Menthya Hittu (Fenugreek powder)- nothing bitter about this delicious condiment

Let me start with, "I love this pudi (powder)" which I hope will give you the confidence to read through the rest of the post and may be try it and become addicts just like me. I have seen many people turning their noses up the moment someone mentions fenugreek (including my own DD) because of the inherent bitterness of these seeds. Though this powder is made with a substantial quantity of fenugreek, bitterness is not in its elements, it just lends the powder a distinct aroma of roasted fenugreek and the rest of the ingredients bring down the bitterness. So if you have never had it, now is the perfect time to give it a taste. I will show you two super delicious ways of consuming this powder once ready, choose the one that calls out to you more intimately.

When Nammamma made this powder back in the days, it was always a treat in the evening once all the powders got done and stored in the larger containers for long term storage and smaller containers for table use. I didn't care if she had any other side dish to go with rice at all as long as there was fresh menthya hittu on the table. Amma would make the seasoning with dals & mustard seeds to add to the rice (we called it khat-khata because of the sounds the roasted dals made when you took the bites :-)). A dash of lemon on the hot rice would immediately emit the unmistakable flavor of freshness and elevate the simple dish miles higher. I honestly did not need anything else for dinner. It is great to keep the dinner simple (not necessarily light though) without elaborate cooking sometimes.

One of my little nieces loves this menthya hittu. A couple of years back when I was in India and was visiting them for the 2nd time since she was born, she was really not open to talking with this atte (aunt) whom she didn't remember. I tried all the tricks I knew to make her talk to me for a couple of hours without much progress, she definitely moved from hiding completely behind her mom's dress to peeking at me when I was not looking (or so she thought) at her and whisper something in her mom's ears :-). Then we sat down for dinner. Most everybody in my family knows my love for all things spicy and chikkamma (my aunt) offered me her home made Menthya hittu. As I put heaps of it in my plate, little V's eyes widened and she became interested suddenly and said, "Menthittu, tuppa anna tumba chennagiratte (Menthya powder, ghee and rice tastes very yummy)" :-). So as I mixed it in, she slowly inched her way from her mother's lap to stand next to me and then sit in my lap in no time to enjoy the delicious morsels with her newly acquainted atte. We had a great dinner, eating multiple rounds of menthittu(as V calls it) , tuppa and rice. I was happy, little V was happy and every one around was smiling while chikkamma was complaining that she never should have shown us the powder since all her other side dishes were being completely ignored :-). This delicious powder was instrumental in our bonding and after dinner she stuck to me like glue and chatted away to glory. Here is my home made menthittu for putani V.

We call it Menthya hittu (as the powder is really fine unlike the coarsely ground chutney pudi) and not Menthya pudi. Nammamma used dried turmeric roots in all the powder preparations and not the turmeric powder which gave her pudis a better fragrance and color. I use store bought powder since I don't anyway get good quality turmeric root and my blender seems to have hiccups if I put in too much hard ingredients for it to break :-).

This powder is not something we use with idli or Dose (Dosa) generally but if you are like me and really fall in love with it, you can just about eat it in any form. The list of ingredients may seem a little daunting but they are all in ordinary Indian kitchens every day and is very easy to procure from your local grocery store if you do not have them. When I had asked Nammamma for the recipe of Menthya hittu the first time I made it, she had said that almost every spice in the kitchen goes in :-) which is pretty much true. She used whole wheat kernels instead of the upma rava I have below and it is a substitution she recommended.

What do you need to make Menthya Hittu?
1/2 cup Toor Dal
1/2 cup Chana dal
1/2 cup Moong dal
1/4 cup Urad dal
1 Tbsp Dhania/coriander seeds
2 Tsp menthya/fenugreek seeds
1/2 Tsp mustard
1/2 Tsp cumin seeds
2 dry red chilies
1/2-3/4 Tsp black pepper
1 inch cinnamon
2 cloves
1 Tbsp Upma rava (in place of whole wheat)
1 Tsp rice
1/2 Tsp turmeric powder
salt (adjust to taste)

How do you make Menthya hittu?

• Heat a heavy bottom pan on medium heat. 
• Dry roast the 4 dals one by one stirring frequently until they turn crunchy and a deep pink in color. Do not burn any ingredients. 
• As they get toasted, put them aside on a plate to cool down. 
• Warm coriander seeds for a minute or two until you get the aroma and it heats up nicely, this doesn't have to change color. Keep aside to cool. 
• Roast rava until it turns light pink. 
• Roast rice until it turns brittle and transparent. 

