Kobbari Pappu / Coconut Dal for "Delicious Dals from India"

Recipe Source: Late Smt. Nandyala Gnyanamba (M's maternal grandmother)

When it comes to cooking part, our kitchen is a melting pot, a global kadai. :) We cook and enjoy vegetarian meals from around the globe. However, I happen to blog mainly about South Indian style, home cooked meals. Why? There is a reason.
As many of my readers might have already noticed, I am a Southie settled in pardes with her husband & two kids (AND as my husband pointed out recently I seem to do nothing else other than cook and blog.) :) When we moved here, Google was not born yet and blogs were not popular. I was a pampered beti / bahu who knew only basics of cooking and not much. I had to cook and in leisure time, I would search the web for some traditional Andhra recipes. There were some Indian cooking websites that would cater the needs of novice cooks like me but there was a problem. For every subzi/curry recipe I look into, there would be addition of coriander/cumin powder and garam masala that in no way would count as authentic Andhra cuisine.
Most of us grow up eating and loving home cooked meals, which are obviously hard to find away from our homes. We get accustomed to the flavors/tastes of food, loving prepared by our mothers / other elders so much that we use it as a standard to compare others' cooking. That's what happened in my case and the recipes I would find on the web would never be up to my standard and I had to keep calling back my mother / mother-in-law for recipes. In the process, I learnt that some recipes are forgotten over the period of time in families.

Then it struck me why not have my own cooking website where I can maintain recipe log to record my and other family members' recipes. I kept asking M for years to help me in this regard since he has the technical expertise. He kept on procrastinating for about a decade until I happened to notice food blogs 3 years ago. Then my blogging journey started and now here I am.

Usually Indian mothers don't maintain their own food catalogs and when I noticed that M's aunt did that for her daughter, I was surprised and had to go through it. She has painstakingly handwritten all the recipes she knows - North & South Indian style, neatly arranged them in categories ranging from chutneys/raitas to laborious desserts. After going through that, I felt it would be a neat gift to newly weds and told her that. While one of my SIL's copied the whole catalog for her daughter, I copied some traditional recipes.
Luckily, I could get some old recipes belonging to / used by M's maternal grandmother and this kobbari pappu is one of them. I had never heard or seen anyone preparing it, including my MIL and it is somehow a forgotten recipe in our family. When I found some recipes which M frquently mentions and never saw his mother making them, that catalog appeared as a 'lost and found' treasure.

First of all, it do not require any vegetable, which is a staple ingredient in any pappu recipe. Go ahead and prepare it when you run out of vegetables or has to use up that extra coconut you have. Taste wise, it is not your ordinary pappu. Though the ingredients used are slightly different from the regular pappu, this one is on a different note. It takes the flavors of the coconut and coriander and somewhat goes in the majjiga pulusu (stew prepared with sour butter milk) track, flavor wise.

Ingredients to serve 3- 4:

• ½ cup toordal
• ¼ cup coconut
• 3 small green chillies
• 1 tsp coriander seeds
• 1.5 tsp salt
• 4 tbsp tamarind puree
• 1/8 tsp turmeric powder
• For tadka: 2 tsp oil,1 tsp mustard seeds, a pinch of asafoetida powder, curry leaves, 2 red chilies broken into small bits

The cooking part:
Cook the dal with turmeric powder in a pressure cooker adding a cup of water. After the valve pressure is gone, remove the dal container out. Mash the dal lightly with the back of a ladle.
Alternatively, dal can be cooked in a pan on stovetop, adding water as needed. The dal should turn mushy. Take care that it is not runny and is thicker as in the picture. If it is runny, cook a little longer.
Grind the coconut, green chilies and coriander seeds into a paste adding a little water if needed.
Add this paste, salt, tamarind juice to the dal and cook on slow flame for about 10 minutes so that the raw smell of the paste disappears and the flavors mingle.
Mean while, heat oil in a small sauté pan and add the mustard seeds. When they start to splutter, add the red chili pieces, curry leaves and asafetida and turn off the stove after about 10 seconds. Add this tadka to the cooked coconut dal and mix well.
Serve with hot rice and ghee.

Variation: Coconut chili paste can be cooked along with toordal.

This goes to my "Delicious Dals from India".