Pravin Vaghani (Photo by Unusha)

Garlic keeps me healthy

Garlic chtney ingredients, pestel and mortar

Indian Recipe – Garlic Chutney

Garlic chutney is the easiest chutney to make. I would even say ‘it’s a child’s play’, because I learned to make it, from my grand-mother, when I was about 5 to 6 years old.

There are only 3 basic ingredients – Garlic, red chili powder and salt. So you do not have to think much how to make it.(I later added ginger and lemon juice)

Well, it was easy to make, but there was a bit of a hard work involved. The garlic bulbs we used to get were very small and there were plenty small cloves, about 5 mm size, in each bulb. To pill those small cloves was tricky and time consuming and frustrating at times. After pilling a few the fingers get sticky and pilled skin does not leave the hand easily.

To speed up the work, we used to experiment various ideas, like dipping the cloves in hot water so the skin will come off easily, rubbing oil over the cloves or our hands so the pilled skin do not stick our hands.

We had a granite stone mortar and a large wooden pestle – shaped like a baseball bat. Knowledge is a dangerous thing ! After learning how to make, and for me pilling the garlic cloves and then pounding them in the mortar, at that age, was fun and play. However it became my routine responsibility to make garlic chutney whenever it was needed.

My grandmother was very fond of pakoras (we call Bhajia) and the garlic chutney is a very good accompaniment with any fried item. She would make pakoras of all kind of vegetables and large leaves. I remember once I had counted that she had made 17 different kinds of pakoras. Of course our most favorites were those of potato, eggplant, cauliflower and ajwai leaves.

Ingredients:

Garlic – 6 to 8 large cloves, pilled

Ginger – small piece

Red chili powder – 2 teaspoon

Lemon juice – ½ teaspoon

Salt – ½ teaspoon.

Making:

Using mortar and pestle pound the garlic and ginger together to a pulp.

Mix red chili powder, lemon juice and salt.

Uses:

Garlic chutney is a good accompaniment to fried savory like samosa, pakora, pudla, aloo-paratha, etc.

Mixed with butter, it can be used in a salad sandwich as a spread.(Our grand-daughter likes this).

Mix 1 part of chutney with 3 parts of plain or vanilla yogert and use as a dip.

If you are making aloo-paratha, in a similar way you can make garlic chutney paratha (our family favorite)

You may want to try the Indian, Gujarati style ‘Pudla’, similar to pancake, very popular items for barbeque;

http://hubpages.com/hub/Indian-Recipe-Mungbean-Pudla

http://hubpages.com/hub/Indian-Recipe-Pudla

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