Spiced Pancakes

The original recipe of this is called ‘Prawn Fritters with Avacado Salsa’ and is from the Women’s Weekly ‘Short-Order Cook’ book. I left out the 450g cooked unshelled prawns/200g shelled prawns in the recipe and found the pancakes still tasted good. So here’s the vegetarian version. The Salsa is not in the photo as I got two over-ripe avocados which turned into mush.

What you’ll need - Pancakes:
* 2 tablespoons oil
* 1 medium brown onion, chopped coarsely
* 1 clove garlic, crushed
* 2 teaspoons hot paprika (used chilli powder)
* ½ teaspoon ground cumin
* ¼ teaspoon ground white pepper (or black)
* ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper (left out as I was chilli powder)
* 2 eggs
* 1 ½ cups milk
* 1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives (optional, meaning didn’t use it)

What you’ll need - Avacado Salsa :* 2 medium avocados, 500g, cubed
* 2 medium tomatoes, 380g, cubed (or halved, if using cherry tomatoes)
* 1 spring onion, sliced thinly
* 2 tablespoons lime juice or less and to taste

What to do - Pancakes:
Heat half the oil, stir-fry onion, garlic and spices until onion softened.
Combine eggs and milk. Stir into flour until smooth. Stir in chives if using.
Heat the remaining oil (I used a non-stick pan), and cook a quarter-cup (roughly a soup ladle) of the batter until browned on both sides until all the batter has been used.

What to do - Salsa:
Combine all ingredients and serve with pancakes.

Roti

I should say this is a recipe for Sri Lankan roti with coconut, not the same as Indian roti. Sri Lankan roti is traditionally eaten for breakfast, but now that we have cereal out of a box at work, roti in our household at least has become a dinner treat. The quantity below is enough for about 4 large; 8 medium sized or about 20+ party-sized rotis.

What you’ll need:

* 1 cup flour

* 1 ½ cups dessicated coconut

* ½-1 tablespoon butter or margerine

* Enough water for a pliable dough

* Salt to taste (optional)

What to do:

Mix flour, dessicated coconut and butter with enough water to make a pliable dough that does not stick to the bowl or your fingers. Once the dry ingredients come together in a dough ball, break off into smaller quantities and roll out into circular rotis. Pan-fry in a non-stick pan until brown dots appear on both sides. I don’t bother oiling the pan, but you can do that if you like. My mother also adds an egg. So you can try that option as well.

Semolina ‘Risotto’

I’d never heard or tasted Uppama before I came to Australia and a Sri Lankan Tamil friend made it for dinner. It’s a semolina dish spiced with curry leaves, mixed vegetables and cashews, but I could never figure out how to make it without turning the semolina into a porridge-like paste.

Thank goodness for Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian cookbook, which has several Uppama recipes of the non-gluggy variety. The secret is to ‘fry’ the coarse semolina granules in oil – don’t bother dry roasting without the oil, this won’t work to keep the dish from being paste-free. So if you like uppama as much as we do, have a go at ‘Semolina Risotto (Uppama) with Cabbage and Peas’.

What you’ll need:

* ¼ cup oil

* Generous pinch of ground asafetida (forgot to add this. In the past, have substituted 1 crushed garlic clove)

* 1 teaspoon whole brown mustard seeds

* 1-2 whole dried red chillies (which I broke into bits)

* 2 teaspoons yellow split peas (or more, because it gives a nice nutty flavour)

* 15-20 curry leaves (it says optional, but I think it’s essential)

* 3 tablespoons shallots or red onion, finely chopped (I sliced one small red onion)

* 1 teaspoon finely grated ginger

* 1-2 teaspoon finely chopped fresh green chilli (or green pepper)

* 1 well-packed cup of shredded green cabbage

* 3 tablespoons of frozen peas (I didn’t defrost them)

* 1 cup (coarse) semolina aka Cream of Wheat

* ¾ teaspoon salt

* 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh coriander leaves aka cilantro (left that out).

What to do:

Boil some water and have about 1 ¾ cups ready for the semolina.

Heat oil in a wok or large frying pan, then add asafetida or garlic. Then immediately after that, add mustard seeds.

When the mustard seeds begin to pop add yellow split peas and red chillies. Stir until split peas turn reddish. By this time the chillies usually turn black. So if you’d like to retain some colour, add red chillies along with the cabbage (a bit later on).

After split peas have changed colour, add curry leaves, then the onion. Fry until the onion begins to brown at the edges, before adding ginger and green chillies. Stir for a few minutes, then add cabbage. (Madhur advises adding peas at this stage along with some water. I don’t add water. And I leave the peas until last).

Stir-fry cabbage, then add the semolina and stir-fry until the granules are golden. Lower heat, stir in salt. Add boiling water a little at a time, stirring until water has been absorbed before adding more. Repeat until all 1 ¾ cups of water have been used. Keep stirring until the semolina has fluffed up. Break up lumps with the back of the spoon.

Then take off fire and add frozen peas. Cover and leave for peas to ‘defrost’. Chopped coriander leaves can be added at this stage too, if using. Then serve.  

Savoury Pittu

 

Steamed Pittu

One rainy summer morning, my sister’s husband Chandra, decided to make ‘pittu’ – traditionally a breakfast dish made of rice flour and grated coconut steamed in the shape of a roll. Only Chandra followed a home recipe from his village in Matara – a signature dish for temple feasts, adapted for Melbourne with supermarket ingredients. And instead of breakfast, we had it for lunch, as well as dinner. (Yes, it was that good!).

What he used:

* 1¼ kg plain white flour

* Half a medium onion

* 1 sprig curry leaves

* 2 green chillies finely chopped (or a few teaspoons of dried red chilli)

* ½ tsp curry powder (raw curry powder for Sri Lankan readers)

 * A small piece – 1 inch – of rampe (aka pandan leaf), shredded

* Salt to taste

* 125g desiccated coconut – rehydrated with a few tablespoons of water

* 100ml water

What he did:

'Crumb-like' flour mixture

He mixed all the ingredients together with approximately "100ml of water" or just enough to make the flour mixture resemble coarse breadcrumbs. Now comes the complicated bit:  the flour mixture was lightly pressed into a pittu bambu – traditionally, the ‘raw’ pittu was stuffed into a short piece of bamboo and then steamed, but the last time my mother came from Sri Lanka she brought an aluminium water pot and pittu pipe for us to use.

Water pot and metal pittu pipe

If you don’t have either of these things, you can use a plain aluminium steamer over a saucepan of boiling water.  Dump the flour into steamer pot, making a few ‘holes’ or spaces in the flour to let the steam through. Steam the flour mixture for 15-20 minutes.

Then unmould (if you've used a mould) and cut into serving-sized pieces. Usually this is eaten with plain coconut milk as a gravy and spicy sambols. Chandra made a potato curry to go with this.