• Roast the remaining ingredients except red chilies until fragrant. Add red chilies, salt and turmeric powder at the end, switch off the stove. 
• Once everything has cooled down completely, make a fine powder in the mixer or coffee grinder. 
• I use the small sieve to sieve the powder, return it back to the mixer for another round of grinding to get a fine powder. 
• Store in a dry, air tight container for upto 2 weeks, the freshness reduces  over time and I prefer to make small quantities. You can refrigerate it for longer shelf life. 

Now that we have the menthya hittu, how do we consume it? Here are a couple of delicious ways to eat this yummy condiment. 

Menthya hittu anna(rice): 

• Mix 2 Tsp of the powder into a bowl of warm, cooked rice (cook rice so the grains are separate, tastes better than using mushy rice) along with 1/2 Tsp of ghee or oil. 
• Make a seasoning of Tsp of oil, mustard, urad dal, chana dal and a few small pieces of dry red chili (Byadagi variety works best as it is not too hot and you can bite into the crunchy bits :-)). 

• Pour a Tsp (or more to taste) of the seasoning on top of the rice.
• Add 1/2 Tsp of lemon juice and a Tsp of finely chopped onions. 
• Mix everything together with light fingers (very important not to mush up the rice), adjust salt or powder as needed and enjoy :-)

And here is an extremely easy gojju that is a favorite with akki rotti in our home. It is equally tasty when mixed with rice. 

Menthya hittu gojju: 

• Soak a gooseberry sized tamarind in 1/2 cup water for 20 minutes and extract the juice. 
• Make a seasoning of 1/2 Tsp mustard, pinch of asafoetida, a few dry red chilies and a couple of curry leaves. 
• Take 2 heaped Tbsp of Menthya hittu in a bowl, add seasoning it to the bowl along with a Tbsp finely chopped onions, mix well. 

• Add the tamarind extract, 1/2 Tsp crushed jaggery or brown sugar. 
• Adjust salt, jaggery or consistency of the gravy (it is slightly runny than a dip but not flowing). 

Notes: 

• Seasoned cast iron pans work best for all powder making as they spread heat evenly, you get a heavy airplane body material pan in India which works very well too, do not preferably use non stick pans.
• Nammamma has gained the experience over years of making the powders to mix and roast ingredients as she understands which 2 (or more) take the same roasting time, Given my heavily multi tasking nature, I prefer to roast the ingredients one by one and give the passing attention they need :-), choose whichever method works for you. Bottom line is to roast them well and never burn any of them. 

Saaru pudi(Rasam powder) & (Mysore) Saaru - a sought after recipe for a home made Rasam powder

Hope everyone started their New Year on a great note. My wishes to all of you. I am going to start this year's blogging with a recipe so common, so popular that it needs no introduction to anyone with even a tiny bit of exposure to Indian cuisine. It is special because it comes from my favoritest most favorite (before my grammar addict DD catches me on this) kitchen in the entire world. This is what I grew up on literally.

Before I start talking about anything else today, I want to unload something with you guys. It is a pet peeve of mine to see something called 'Mysore Rasam' because as far as I know, there is no such thing as Mysore Rasam. I was born and raised in Mysore and spent the first 20 years of my life in this beautiful city but have never heard another Mysorean say, "I made Mysore Rasam for lunch today" :-) simply because it doesn't exist. I think it was the MTR quick mixes of the world that coined the name to distinguish it from the neighboring Madras Rasam(is there a Madras Rasam BTW, any Chennaites?) and the name some how stuck. For one, we don't call it Rasam in Mysore, it is a 'saaru' and saaru tastes different from kitchen to kitchen within the boundary of Mysore depending on the individual tastes and preferences of each family, so generalizing something as Mysore Rasam is a gross understatement. Since the rest of the world has gotten used to this misnomer, I will indulge everyone with it albeit unwillingly. But for a hard core Mysorean, it will always remain 'Saaru'. Whew, now that I took it off my chest, I am back to my happy self and we can continue our talk in a much lighter vein for the rest of the post.

