Healthy Food Recipes - Vazhaipoo Usili (Banana flower)
Posted on: 31/Dec/2014 11:58:09 AM
Ingredients Required:
- Plantain/ Banana flower - 1 medium size
- Onion – 1 nos
- Tomato – 1 nos
- Besan Flour – 5 spoon
- Garlic – 5 nos
- Urad dal- 1 spoon
- Curry leaves – a few
- Cooking oil – 5 spoon
- Salt – as required
- Turmeric Powder – ¼ spoon
- Sambar Powder – 1 spoon
Method:
- Finely chop the fresh and cleaned Vazhaipoo. Add required salt and turmeric powder to it and pressure cook for 2 whistles. Add required quantity of water for boiling. (Generally 50 ml of water is more than enough). Drain the water and keep it aside.
- Finely chop both onion and tomato.
- In a mixing bowl, add Besan flour and water and make it as a fine paste.
- Heat the pan with 2 spoons of oil and add urad dal. Wait till it turn golden brown in colour. Now add the crushed garlic, curry leaves and chopped onion and sauté well.
- Once onion changes to golden brown colour, add tomato, sambar powder and stir well.
- Now add the already prepared Besan flour paste to it and add required salt and mix well. (As we had already added salt in Vazhaipoo at the time of pressure cook, add little salt that is required for onion, tomato and Besan flour).
- Stir well for a minimum of 2 to 3 minutes, so that it should not get sticky on the bottom of the vessel. By this time, the Besan flour will become fine coarse content.
- Now add the boiled and drained Vazhaipoo into it and blend well.
- Better stir for about 5 minutes and remove it in a separate bowl.
- Vazhaipoo Usili is ready to serve! Tasty and Healthy side dish for rice!
Note:
- Some Banana flower might be bitter in taste, hence taste a small piece while buying the banana flower from market.
- If you want the dish to be spicier, you can reduce the level of sambar powder and add one green chilli.
- Instead of Besan flour, you can very well add either grind soaked toor dal or Bengal gram (channa dal) along with one green chilli as a coarse powder and use it.
- In addition to Vazhaipoo Usili, you can prepare several other dishes like kootu, Poriyal and vadai using banana flower.
- It has the potent in controlling excessive pain and bleeding during menstrual cycle.
- Especially it is very good for pregnant ladies.
- Incorporate banana flower very often in your daily diet, as it can ease several uterus allied health ailments.
Steps To Clean Banana Flower:
- Dip your fingers well in oil before start cleaning the banana flower, as it is very sticky in nature.
- Remove the each leaves of the flower and collect the bunch of flowers out of it.
- Remove the kallan (plastic transparent petal, the black lengthy part) from each flower. This is because this kallan can not be boiled and it is not easily digested).
- Else, chop them finely and put it in vessel filled with water and little butter milk. The addition of buttermilk is to avoid the discoloration of the Vazhaipoo.
- While cleaning the flower, there will be a cone shaped tender part (termed as Kuruthu). You can directly cut this cone part into small pieces and use it. No need to remove the stem and plastic petal in this cone part.
- You can very well consume this small cone shaped tender part raw, as it constitutes several health benefits.
li>You can very well clean the flowers during the previous day night and store in an air tight bag and keep it in the fridge.
Recipe by : More Recipes»
Mrs. Lavanya Sampath
