Recipes from my mother's recipe book - 1 - Eri Sheri

I found this in my mother's handwritten recipe book - and this followed a couple of pasta recipes, and I somehow always thought it was a continental dish - till I discovered recently that it was very Indian and a very famous dish of Kerala.

Ingredients -

Yellow Pumpkin - 2 cups of small cubes

Curd ( yoghurt) -  1/2 cup - well beaten

Grind to fine paste -

Mustard seeds - 2 tsp

Coconut - 1/2

Red Chillie powder - 2 tsp ( or to taste)

For seasoning -

Oil - 1 tsp

Black gram dal ( urad dal) - 1/2 tsp

Curry leaves - few

Add sufficient water and salt to the yellow pumpkin and cook till half done.

Add the ground paste and cook further till just tender ( this should not take too much time)

Add the beaten curd.  ( after this the dish is not placed back on the stove)

Season.

Eat with hot rice.  It tastes good with rotis too ( which I am sure is not the usual combination).  I am told ash gourd ( white pumpkin) is also a good vegetable to make this with.  Simple to make and good to eat.

Palmyra Fruit Dessert - Munjal or Nungu

The original container for the fruit -the above two pictures from The Hindu

  

It was maybe a coincidence that hubby got home the fruit just after Mothers Day.  Palmyra fruit or Munjal as it is known in these areas. It brought back memories of the dessert that my mother would make ever so often in summer.

The ones here ( below) were bought off a highway, freshly plucked from the palmyra tree.  

The outer peel has to be removed and the succulent white fleshy mass is exposed- juicy when tender and a treat to eat.  It can be eaten plain, but I decided however to make it the way my mother did.                                    

The pulpy fruit is placed in a bowl.  Sometimes she would cut it into small even pieces ( when they were not too tender) and a dollop of cream was placed on the fruit and lightly sprinkled with powdered sugar.  This was chilled in dessert bowls and would be at just the right temperature to devour when we came back from school.  This was of course before cholesterol made news.  I went a little easy on the cream and sprinkled some diet sugar.  Maybe not the same, but did bring back memories of the dish the way amma made it.