Pickling jalapenos!

I bet most of your tongues would be salivating thinking of tongue-tickling taste of nachos after looking at this topic.

The easiest method of pickling them which I do normally is by the below mentioned procedure
Ingredients:
1 cup fresh lemon juice
2 cups distilled white vinegar(5%)
2 tsp salt
20 Green jalapenos

Procedure:
Mix the lemon juice and distilled white vinegar and add salt to it
Dissolve salt in the mixture by stirring it. The marinade is ready!
Cut the jalapenos into smaller rings of 3-4mm thick each
Soak jalapenos in this marinade until you use!
Keep the marinade as long as you have the reminder of jalapenos.
Store in refrigerator.

This can be used for nachos, sandwiches to give it a tangy and hot flavour. This can also be used for making roti veggie rolls etc., etc.,

Adai aaga maariya paruppu usili!

This is a small story. This happened when I was 'deep' into the first year of my marriage! My mother-in-law was not there with us at that time. She is the one who cooks for when we comfortably leave to our repective offices. We call her 'Annapoorni' as she never used to crib and makes everything ready and hot-hot before we leave for the office.


I was trying my hand in the kitchen department during her absence. I wanted to make beans paruppu usili and soaked kadalai paruppu(Chana dal) and Thuvaram paruppu (thoor dal) for 20 mins. I ground both with ginger, red chillies, karuvepilai(curry leaves), after soaking and in a hurry mixed a little excess water by mistake. Instead of being a thick crumble it was like a paste! One moment I thought of it to be a sheer waste of material and felt very bad. Then an idea struck like a lightning! I had some arisi maavu (rice flour) at home. I mixed some rice floor along with water and salt to the paruppu (dhal) paste to make it like a batter of adai and left it till we returned back from the office( I made beans kari instead for us!). I made adai in that batter and everyone liked it!

Vella appam with a twist!

I had been to lunch on the day of 'avaniyavattam' to our friends R and S's place. Maami oda kai varisai idhu! She and S jointly displayed a long list of delicious looking dishes, semiya payasam, vendaikkai more kozhambu, vaazhaikkai kari, rasam, lemon rice ( which also has another twist to it!), vadai, vella appam etc., etc.,

The subject of interest here is vella appam which smelled and tasted delicious. S mentioned that maami has added strawberries to the vella appam maavu and has deep fried it. Usually vella appam does not generate excitement in me as it tastes a bit bitter when the proportion of vellam is not correct. But this appam tasted great and smelled wonderful! A nice change to the traditional dish! Novice cooks who are aspiring to make vella appams can find my recipes in the later posts.