Sorakkai Halwa - Bottle Gourd Halwa - Farm to Plate

During the summer months when the plants are most productive, the need to create new dishes is always in the back of the mind. The bottle gourd plants left us with plenty of bottle gourds to spare. While the usual curry route was exhausted, had to figure out another way of putting them to use. Making desserts with vegetables seems to be a guilt free way of enjoying sweets without all those calories along with the satisfaction of putting vegetables to use in a productive way :)

When mom suggested that we make some halwa, the only time consuming part of this is grating the bottle gourd. If grating is not your thing, you can always use a vegetable chopper and chop them into tiny pieces. The texture of the halwa comes from the sugar you add. I added 1/2 cup of raw sugar for every cup of the grated bottle gourd. About 2 tbsp of ghee or however much or less you want.

Recipe in pictures,

Peel the skin on the bottle gourd, slit the gourd in half and remove the spongy white insides.
Grate the bottle gourd or use a vegetable chopper to chop the bottle gourd to tiny pieces. I did both.
In a wide mouthed pan, heat some ghee and saute the bottle gourd for about 4-5 minutes, add the milk and let it cook till the bottle gourd becomes soft.
Add in the ghee, cardamom powder and the sugar and let it cook till the moisture is completely gone and the halwa starts to glisten. Takes about 25-30 minutes.

This kind of vegetable based sweets don't have to be overly sweet, the right amount of sugar gives it the delicate flavor that everyone can enjoy without any guilt :) The added benefit the vegetable grew in the backyard.

Sorakkai Halwa
Preparation Time: 20 minutes
Cooking Time: 50 minutes
Ingredients

1. 1 medium sized bottle gourd - 4 cups of grated bottle gourd
2. 2 cups of sugar
3. 2 cups of milk
4. 1/4 cup of ghee or more if needed
5. 1/4 cup of roasted cashews (skip if you do not want nuts)
6. 1/2 tsp cardamom powder

Method

1. Peel the bottle gourd, cut the bottle gourd in half and remove the spongy insides. Now grate the bottle gourd or use a vegetable chopper to chop the bottle gourd in tiny pieces.
2. In a heavy bottomed wide mouthed pan, add about 1/2 tbsp of ghee and saute the grated bottle gourd for about 5 minutes or so.
3. While stirring add in the milk and let the mixture cook till the bottle gourd is completely cooked. This takes anywhere between 25-30 minutes.
4. In a saute pan add ghee and roast the cashews till golden.
5. Add a tsp of sugar to the cardamom and powder it in a coffee grinder or using mortar and pestle.
6. Once it thickens add in the sugar and the rest of the ghee or more if needed. Let it cook till the sugar melts and the halwa thickens.
7. Add the roasted cashews and turn off the heat. Stays outside for 3-5 days and for a month or more refrigerated.

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Growing Peanuts (Groundnuts)

We eat a lot of peanuts, roasted, boiled, blended into paste for curries, sprinkled on stir fries and salads for crunch and much more. My favorite way to eat peanuts by far is the boiled kind. Occasionally we get fresh peanuts at the local Indian grocery store but if you miss the short window when they are available you are out of luck. While the roasted peanuts are pretty affordable the fresh kind is pretty pricey.

Young Plants

So this summer I decided to grow them myself. Not much around 15-20 plants just to see how they grow and if the soil conditions we have around here are suitable for their growth. What do you know? They did pretty well.

Yellow Flowers

Boiled peanuts are not popular in the North East but they are popular in the South. Once we leave the DC suburbs that we live and start driving south, boiled peanut stands dot the sides of the roads during the summer. But taking a trip to the south just for boiled peanuts did not work out as often as we wished. So the next best thing grow them yourself.

Mature plants

While plenty of adults know that peanut is a leguminous plant, most of them have never seen a peanut plant with the cluster of peanuts on the roots and hidden in the ground. For the amount of peanuts we eat pretty much all of us should be familiar with where the peanuts comes from don't you think?

Freshly pulled from the soil

Growing them is not a specialized skill but you need loose soil so you are able to harvest the peanuts easily. Shell the seed peanuts and the seeds that are inside, the ones that we eat are the seeds that go in the ground. Plant them about 1-2 inch deep, cover with soil and water regularly.

Harvested peanuts

In a week or so they sprout. In good warm summer weather they thrive and though this summer has been extremely wet and extremely hot so they did well. I am not sure if our yield was good or not since we have never grown peanuts before.

Red Peanuts!

The peanuts I grew were called "Tennessee Red Valencia Peanut" as the name suggests, fully mature peanuts look red and are 3 or sometimes 4 to a pod. They are excellent with a sweet mild taste. They take about 110 days to mature. They produce small yellow flowers around 40-50 days which self pollinate and fall off just when the peanuts are beginning to form.

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