10 ways of eating whole seeds

Puttu ( Indian Couscous) Cheatsheet

10 Puttu ( Indian Couscous)

Model Recipes :

Pavithra’s Rice Puttu

Lakshmi Wheat flour puttu

Rava Puttu

Yummy o Yummy’s Bread Puttu

Kamala’s Ragi Puttu

Pearl millet puttu

Maize puttu

Drinks Cheatsheet

Model Recipes :

Seena's Tender coconut drink #261

Soy peanut butter shake #178

Filipino Buko Juice #207

Non Alchoholic pina colada 003

Juicing vegetables #300

Lassi Cheatsheet #467

Milkshakes Cheatsheet #313

Juicing Fruit #600

Mocktails Cheatsheet

Ice cream shake #700

Indian Seafood Pickle Cheatsheet

Model Recipes

Sayantani's Bengali Prawn pickle uses mango as a souring agent and mustard paste as a preservative. Her use of water, green chillies and coconut would no doubt make the pickle tasty, but would dramatically shorten the shelf life of the pickle. If you cut out coconut, replace green chilies with chili powder and water with vinegar, the shelf life would greatly improve.

Ramana Dukkipati's prawn pickle uses lemon juice as a preservative. Though warming lemon juice ( he has the innovative technique of adding lemon juice to hot pickle to warm it !) increases the shelf life, the water content in lemon juice does not permit the pickles to be stored for long. Replace lemon juice with vinegar or citric acid crystals dissolved in vinegar for a longer shelf life. Instead of rinsing and simmering prawns in water, using vinegar would dramatically improve shelf life.

Nisha's Tuna Pickle demonstrates there is just a thin line between a curry and a pickle.


Yummy Team's fish pickle reduces water content of the fresh fish first by blotting it with a tissue and then by deep frying it. However, Fish, green chilies, garlic and ginger do retain some of their water content, even after cooking. This water would shorten the shelf life, but the generous addition of vinegar balances it out.

If I am to judge pickles by how long they last, the easy winner is Addie's dry fish pickle. This would keep the longest as he only avoids using water in the recipe, but uses dry fish to ensure the recipe has virtually zero water. This pickle will easily last years in a refrigerator, getting better with age ! Remember, water is poison to pickles.

Think of any pickle as a really sour, really spicy curry, cooked with very little water ! In fact you can easily turn any curry into a pickle by adding a generous dose of souring agent & pickling spices.

South Indian Sattu Mavu (Cereal based Energy Drink)

Model Recipes :

Seec’s Sattumavu with a cornucopia of cereals, lentils and flavourings shows how you can have all these powders as a sweet drink ( with milk and sugar) or as a savoury gruel ( with salt and buttermilk).

Ramya’s sattumavu uses the unusual medicinal rhizome, Vasambu (love flag).

Indian Pickles Cheatsheet

Model recipes :

Indra’s red chili pickle, would last longer if vinegar is used to wash chilies instead of water, and the lemon juice is warmed before being added.

Divya’s Tomatillo pickle is a fine example of sticking true to the spirit of a recipe. Though her tomatillo pickle uses a ‘foreign’ ingredient, it will be no doubt accepted as an authentic Indian pickle.

Sireesha’s Andhra mango pickle. mixes the spices with the oil first and this paste is mixed in with the mangoes. The oil film would delay absorption of salt & spices by mango. A faster way would be to mix in salt with the mango pieces and wait for a couple of days so that the juices are drawn out and then mix in the spices, wait for a couple of days till they get absorbed and lastly to mix in the oil. Again, washing mango in vinegar instead of water would help getting a longer shelf life.

Instant Cereal Soup Powder Cheatsheet

Model Recipes :
Kamala's Kanji Podi with step by step pictures - but Oregano is not Omam ! It is the leaves of Oregano which are used and not its seeds.

Viji's gritty Kanji podi using healthy hand pounded rice demonstrates the large overlap soups and porridges have.

Indian Prawn Pickles

Powder anything - South Indian Style !

Model Recipes:
The simplest podi of them all – blend processed lentils with salt and chilies to a delicious powder ! Eat it mixed with rice or use it as a garnish for dry curries !

Swathi’s Kerala Style Coconut podi

Yummy team’s Dried prawn podi proving that the podis can accommodate any dried edibles. Their use of shallots would however shorten the life of the podi.