Since I started this blog 2 years back, I have had many requests for home made powders, while I do post them from time to time, there are some I still haven't brought to the blog. Saaru pudi is such a quintessential condiment in a South Indian home that each of us learn it by watching moms and grandmoms in the kitchen. Saaru fares regularly in our menu and I used to stock my pantry with MTR Mysore Rasam powder for a long time whenever my imported pudi from Nammamma's kitchen got over. Though I knew the ingredients that went in to making the pudi, I had never attempted it on my own until recently. One day when I was picking through my recipe books including the hand written one I have, a piece of paper fell down that had saarina pudi recipe. It is from some 6 years back when nammamma was here visiting us. Having hit the jackpot, I went to the kitchen and made it that day and then a week later and again 2 weeks later. This here is nammamma's saaru pudi and I don't find the need to buy MTR anymore :-)

Since I said saaru tastes different in different kitchens, let me also state that nammamma made one of the best saarus I have ever had though she didn't ever think so and has never been a big fan of her own saaru, she prefers Huli (which is known as sambar in Indian culinary dictionary). Basic definition of saaru is a spiced liquid with or without lentils in which vegetables are most notably absent except for tomatoes and in some special cases onions. The saaru usually has a much thinner consistency compared to a Huli/sambar and is served as either an appetizer or as the second course to be mixed with rice in a meal or more famously to dunk deep fried vadas in. While I was writing this post and thinking about the different varieties of saaru made at home, it occurred to me that a picture might be more useful to show you what I had in mind instead of writing sentences. So I applied a little bit of my professional skills to draw the below, it is hand drawn so pardon the 'unstraight' straight lines. Hope you guys enjoy the neat picture and if you didn't know, you just read a basic flow chart :-)

Making saaru pudi is an art, while you may get the list of ingredients and the proportions from a recipe, the major trick is in roasting those ingredients. Under roasted or over roasted spices turn a possible master piece into a failure very quickly. In Nammamma's kitchen, pudi making days were actually marked on the calendar, she would make sure there were no other events happening on that day, ingredients were purchased and kept ready, kids were at school (you don't want them either sneezing on you the whole time or tugging you at arm for snacks, so they had to be out) and she would also plan the breakfast & lunch for the day ahead so she can get it out of the way and clear the kitchen area. Once the daily cooking was done, the kitchen would get a round of cleaning, the gas stove with 2 burners would come down to the floor and she would sit there roasting all the spices. All this was essential since she made big batches of the powders and usually made 3 or more different spice powders on the same day and in quantities big enough to sustain the family for atleast a month and half before the cycle repeated.

Once the spices are roasted, you take them to the flour mill in the neighborhood. These mills were small rooms, low ceilinged and housed 2 or 3 huge machines that ran continuously and generated so much heat that standing inside that room was no less than an adventure sport. Nammamma would send one of us kids as messengers the previous evening to let the mill owner know we had a batch of powders to be ground so he could plan ahead. What planning, you ask? Here is the deal - the machine has a wide feeder on top from where the roasted lentils/spices would be fed and the ground powder would come out through a much narrower pipe - it was actually a stump that was extended longer with a stitched cloth, imagine a leg of trousers. We would keep a container at the end of it to collect the powder. Pretty ingenuous, huh? But the problem with this is the powder invariably gets attached to the inside of the cloth and if you didn't want multiple flavors mixed up in your powder, you had to invert that trousery thingy and make sure all attached powder got detached/dusted off :-) and would sneeze and cough laboriously in the process. And then the blander powders (like Menthya hittu - recipe coming up sometime soon for this favorite powder of mine) had to be ground first before you would start on the spicier powders. After a strong flavored powder was done, the cloth tied to the output tube would be flipped reverse and any powder sticking to the inside would be dusted off completely before starting the machine again. On top of all this, the machine was controlled by request to produce fine powder (as in saaru pudi) and coarse powder (as in Chutney pudi).

The powders would get home by evening and the next day would be a sort of celebration trying out the various powders. I made small quantities and used my mixer to grind the powder.

What do you need to make Saaru pudi (Rasam Powder)?
1 cup coriander seeds/dhania
2 cups broken red chilies - preferably a mixture of Byadigi & Guntur, see notes below.
1 cup picked curry leaves
1/4 cup black pepper/menasu
1/4 cup fenugreek seeds/menthya
1/4 cup cumin/jeerige
1 Tblsp mustard/saasive
1/2 Tsp ghee
2 Tsp oil
1/2 Tsp asafetida - I like to use the non powder form (SSP brand has good asafetida), if not available, use the powder
1/2 Tsp turmeric powder or a small piece of dried turmeric root if you can get it

How do you make Saaru pudi?

