We are all aware of the advantages of millets. Not just eating it but the benefits of growing it as well. I believe it makes more sense to eat our local grains than say adding quinoa to our diet. The texture is so similar and these are more suited to our Indian lifestyle and cellular health.
Millets have long since been on my mind,to be included in our family diet.While we did eat the occassional thayir kambu , sola saadham and ragi dosai , it wasn’t an important part of our daily meals as much I wanted it to be. For some reason , I did not apply myself to trying to cook it in a manner outside of our traditional recipes.
Very recently ,thanks to a visit from my friend Kavita, my larder is now filled with millets of various kinds. I started slowly by replacing my brown rice with millets for lunch. Having always loved textures ,preferring this over white rice was a give in. But ,the question remained as how to get my ‘white rice loving’ spouse to add it to his diet. As I got used to the quantity of water to use while cooking ,it dawned that the textures can vary from sticky to light and airy just by varying the liquid infusion. When the liquid was just right ,when cooked, this little millet or saamai as it’s known in tamil ,very closely resembled the mediterranean cous cous….which the husband loves. Eureka !!! ( Also happy ,coz I don’t have to make two different things at every millet meal !) That’s just how this recipe came about. It was a cool evening , was looking forward to having my siblings over for dinner . We lot tend to loose track of time over bouts of laughter and some great conversation…and we’re all foodies ,so of course the food has to be delicious. Not fancy but definitely delicious !
The menu comprised of the favoured nurnburger bratwurst , roasted bell peppers , cold potato salad… swaped the pasta in favour of the millet. Waited to see how that would go. Made an onion less version for the younger sibling,who looked at it suspiciously 😀 … I called it thinai at first (just learning my millets here ) and was promptly asked if I was serving him bird feed …hahaha… indulged them by serving a molten dark chocolate mini cake with vanilla icecream for dessert 😉 !
Agreed they did eat it ,not as much as the potato salad but enough to make me happy. My husband on the other hand took several helpings ,he’s the one that loves his carbs the most…looking at him ,no one would believe me ! Sigh…some folks just have a great metabolism. My kids loved it ,as did I ,so the recipe is yours to try. There was no real plan in choosing the ingredients , I just went with what I had at home. The concentrated sweet tang of the sundried tomatoes ,go so well with the wholesomeness of the country corn. With the invasion of sweet corn ,most folks seem to have forgotten the actual taste of natural corn. You could just as easily substitute the swiss chard for pak choy or palak and add in some roasted chicken or paneer. The saamai soaks up flavours very well and it’s a great main dish for a meal at home.
Very useful and healthy recipe. Kudos. But how do we replace sun dried tomatoes with fresh ones?
Thank you.You can if you like add the tomatoes before sautéing the greens. Let it sweat a bit until it takes on flavour. There are endless posibilities with most of Pink lemon tree recipes , please feel free to experiment 🙂