Huli Soppu

Here comes one more recipe that has been in my inbox for god-knows-how-long!! We Kannadigas pride ourselves with simple, unpretentious every day food. Most often than not, our every day foods fits every dietary bill out there, or it can be tweaked a bit -be it vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, low fat, low carb, primal etc. Life was that, simple and healthful. Well I do not imply that people lived longer back in the days, on the contrary, it is common knowledge that human beings are now living longer than ever before. But then we are also suffering from a host of life style related diseases. Western medicine only offers treatment symptomatically and every now and then some for-profit research comes up with a miracle food but people keep getting sicker and sicker. Addressing the primary problem is still a long shot. The primary problem of course is self-control. That is the reason why most Eastern medical treatments often combines dietary restrictions. It is  so much easier to pop that pill rather than abstain from eating all the tempting goodies. It is indeed hard. Just one look at Mithais and all my self control crumbles in an nano second, health be dammed.

But then eating traditional every day food cannot go wrong. What ever FDA might say, I bet on our traditional food, just that I need to eat very slowly and give my stomach to send signals to my brain when it is full. As a person who hardly works her jaws and rely on stomach acids to do the job, it is a very hard proposition. Who every thought that chewing and eating slowly could be such a hard task?
Accordingly to Ayurveda each morsel of rice/chapati needs to be chewed till we can feel the natural sweetness of the grain. Believe me I have tried and it does feel sweet about chewing for about 25-30 times! In this era of desk lunches, grab and goes and drive thru how can we manage to work our jaws 25-30 times per morsel? We did rather work our jaws the other way -yapping. Now enough of Yapping and getting back to the recipe Huli-soppu.  Huli in Kannada means sour also Huli means tamarind as well. So this is a sort of tamarindy, sour mix of greens and toor dal.

We will need,

Mixed greens  2 lbs washed and chopped.
Toor Dal 1/4 cup
Green Chillies accordingly to taste
Tamarind size of a small lemon
Tomato 1 chopped
Onion 1 small chopped
Garlic cloves 4-5
Jeera 1/4 tsp
Turmeric 1/4 tsp
Hing a couple of dashes
Red chilly powder 1/4 tsp (adjust as per taste)

For Oggarane:
Ghee 1 tbsp
Mustard seeds 1/4 tsp
Curry Leaves a handful
Hing a dash
Salt to taste

Method:

• Wash the dal in several changes of water and place it in a pressure cooker. Add about 1.25 cups of water. Place the chopped greens and then place the remaining ingredients except the ones for Oggarane. Cook till the dal is soft. It gets done in 3-4 whistles in my pressure cooker. Remove from heat and allow it to cool.
• Prepare the tempering. Heat the ghee in a small wok. Throw in the mustard seeds, hing  and curry leaves. Remove from heat once they stop spluttering.
• Once the pressure cooker is cool enough to handle, pour the ghee on the dal and stir well. Add ghee and Mash it using a potato masher or even a hand blender. Bring it to a gently simmer and remove from heat.

P.S: By mixed greens I mean assorted greens. Typically in south Karnataka, we can ask the vendors to give us mixed green and they will throw a bunch of spinach, bunch of Chikke, bunch of Chakota etc.  Else choose a combination of green that you like. Here in the USA, we get bags of mixed baby greens and they work very well.