• Heat the skillet on medium heat until warm, add fenugreek seeds. Roast them by continuously stirring until they turn light pink. Keep them aside in a wide plate.
• Add cumin to the pan and fry until light brown. Take care not to smoke cumin. Keep aside.
• Add mustard and stir them to roast until they pop, keep aside.
• Add ghee to the pan followed by black pepper and roast them until fragrant and start to pop. Do not smoke the black pepper. Some black peppers do not pop, so watch while roasting and take them aside as soon as they become fragrant.
• Add oil to the pan, add the broken pieces of chilies (get your exhaust fan going and open a couple of windows to help air circulation) and roast by stirring continuously until chilies turn crisp. Take care not to blacken them. Keep aside.
• Add the curry leaves to the pan and roast until they are crisp. Keep aside.
• Add coriander seeds and roast them until they heat up and become warm completely, add turmeric powder and asafetida just before taking the seeds out of the pan and stir them to get coated.
• Let the roasted spices cool completely before grinding them to a very fine powder.
• Store in air tight containers. This will stay fresh for atleast 3-4 weeks when kept outside. If you are making large quantities, put it in the refrigerator for longer storage.

Once you have made saaru pudi, next logical step is to make the saaru or Rasam. So I combined both in this post. The saaru I have here is just one of the ways of preparing it and is delicious. You can skip tomatoes completely, use tamarind instead for a different variation. If you have had a taste of this heavenly broth and want to recreate it at home, remember a good saaru starts with a good pudi, add a pinch of jaggery (Mysore touch) and a spoon of milk (to get that beautiful hue, nammamma's wisdom), you are all set to go :-).

What do you need to make Tomato Saaru?
1/3 cup toor dal
2 medium tomatoes
3-4 curry leaves
2 Tsp saaru pudi
small piece of tamarind (adjust this based on the sourness of your tomatoes)
3/4 Tsp salt (adjust to taste)
1/8 Tsp turmeric
1/2 Tsp jaggery
2-3 twigs of cilantro
1 Tsp shredded coconut
1 Tblsp milk
Seasoning:
1/2 Tsp ghee
1/2 Tsp mustard
1/2 Tsp cumin
pinch of asafetida

How do you make Tomato Saaru?

• Wash, pick and cook toor dal along with the curry leaves and 1 whole tomato and another 1/2 of it in pressure cooker until soft.
• Chop the remaining 1/2 tomato into small pieces and keep it aside for later use.
• After the first whistle, I simmer the heat down completely and let it cook for 15 minutes. This works perfectly for me. Depending on your stove, lentils quality and the pressure cooker itself, you may need to adjust this time. Idea is to cook until soft.
• Let pressure subside, take out the cooked tomatoes onto a plate and whisk the dal to form a homogeneous puree.
• Once the tomatoes cool down, remove the skin, take it into a blender jar along with salt, saaru pudi, grated coconut, tamarind and grind it into a smooth paste.
• Bring the mashed lentils to a boil with turmeric, jaggery and the ground paste along with chopped tomatoes.
• Once it starts to form bubbles, add finely chopped cilantro (use the cleaned stalks along with the leaves), milk and let it boil on medium heat.
• Heat ghee in a small seasoning pan (preferably iron/cast iron), add mustard and cumin. Once the mustard pops, add hing and pour the seasoning into the saaru.
• Serve delicious saaru with steaming white rice and a drop of ghee or drink it up as an appetizer.

Notes:
Saaru Pudi wisdom:

• Really important to remember while making this powder is to get good quality ingredients especially asafetida and roast them with love and patience. Nammamma has a technique of combining different ingredients while roasting as she knows the combinations that need the same roasting time but I go for an easier technique (to remember that is) and roast each of them separately until done. Follow the order I have above to keep dry & oil roasting separate.
• Use a heavy gauge skillet or cast iron pan to roast the ingredients as it helps distribute heat evenly and adds flavor.
• Thumb rule for mixing red chilies - Guntur variety gives heat and Byadigi variety gives the color. Adjust according to your preference. Amma's recipe calls for 1 cup coriander seeds to 2 cups broken red chilies.  

Saaru wisdom:

• Add 2 drops of oil to the pressure cooker so lentils cook well.
• Saaru should boil but not spill over for best taste, adjust the heat.  
• This saaru is not too sour, if your tomatoes have sourness, skip the tamarind.
• Adding a little bit of tomato pieces to the saaru enhances its texture. Same with cilantro stalks. If you have had this saaru in any Karnataka wedding, you will see that they use cilantro along with stalks liberally, so go for it.

This is a really special recipe for me because all my guests & friends that have tasted this saaru always like it. If you try this at home, I would love to hear back from you whether you liked it or otherwise. Enjoy!!

