Akkara Adisal: The Ambrosia Of The Gods
Monday, 12 March 2007

Akkara Adisal is the quintessentially Iyengar dish that has an unsurpassable taste. Be it any festival or a birthday in the family, finishing a sumptuous meal with this for dessert will be the perfect high note. Add a pinch of pachai karpooram to it just before serving and you'd realise that this is the ambrosia of the gods.

Raw rice - 1 cup, washed
Jaggery - 2 cups
Water - 6 cups
Milk - 2 cups
Ghee - 4 tbsp
Cashew - 10, broken into pieces
Raisins - 10
Cardomon - 2-3 pods
*Pachai karpooram - a pinch

Take a cup of rice (I use ponni raw rice), wash it a couple of times and strain the water off it. Heat two tablespoons of ghee in a heavy-bottomed kadai and add the rice to the ghee. Saute it for a few minutes, making sure the rice doesn't burn.

Transfer the rice to a small vessel, add a cup of milk and pressure cook it. I usually wait for two whistles before I switch it off. Meanwhile, take two cups of jaggery, mix three cups of water to it and boil the mixture in the kadai.

After about 5 - 10 minutes, take the mixture off the flame, cool it off a little and strain it. This gets rid of the stones, pieces of sugarcane husk and other assorted impurities that find their way into jaggery. Once done, pour the mixture back in the kadai and boil again, till the mixture thickens a bit. Now add the cooked rice and let it all boil together till the rice gets cooked completely. Add three cups of well boiled milk (sunda kaachina milk) to the mixture and let it all simmer together for a few minutes.

Roast the broken cashew pieces and raisins in the ghee and add those to the payasam along with powdered cardomom and pachai karpooram.

Your akkara adisal is now ready.



Warning: addictive!

*Addition of this to the akkara adisal (or any other payasam) is optional. But this ingredient has a heavenly smell that always reminds me of my gran and her kitchen. Guaranteed to take your dessert up by a few notches and earn the label of 'heavenly'.

+Note: One can make it to be of a slightly thicker consistency - the result would be akin to chakkarai pongal then.

Posted by DesiGirl 11:35 2 comments    

Labels: akkara adisal, ambrosia, dessert, food, iyengar, kheer, payasam

Grub's up!
Saturday, 10 March 2007

The first time I entered the kitchen was when I was in VII standard (someone call Child Services!), when I used to cook the odd pot of rice when my mum was a bit late in coming home from work. This earned her the name of tyrant and child labourer. Though I made a fuss then, just to keep up appearances, I was slowly getting entranced by the world of cooking. My mum is a fab cook and the 'wah! wah!!'s she earned everytime we gave dinner parties made me want to learn to be an equally good, if not better cook. Thus, I started collecting recipes.

My maternal gran is the de-facto cook in her house and at 70, she still churns out amazing amount of grub for all and sundry. Come festival time and you can see her seated next to this huge kadai, making murukku, seedai and other assorted yummies. My mum being an Iyengar, I soon learnt to cook the iyengar cuisine well and that forms the basis of my cooking, to this day.

When I got married to a Telugu bloke, I decided to widen my repertoire by adding some Andhra recipes to it. Though these are a handful, I still make them now and again just to prove that I can make a mean baghara baingan. Nowadays though, I depend on great blogs like Mahanandi to show me the way.

When my palate widened to accommodate Italian, Mexican, Chinese and Mediterranean cuisines, I decided to learn to collect recipes from all over the world and cook them myself. Being a staunch vegetarian, I figured if I didn't want to ingest any stray animal product and still wanted my fix of fajitas and enchilada, I better learn to make them myself.

There are some fantastic food bloggers out there and I hope, with me foraying into this 'genre', I can now become a member of that sisterhood too! Feel free to contact me with your comments, suggestions and/or corrections.

Posted by DesiGirl 15:54 0 comments    

Labels: blog, chinese, cuisine, desi, food, indian, italian, mediterranean, mexican