I would like to thank Smruti for sharing this ingredient. Yes, this week’s BM theme is the ingredient exchange, and yesterday I posted kulukki sarbath with basil seeds, and today it is the milagu orai. This recipe was on my to-do list for quite some time. I would call this recipe as a distant cousin of Ven Pongal. Unlike Pongal, we don’t use moong dal for this recipe. It is very similar to podi sadam/spice mix rice. We need to prepare fresh ground spice mix with urad dal, channa dal and of course pepper. Then mix it with cooked rice and temper it with mustards seeds. It is as simple as that. I followed the recipe from this Traditional Iyengar cooking website. As you can notice, the original recipe doesn’t call for cumin seeds and also curry leaves. But I included both to mimic the Pongal taste. I did not use any ghee and went with gingelly oil as mentioned in the recipe which makes it perfect for vegans too. Here comes my second recipe, Ingredients:
Little millet – 1 cup Water – 1.5 cups Pepper – 1.5 tsp Channa Dal – ½ tsp Urad dal – ¼ tsp Red chilly – 1 Curry leaves – 1 strand Hing – ¼ tsp Mustard seeds – 1 tsp Gingelly oil – 2 tsps Salt – 1.25 tsp
Steps:
Wash the little millet and cook them in your preferred way. I used my rice cooker to cook the millet. I used 1.5 cups of water for 1 cup of little millet. Once cooked, let it cool.
Heat about one tsp of gingelly oil in a kadai, and once the oil is hot, dry roast pepper, channa dal, urad dal, red chilly until the urad dal turns golden brown.
Let this mixture cool and grind into a coarse powder. Add this fresh ground powder and salt to the cooked millet. Before mixing, do the tempering. Heat a small pan or kadai and add the remaining one tsp of gingelly oil. Once the oil is hot, add the mustard seeds, hing and curry leaves. As the mustard seeds start to splutter, add it to the millet.
Now mix the millet, spice mix, and the tempering together.
That’s it. Milagu Orai is ready. Serve hot with chutney or gothsu.
Notes:
You can replace millet with quinoa or rice. And also you can use your preferred millet. Red chilli is optional. We personally felt the spice from pepper was more than sufficient. But adjust the salt and spice as per your preference. If required ghee can be included. Tempering can be done after mixing the millet and spice mix too.
Sending this to the BM 72. Check out the Blogging Marathon page for the other Blogging Marathoners doing this BM
📖 Recipe
