nimi’s beetroot pachadi
This is one of the recipes we cooked on the Keralan cookery course with Nimi Sunilkumar. She recommends serving this dish with rice – I like some nutritious dal alongside. The recipe is finished with what the Keralans call a vaghara (known elsewhere in the subcontinent as a tarka, tadka, baghar or vagar) – a tempering of spices and aromatics sizzled in oil that is prepared separately and tipped over the dish of cooked food at the end.
There are a few ingredients here that may require a visit an Indian grocer. Nimi used flesh scraped from a freshly cracked coconut, but for ease I recommend using ready prepared, frozen coconut flesh (often available in larger supermarkets). Fresh curry leaves are essential to the final flavour, and can be found in some supermarkets (but avoid the dried ones, they’re flavourless). For Nimi’s ‘curd’ – creamy, homemade Indian yoghurt, often made with the milk of water buffalo – I have substituted full-fat Greek yoghurt.
SERVES 4 AS PART OF A LARGER MEAL
2 medium-sized beetroots, peeled and finely grated
5 green chillies, deseeded and chopped
½ teaspoon salt
250g frozen coconut flesh, defrosted and broken into small chunks
2 cloves garlic
½ teaspoon black mustard seeds
250ml full-fat Greek yoghurt
FOR THE VAGHARA3 teaspoons coconut oil
½ teaspoon black mustard seeds
¼ teaspoon fenugreek seeds
2 dry red chillies (Kashmiri if you can find them), broken into chunky pieces
Handful of curry leaves
Put the grated beetroot, green chillies and salt into a pan with 125ml water and cook over a low heat for 10–15 minutes, until tender.
Meanwhile, put the chunks of coconut flesh into a blender or food processor along with the garlic and mustard seeds. Grind to a coarse paste. When the beetroot is cooked, stir in the coconut paste. Cook gently over a low heat while you prepare the vaghara.
Melt the coconut oil in small frying pan set over a medium heat. Add the mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds, dried chillies and curry leaves and fry until they begin to splutter and the mustard seeds pop, about 1 minute. Tip the contents of the frying pan over the beetroot mixture and serve.
