Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Moongori

Moongori/ Moongavri is not my favorite but has many crazy fans the type who like slurpy sweets and old world charms like my Dad. It is pleasant childhood memories for people of his generation who grew up in the village and came to mumbai for holidays and later Mumbai became their life.
This is a wedding sweet and is made on the day after the wedding when the newly married are brought to the brides home for a ritual called "Drushta kadhne" that is to save them from evil eye. People believed those who attended the wedding would be gushhing about the newly weds and how lucky they were so there needed to be a ritual to protect them from getting bad luck. This sweet is part of the lunch following the "Drushta kadhne" and it is usually smeared over everyones face more than it gets eaten. So we always hide if we happen to attended this ritual but most of the time end up in the washroom cleaning up ourselves. This sweet is also offered as Naivedya on many ocassions.



Ingredients
1/ cup rice flour
1/2 cup water
2 table spoon ghee
1/cup jaggery
1 fresh coconut

Preparation:

Stage 1
Boil the water and mix rice flour and make Ukad like we did for the rice roti. Knead the dough and make marble sized balls smaller the better and keep aside.


Stage 2
Grate the coconut and grind with a little water in the mixie. Squeeze out the milk and keep aside. Use the coconut cake again and grind with more water and squeeze out more milk. Keep the second milk in a separate pan. Try to extract coconut milk the third time. The third milk can be kept in the same pan containing second extract.




Stage 3
Heat a big pot on medium. Add the ghee and pour the second and third extract milk in it. Reduce heat and simmer the coconut milk along with jaggery. After the jaggery is dissolved add the marbles you made in stage 1 to the boiling liquid. Boil for 5 mins. Then add the first extract and boil for another 10 mins. Take care not to keep heat on high as coconut milk might split as we have used jaggery. The sweet should be boiled down to a slurpy thickness of choice.

Remove from heat and serve warm. Mongoori or Moongavri is ready to eat. BTW my Mom's maternal uncle had a surname Moongavri and everyone teased Mom about it when she was a kid :)

5 comments:

  1. Thats a very interesting dish. But I seriously feel you should post some pictures to give the 'feel' of the dish.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the encouragement. I will try to take pictures during Diwali hols atleast a few.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi,

    This is really good receipe...I think both elders and kid will sure enjoy this sweet...

    Your way of explaining the step-by-step process was good,but if u start posting pictures,then it would be too fine yaar..

    Than sugar,jaggery is good for health....Jaggery is good source of Iron, which can be taken by all,especially kids and pregnacy ladies to prevent from Anaemia..

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks Usha. I have taken some pictures lets see when I can post them here.

    ReplyDelete
  5. My grandmother makes this "Payasa". What she does is soak and grind rice to a very fine texture. Adds 5 times the quantity of batter and cooks the batter to dough consistency. She makes sev of the dough and cooks payasa the same way as your recipe suggests. Tastes yummy.

    ReplyDelete

Thank You for taking the time to leave your thoughts here.

On Trail