I thought it would be better if I make it more interactive. So every now and then I am going to ask you to comment with suggestions and your ideas so that we both learn and widen our culinary skills. Here is my first question or rather doubt…
I got a beautiful papaya from my last weekend shopping spree. It looked yellow from outside and I hoped that it might be ripe and juicy like the ones we get in India. When I tasted it, it was somewhere in between ripe and unripe. It was very hard and nothing like soft ones that we get in India and had kind of bland taste. There is absolutely no question of eating it as it is. I can’t use it in curries because it is not completely unripe. I know few recipes like halwa , burfi , milkshake, jam, holige with it. But I want to know if any of you know any other recipes. If you know, please comment here.
Thanks in advance.
I am extremely happy for the response of my papaya dilemma . I was in no mood of making any sweet with papaya and by my good luck all the recipes given by you all are spicy dishes. I wanted to make all of them at once but thought I would take it a bit easy. I started with Pappayi ghashi/gassi .
For last one week, I hardly cooked anything. Due to extreme cold conditions here, I was feeling lazy and settled on either restaurant food or rice congee (rice cooked in lot of water called as ‘ pej ‘ in Konkani or ‘ ganji ‘ in Kannada) and pickle. Yeah, it is an amazing dish for cold weather, but we can’t have it for a long time. I saw the blank look on my husband’s face when I said I am going to cook Conjee today. So I dragged myself to cook this ‘ papayi ghashi ‘, which looked extremely simple.
I was hooked to this recipe given by amazing artist Sree . I love all her paintings and I have to say, now I love her recipes too. As she said in her comment , I also liked the sweetish tinge of papayas to this gravy. I loved the taste of cumin seeds in this dish. I felt it is a mixture of varn that we make at home and ghashi or udid methi with mangoes. Pappayi ghashi , rice and pickle was my afternoon lunch and I should say it was heavenly. Thanks a lot Sree (I hope I have followed it exactly as you mentioned).
The bowl in the picture was a gift from a lovely friend for Thanksgiving :).
Ingredients: 15-20 pieces of papaya (they should be sweetish, not very ripe. They should be bit hard but sweet) 3/4 cup grated coconut(fresh or frozen) 1 tea spn cumin seeds(jeera) + 1/2 tea spn for seasoning 1/2 cup onion (preferably shallots) 1/2 tea spn mustard seeds 1-2 green chilies 3-4 Kashmiri red chilies (I used Byadagi chilies) + 1 chili for seasoning 1-2 pieces of kokum 4-5 curry leaves A pinch of turmeric Oil Salt
Method: Cook papaya with kokum, salt, slitted green chilies and enough water. Grind coconut with cumin seeds(1 tea spn), a pinch of turmeric and red chilies to a paste. Add this paste to cooked papaya. Add water to bring it to desired consistency and cook for around 10mins. Heat oil in a seperate pan and add mustard seeds. When they start popping, add cumin seeds, curry leaves and 1 red chili cut into pieces. Now add choppes shallots and fry till they turn translucent. Add this to the gravy and mix. Serve hot with rice and pickle.
Serves : 3-4 Preparation time : 15-20mins