Spicy peanut powder - call it a powder or an instant chutney

It is one of those really long, never ending week days when you haven't had a proper lunch either and have spent a good amount of after work time in chauffeuring the kid from one activity to the other. By the time you reach home, the entire family has reached the peak of crankiness and you find the refrigerator is devoid any re-heatable items. Didn't you & dear spouse have a discussion on the umpteen left overs only the previous week and decided not to cook too much at one go and fill the refrigerator? I am sure many of you will empathize with what I am talking about.

Is there a go-to dinner item you guys prefer when you are tired, it is a week day and your stomach is growling by the time you reach home? We love godhi dosa on these ocassions, it is easy to whip up, nutritious and always turns out delicious. But like I said in my godhi dosa post, we have this combo thing going and have to have peanut chutney whenever godhi dosa is made. If I put a bowl of peanut chutney on the table, an extra dosa goes inside for DD :-). Being a mom, I can't pass on that opportunity to over feed my kid.  But since it is one of those "I am late, tired and hungry" days, roasting peanuts, letting them cool, grinding them into a chutney all seem extremely tedious. That is when this powder comes to the rescue. I can turn the powder into a mouthwatering chutney in 2 minutes, in fact BH gets it ready while I mix the godhi dosa batter and start making dosas, we have done this so many times, it is almost like clock work now. The cranky family that entered the house a few minutes ago return to their usual happy and civilized state as soon the hot, lacy dosas dipped in tangy, spicy peanut chutney hits the stomach and things are all cozy once again :-). I love these life saving, instant mixes.

I am quite a nut when it comes to nuts in my cooking. Nuts are my go to snacks when craving hits (and I can actually stay away from the ever appealing jar of deep fried Indian snacks :-)). Nuts though are not great protein sources, are very high up there as energy boosters and hence come in handy when the clock strikes 4pm. An Indian vegetarian diet is inherently loaded with legumes and nuts. Take any North Indian gravy for example, they will invariably have some cashew nuts or almonds to bring in creamy richness. South Indian kitchens stock up on powders made with many a nut or lentils. So needless to say I grew up with a number of pudi or powders in our very South Indian household. But surprisingly was never introduced to peanut powder until after my wedding.

Then again, peanut powder is not an Andhra original either, amma apparently learnt it from a Maharastrian neighbor when they lived in Nigeria :-), I am convinced that good food travels the World and stands the test of time. I have blogged about peanut chutney here. Today it is the turn of peanut podi or powder and how you can make an instant chutney with this powder. Now this powder is one of my pantry staples since it is so versatile and I use it in multiple different ways. I will talk about its other uses on other posts.

What do you need to make peanut powder? 

Makes 2 cups peanut powder

2 cups raw peanuts

6-8 dry red chilies(adjust to taste)

1 Tsp cumin seeds

1 Tsp salt (adjust to taste)

How do you make peanut powder? 

• Take a heavy bottom, wide pan and heat it on medium heat. 
• Add the raw peanuts to the pan and stirring occasionally  roast the peanuts until they start to pop and develop some black spots on the skin. 
• Peanuts will become crisp and lose their raw smell. take them off the stove and keep aside to cool. The roasting process takes about 10-12 minutes on medium heat. 
• In the same pan, add the dry red chilies and fry for a minute (open the windows and/or switch on the exhaust to allow air to circulate), add cumin and roast for 30-45 seconds, switch off and take them onto a plate. 
• At this stage, you can either choose to de-skin the roasted peanuts or grind them as they are. I make it both ways depending on the 'mood of the day'. 

• If you plan to remove the skin of the peanuts, once cool, put them in a ziplock bag, close it and give a couple of hard rubs on the outside so the skin peels. Put them on a flat plate and gently blow through them to separate the nuts and the husk. Preferably do it in the backyard where you can sweep off the husk easily:-). 

• Making the powder - Take the ingredients to the mixer along with salt and make a powder, remember this is not a fine powder, you need to run your mixer on pulse a couple of times and then run it full speed once mixing the ingredients in between. If you run the motor for long, peanuts become an oily mass and your only choice is to make a chutney of the whole thing and consume it quickly. The powder can be stored up to 2 weeks at room temperature or longer inside the refrigerator. You can mix this powder with rice and use it with idli/dosa as an accompaniment.

• Making instant chutney from the powder - Take 4 Tblsp of the peanut powder, add 2-3 Tblsp of whisked yogurt to get the right consistency of your choice. Make a seasoning with a pinch of asafoetida, 1/2 Tsp mustard, 1/4 Tsp cumin seeds, couple of curry leaves and 1 or 2 pieces of broken dry red chili. Pour the sizzling seasoning on top, mix it well and enjoy with dosa, idli and such. 

