish: Rice with Urad dal spice powder (Ulundu Ogaray)
Can't believe we are only few weeks away from a New year, time sure seems to fly. We are starting a new edition of Blogging marathon today and my theme for this week is 'Bring on your Rice', Valli wants us to post any rice based dish.

As a South Indian, rice is our staple food and every meal essentially revolves around rice. So it is only natural that I take up this theme to try some more new rice dishes.

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Homemade Pumpkin Pie Spice Mix

It's that time of the year where everything is flavored with pumpkin pie spice -- pumpkin pie latte, pumpkin donuts, pumpkin scones, breads, cakes and on and on and on. But the price of pumpkin pie spice in the grocery store is way too high and since it has limited use in my kitchen, I never bought it.

But couple of days ago as I was planning to make the Pumpkin ice cream, I needed couple of teaspoons of the pumpkin pie spice and I looked online for the recipe. Luckily I had all the ingredients on hand and voila I had my own pumpkin pie spice mix that I can now use in different fall based recipes.

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