A Sunday morning with Idli and sambar

Idli and Sambar

S. No	Items Required	Quantity
For Idli
1	Idli rice	1 cup
2	Urad Dal	1/2 cup
3	Cooked Rice / Beaten rice	1/4 cup
For Sambar
1	Toor Dal	1 cup
2	Onion	1
3	Tomato	1
4	Green chilli	2
5	Carrot	1
6	beans	3
7	Drumstick	2
8	Lauki	A small piece
9	Tarmaid	small piece
10	Musturd seeds	1 pinch
11	Dried Red chilli	1
12	Curry Leaves	1 spring
13	Hing	1 pinch
14	Turmeric powder	1/2 tsp
15	sambar powder	1 tbsp
16	coriander powder	1 tsp
17	Coriander leaves
18	Oil	2 tsp
19	Salt	As required

To prepare Idli you need to plan a day before if you are not buying a readymade mix. To make the idli batter soak 1 cup of Idli rice and ½ cup of the urad dal in water for overnight or minimum of 8 hours.

Grind the mix and add cooked rice at the end and make a fine paste with little water. The consistency of the idli  batter should be thick else it will lead to a sticky idli and which will not taste good.Pour the mix into a container and add required salt and stir it. Cover it and keep it for 8 hours/overnight for fermentation. The more it get fermented the more fluffy and soft idli you will make J.

Once the mix is fermented pour the mix into idli maker or cooker and steam. The idli is ready.

Now the sambar preparation. For saving time the sambar can be prepared without any vegetable also. Here I have included some vegetables which we can cut easily and that makes your sambar tastes good as well.

First put the tamarind in a bowl with little water and keep aside. Pressure cook the toor dal and mash it and keep it aside, in the meantime finish all the vegetable cuttings. Keep the cooker on the gas stove and pore 1 tsp oil to it. Put the sliced onion and stir it till it becomes soft and add green chilli, curry leaves and tomato also. Stir it for a minute and add carrot, beans, lauki, drumstick etc (whatever vegetable you want to put).Stir it for a minute and then add turmeric powder, coriander powder, sambar powder , salt as mentioned in the above table. Pressure cook vegetable and once done open the cooker and mix the mashed daal with the vegetable. Squeeze out the tamarind pulp and water and pour it to the cooker. Let the sambar boil for a minute. Switch of the flame and keep it aside.

In a small pan add oil, musterd seeds, dry red chilly and curry leaves and make it splutter for a minute. Put some hing in the mix and pour this seasoning into the sambar. Put some coriander leaves also on the top.

The sambar preparation looks lengthy but it is very simple and trust me it will not take more than 15 minutes to do this. You can prepare tea also parallel.

Tips :-

1.       Soak toor dal at night itself so that morning it will get cooked fast.

2.       Cut the vegetable at night if you have time.

3.       Buy fresh idli mixes from genuine shop to avoid grinding at home.

4.       Prepare chutney instead of sambar if your family agrees J