Pavakkai Pitlai (Bittergourd Coconut Curry)

Blogging Marathon# 61: Week 2/ Day 1

Theme: Meal Ideas

Dish: Bittergourd Pitlai

My theme for this week's Blogging marathon is probably one of my favorite. It is 'Meal Ideas', Valli wants us to showcase a complete meal even if that means sharing just one recipe. Coming up with a plan for a meal is quite an exercise for the brain which is why most of us try to delegate the task to the family by asking, 'what do you want to eat today?' I am one of those people who will ask this question and then reject almost everything that is being requested, only on very rare occasions a suggestion is actually cooked. But I don't fail to ask the question ;-)

Coming from south India, most of our meals revolve around rice, so for the next 3 days, I'm going to share some interesting meal ideas with rice as one of the component.

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Kakarakaya Pachadi (Bittergourd Chutney)

I am not a big fan of spicy Indian style pickles. My mom makes sure she keeps me stocked with fresh pickles every year, but I rarely eat them. In my house, my husband is the major consumer of these spicy pickles. He also likes the simple chutneys made with vegetables, so I make them occasionally. They keep well in the fridge for 4~5 days.

I saw this pachadi/ chutney recipe made with bitter gourd/ kakarakaya on a cooking show. Recipe is very simple to make and the method of making is quite interesting. Bitter gourd is usually cooked with lot oil for a very long time to reduce the bitterness, but in this recipe it is ground into a coarse paste and then cooked in little bit of oil until it is cooked through.

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Stuffed Karela/ Bittergourd Curry with Garlic (Kakarakaya Vellullikaram)

I am always looking for new ways of cooking bitter gourd, so when I saw this recipe on a Telugu cooking show I promptly noted it down. Then my sister asked me a recipe for stuffed karela and I gave her this recipe and they totally loved it. After hearing the feedback I decided to make it myself and she was right, this is a delicious stuffed karela recipe.

One thing I learnt from this recipe is we don't need baby bitter gourd to make stuffed curry. Just use regular sized ones and cut them into chunks. Remove the seeds from the middle and hollow out the centers, then stuff them with spicy ground masala.

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Kakarakaya Nuvvulannam (Bitter gourd-Sesame Rice)

One pot dishes are so convenient any time of the day. Being a South Indian most of my dishes revolve around rice, so a lot of one pot dishes I make are with rice. If I have leftover rice, it gets transformed into some kind of one-pot rice dish the next day. I'm sure all South Indians would probably say the same thing. Talking about rice lovers, I had an American co-worker who didn't like rice at all and I couldn't even imagine what it would be like without eating rice.

Today's rice dish is a new combination for me. I've never made a rice dish with bittergourd before. I saw the recipe on a Telugu Cooking show and the combination of bittergourd, sesame seeds and rice sounded very interesting. I was pleasantly pleased how good the dish turned out to be and was even more happy when the husband really really liked it.

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Kakarakaya Podi Kura (Bittergourd Dry Curry)

Blogging Marathon# 32: Letter K
Theme: A-Z Dishes from Andhra Pradesh
Dish: K for Kakarakaya Podi Kura (Bittergourd Dry curry)

Letter K stands for veggies like Kakarakaya (bittergourd), lentils like kandi pappu (toor dal/ red gram) and ingredients like kobbarikaya (coconut). 

Today's recipe is from a cookbook, Vantalu Pindivantalu by Malathi Chandur, that I bought years ago in a small book shop in Hyderabad. I still remember taking my mom to Koti, Hyderabad to buy a cook book. After asking in couple of stores, I was slowly getting disappointed that I won't be buying a cookbook that day. But my mom took me to a dusty old store that had no windows and had a rickety broken stairs. The guy said he had some cookbooks in the back and the back was even more dusty and dark. Well finally one of the assistants came down from the attic with a couple of cookbooks and I ended up picking this one.

This book was first published way back in 1974, so there are no pictures and the recipes are written with no measurements, everything is written in terms of fistfulls and a little bit more. So here's a recipe with the measurements I came up with. The curry ended up super tasty, do give it a try. I'm sure that the masala would taste great with other veggies too.

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