Millets-O-Millets

                

             

             Finally reached here….my tiny world. I love scribbling here but then I rarely spend time here. days. Priorities keep changing.  Just thought of  writing about my recent addiction which is none other than millets.  Got so addicted and I am using them in my kitchen almost three days a week.  Kitchen is another tiny world of mine and I love spending time there except on hot sunny days.  I prefer cooking  early in the morning during summer so that  I don’t sweat.  Cooking!  Wonderful way of showing love and care. That moment when u serve food and u see the satisfied expression from the person who eats…wow! U forget the quantity of sweat u gave in for the recipe.  It is also a fact that you can never expect to satisfy people all days but those days count so much in improving your cooking. I have gone wrong some hundred times literally in making a mutton biryani before I could cook it to the expectations of the people at home.   

         Without meandering further, getting straight into the topic, I read about these millets somewhere in anandha vikatan , that millets were supposed to be Tamil people’s traditional food and they had listed so many advantages of these millets. What usually happens after reading such things, is that we will talk about  it with people at home and we also decide to use them the next day, but often end up cooking with the usual stuffs.  One fine day, I came across these millets in the racks of the super market. I dont know why, they always keep millets at the bottom most row of the rack in that super market. I wanted  to bend and take it but u see we  wont bend too much for a thing we actually don’t need. That’s how I was missing these millets for long time. One day while surfing the cookery blogs, I came to know that millets can be used for making idly and dosa. The very next month, millets got included in my grocery list! I am an idly, dosa freak. No week can be spent without idly and dosa. Days were terrible when we in UK, where I could not get the idly /dosa batter, with right quality of fermentation.  Back to millets, while making idly/dosa batter, I started using them in little quantity , replacing rice with millets in the ratio 1:3 and  later I made it as  1:1.  Yeah, it was really incredible that, selva and nila could not make any difference between the usual idlies and the millet based ones.  

                One gentle advice of mine would be, if you want to start making idly/doa with millets, start with varagu (kodo millet) or samai (little millets) because they are white in colour and so they wont change the colour of your idly. I have also tried idly/dosa with thinai (fox tail millet )and kuthiraivali (barn yard millet). There are so many recipes available using millets on the web but I was very much contented with idly/dosa.  I tried making dosa batter with only millets and urad dhal leaving out rice completely but the dosa was not so soft . May be the absence of glutten (which is actually good for health!),make the millets based food so hard. So, I felt adding a little rice will help softening the batter. I have also tried  plain biryani with thinai millets and yes it tasted good but I did not like the pongal made with that.  Opinion differs.

              Only thing is that milltes are quiet costly compared to rice. Half kg of any millets is 55 Rs. But I feel, when we can buy Basmati or seeraga samba rice for that price, millets are worth buying. And yes, when compared to Pizzas and burger, millets are definitely cheaper. I think for those who dislike being on diet eating only chapatis  for dinner, they  can blissfully prefer millets .

               

            http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=53. This is one of the links which states the advantages of the millets. The idly photo shown  in the beginning of this post is the idly cooked by me. I had asked selva to take a photo of the idlies but I never thought he would only focus the idlies leaving the side dishes!!!.

              

              Thanks for reading.