Notes: 

• It is important to roast the peanuts well, under done peanuts leave a really bad after taste while over done or burnt peanuts are no good either. 
• Peanuts can be roasted in the microwave but you will need to watch the times closely depending on your microwave power. 
• You can use a combination of red chilies to get the desired color and heat (thumb rule - Byadagi chilies are milder but give a radiant color, Guntur chilies are spicier but lack the color).
• If you are pressed for time, you can make a quick fix powder using the store bought, dry roasted, salted peanuts. I personally like to roast raw peanuts at home. 
• Many times, I do not remove the skin of the roasted peanuts but grind them as they are. This is much more convenient since I just add red chilies and cumin seeds to the same pan a minute or two before switching off the stove. 
• Like anything else with nuts, things tend to go rancid after a long storage, while 2 weeks is a decent period, I don't recommend storing the powder for too long since it will also lose the flavor.

I am sending this to Priya's Cooking with seeds - Peanuts event.

Chutni pudi - Instant side dish for any meal

Hope everyone had a great time this past week, we did. It was a very hectic but extremely enjoyable trip to the family wedding. Met all the family on my FIL's side, lot of the family on my MIL's side, my daughter got to meet lot of cousins and she upped her number of brothers (first & second cousins) by 3 and was in cloud nine :-). We felt happy to have made the trip. We didn't even have time to feel the jet lag and it is back to school, work and of course blogging today..

Since I was getting ready to be away for a week, I had not bought any new groceries for the past 2 weeks and had emptied my refrigerator of all the vegetables so I could start afresh. While coming back home to a clean fridge is a great idea, I had to grocery shop and start cooking almost immediately as we reached home. Made some pongal and rasam over the weekend and got my idli dough ready for the week. Since I didn't have the time to cut and cook vegetables, made a small quantity of fresh chantni pudi to go with the idlis as we all like to eat idlis with chutni pudi mixed in oil :-).

Chutni pudi is a very popular and versatile ready to eat powder that can be had with rice, idli, dosa, chapatis and even bread toast. It keeps well and stays fresh for a couple of weeks if preserved in an air tight container. Normally different house holds have different proportions of the dals and other ingredients and other variations, I have tailored my chutni pudi recipe to suit our tastes at home but I get lot of requests all the time from family & friends for some chutni pudi. This is how I make it.

What do you need to make Chutni pudi? 
1 cup chana dal/kadle bele
1/2 cup urad dal/uddina bele
1/2 cup grated dry coconut
6-8 red chilies (adjust to suit your spice tolerance)
1 cup of curry leaves (loosely filled cup)
1 small piece of tamarind
1 Tsp salt
1 Tsp sugar (optional)

For Vaggarane/tadka/seasoning:
1 Tsp cooking oil
1 Tsp mustard seeds
a generous pinch of asafoetida
2-3 curry leaves - chopped fine

How do you make Chutni pudi? 

• On medium heat dry roast chana dal, frequently stirring until the chana dal turns uniformly golden brown and gives out a nice roasted aroma, keep aside.
• Pour the urad dal and roast to get a similar color and aroma, keep aside.
• Roast dry coconut for a minute and keep aside.
• Roast red chilies for a minute or until you see small black spots forming on the skin, keep aside.
• Roast curry leaves with a drop of oil and tamarind until the leaves turn crisp and keep aside. 

• Let the ingredients cool down completely.
• Take all the above into your mixer/blender along with salt and sugar and grind to a homogenized rough powder. Ensure you do not make a smooth powder. 
• Heat oil in a small pan, add asafoetida and mustard, wait for mustard to crackle, switch off, add the chopped curry leaves and pour it over the ground chutni pudi. 

• Let cool, mix well and store in a jar. 
• We had fresh chutni pudi with idlis for dinner today. 

Variations: 

• Adjust the amount of curry leaves depending on your taste.
• Use byadagi chilies for a red colored chutni pudi and milder flavor, we are familiar with this color as it doesn't scare away little kids from trying a delicious side.
• Add a Tsp of brown sugar or jaggery instead of sugar or totally skip this.
• Seasoning the chutni pudi is optional, you can skip this step. 

Tips: 

• Roast all ingredients in medium low heat so that the dals get roasted completely and evenly.
• Curry leaves need to be roasted until they turn brittle to touch, pick tender leaves for maximum taste.