A recipe for a mixed vegetable kootu made using seasonal winter vegetables – a dish prepared in Tamil homes
Winter vegetables are love
In India, come winter and the vegetables look extra bright and happy – especially the red carrots, the tender green beans, blemish free cauliflowers and the plump green peas. Ever since I started tending to my kitchen garden, I am first hand witness to the effect that this pleasant Bangalore winter has on the vegetables. A few days we had some harsh sun and the broccoli florets bolted to give out yellow flowers and then pods which housed the seeds. And a few days of cold weather and I did manage to get some other broccolis whole.
homegrown sweet potato
We also got a generous harvest of sweet potatoes this season and there’s still more to come. Then there’s Avare or flat beans that come up on their own from the fallen seeds of last year. They just wait for December to take over the metal grille with their pretty heart shaped leaves, white flowers and bunches of flat beans the size of my little finger. If we don’t pluck them on time, we open the pods and use the ‘bean’ within.
My not to great relationship with kootu
As a kid, if the response to ‘What’s for lunch?’ was ‘kootu’, instant loss of appetite would happen. It used to be a boring old thing made to combat the routine of sambar and rasam. My granny would say it’s a day off for extracting pulp from soaked tamarind, which is the first step to making a rasam or sambar at home.
Decades of avoiding Kootu meant I would never want to make it when I started running my own kitchen. And then suddenly one day, you feel homesick (yes, this is possible) and you want to eat that hated dish of your childhood that now becomes comfort food. You can debate on how something as ‘blah’ as kootu can be comfort food, but this is a completely relative thing. Just like how I don’t question how Maggi can be anybody’s comfort food :D’
The thing about kootu is that it forms a handy vehicle to eat the most boring of vegetables such as bottle gourd, snake gourd, chayote squash (chow chow) and THE dish to resort to when you have a little bit of everything left in the vegetable crisper. This morning I woke up and I thought of this simple dish, not made with boring veggies but brimming with the freshness of colourful winter vegetables. It was convenient that I did have all these vegetables in stock. Plus, I added home grown sweet potato and avare beans to the mix, and it turned out into quite the colourful party.
Mixed vegetable kootu
One thing to remember while making a kootu is that the consistency depends on how you want to eat it. If you want to mix it into rice, then keep it thinner and thicker if you want to keep it as a vegetable side dish to be served with rasam (for example) and rice.
Mixed Vegetable Kootu
Ingredients
Method
- Peel and dice the carrots and sweet potatoes ~1 cm dice. In a medium sized saucepan, take 1/2 cup water. Add all the prepared vegetables, 1/2 tsp salt, pinch of turmeric and bring to a boil. Reduce flame and allow to simmer on a low flame for around 8-10 minutes until carrots are tender.
- Meanwhile, pressure cook the dal with 1.5 cups of water. Whisk until smooth and keep aside.
- In a small mixer jar, grind the coconut, cumin and green chili to a fine paste with the aid of 1/4 cup water and keep aside.
- Add the cooked dal and ground spice paste to the cooked vegetables. Add 1/2 tsp or as much as necessary and bring to a simmer. Adjust consistency depending on how you will serve the kootu, keeping it thinner if it will be mixed with rice and slightly thicker to serve as a vegetable side dish.
- Heat oil/ghee in a small tadka ladle. Add udad dal and once it turns golden brown, add the mustard seeds, curry leaves and dried red chillies. As the mustard seeds splutter, add the asafoetida and turn off the flame. Transfer this tempering over the kootu.
Notes
I too have same story Nandita. Used to run away from Kootu. But now after I started eating properly (!!) I realize that Kootu is versatile, nutritious, easy to make and more importantly goes well with bland brown rice. Nice articulation and super good pictures.
You’re spot on about the homesickness – that’s how I began to eat things I would NEVER touch as a child and teenager and young adult… things like karela, rava upma, Kancheepuram idlis, and yes, kootu 🙂 ALso, you DONT question Maggi as comfort food??? Good grief! 😀 I question it so very strongly!
I mean, I question, but i don’t openly question 😛 You get what i mean, right?
I love food, people, traveling and thank you for sharing valuable information here.
This recipe looks cool for summer..and it will go good with rice
Hey. Love the recipe. Planning to try. Do I have to cook the urad dal or can I just add the dry dal to the tempering?
you need to fry the urad dal for the tempering.