7: 00 am, Saturday morning, Thiruvonam Day 2021 🏵; no hurry to rush to the kitchen and start with the cooking 😊….I had it under control or at least I believed so…

The To Do list for the cooking spree on Saturday morning ran like this 👇

• Extract the thick and thin coconut milk for the payasam
• Make the jaggery syrup for the payasam
• Soak the broken wheat for the payasam in water for 2 hours, so that it takes less time to cook
• Make the Kootu Curry
• Make the Avial
• Cook the Rice
• Make the Prawns Ularthu
• Clean the banana leaves
• Make the Payasam and last step…
• Fry the Pappadams 🤗

In between we called my parents in Kerala; my brother and family were home for Onam and my nephews were working on the Pookkalam while my sil and mom were making the payasam.

A curry with roasted coconut is another favourite with or without Onam. There are two choices – an Erissery or a Kootu curry. On normal days, I make Erissery and so on Onam, I decided to try out the Kootu curry with – Yam, Raw Banana and Brown Kadala (Chickpeas); the last part is adding the roasted coconut.

The Prawns Ularthu had coconut bits in it, here’s the recipe 👉 Prawn favourites: Adds magic to meals 🍤

Avial is quintessential Kerala and no Onam is complete without it 👇. And for this dish, more the coconut, merrier it is…😘

11;30 am by now, the rice was boiling and only two items were remaining – the Payasam and the Pappadam. I was slightly flustered that my guests would be arriving anytime now and I was still not finished with the cooking. So I started off with the payasam buy melting ghee and adding the pre-soaked and drained broken wheat in.

As I began to stir for 5 minutes, I realised that I was supposed to pressure cook the broken wheat first in water and then fry in it ghee. I could feel a lump in my throat; I had messed up the payasam, the main sweet dish for Onam. I had made this before and I completely forgot 👉 Love is Brown 🍂

The reason the broken wheat is pressure cooked prior is because, it takes a long time to cook and become tender. I had messed up the payasam.

By now it was 12:30 pm, my guests were running late, thanks to the Bangalore traffic. I fried the Pappadams, the rice was done and I continued with the payasam, adding the melted jaggery syrup.

Half an hour later added the thin coconut milk and the broken wheat was cooking away for over an hour now; it had become tender and softer; maybe my payasam will not be a flop after all and one more hour and the broken wheat would be perfectly cooked. I added the thick coconut milk. It was close to 1:30 pm. the guests arrived. By 2:00 pm the broken wheat payasam was perfectly cooked. Hurray !! I added the raisins and cashew fried in ghee, the cardamom powder and the dry ginger powder. It was delicious. The pressure cooker would have saved nearly an hour of the cooking time, but slow cooking worked well too 😘

And finally we had lunch, the Onam Sadya 2021 😀

It was definitely a cooking adventure to remember and did I mention, the gas cylinder got over half way while the payasam was cooking; we had a full cylinder in stock, so no problems there, just the hassle of changing cylinders.

I enjoyed the adventure and celebrating together is always nice. And another advantage of limiting the number of dishes is that the leftovers will be less; no cooking on Sunday !!

Till next post, take care !!