Cabbage-Beans Parrupu Usili / Cabbage-beans-lentil crumbs stir fry

This is an absolutely yummy Iyer Aathu dish [Tam-Bram home]. A must in all their wedding lunch sessions.This preparation is a slightly tedious process, but worth it. :). Mom used to cook this quite often at home as it used to be one of my favorites.But she had her own name for this, and until some time back I always referred to this as "Vegetable Cola". Lol ;). This is traditionally made with beans, I added some grated cabbage too.

Cabbage-Beans Parrupu Usili

Ingredients

Serves - 4
Spice Level - Moderately Spicy

Grated Cabbage 1/3 cup
Beans - Finely chopped , 1/2 cup , steamed/boiled
Curry leaves - 2 Sprig
Mustard - 1 Tspn
Jeera - 1 Tsp
Hing - 1/4 Tsp
Oil - 3 Tbsp

1.Toor dal - 1 cup
2.Jeera - 1 Tbspn
3.Dry Red chilli - 5
4.Fennel - 1/2 Tsp
5.Turmeric - 1/2 Tsp

Ginger-Garlic paste - 1 Tspn


Method

Soak ingredients 1-4 for about 30-45 minutes in 1.5 cups of water. Drain the water and grind along with ginger-garlic paste and turmeric to an almost fine paste with maybe 1-2 Tbsp water.Divide the paste into 4-5 equal portions and steam them in an idli cooker for 5 minutes. I have a microwave idli steamer set and i use that to steam these. If you have one of them, use it and microwave on high for 8 minutes.Once they firm up like idlis, transfer them to a plate and cut each into quarters and let it cool. Maybe 5-10 minutes. Once cooled, pulse them up in your food processor until they crumble completely into extremely tiny particles resembling bread crumbs. This will take a few seconds in your mixie jar, maximum 3 short pulses.Make sure the steamed dal, has no water content, else when you use the food processor to crumble them it will become a paste again.Now the dal crumbs are ready.

Heat oil in  a kadai. Add hing,mustard, jeera and curry leaves. Let it roast. Add in the dal crumbs , salt and stir well. Let it be on flame for 7-10 minutes, keep stirring now and then. Now add in the boiled beans and grated cabbage, mix well. Let this get cooked for another five minutes. You can add more salt if needed at this time. Stir again. Switch off flame.

This goes very well with steamed white rice and kara-kuzhambu. :)


Notes

1. Many recipes suggest crumbling the steamed dal by hand as much as possible and then put it directly in the kadai to further crumble in heat.This method doesn't work out very well, and getting the dal to crumble over heat is difficult and takes a lot of time. So crumble it completely using a food processor.

2. To steam the ground dal, use a microwave idli steamer if you have one, works out much easier and faster and the steamed dal turn out dry the way we want it. So it requires max 5 minutes to cool down before you crumble them using your mixer-grinder.



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