Cucumber with Moong Dal, Keerakaya Pesara Pappu

Cucumber with Moong Dal,  Keerakaya Pesara Pappu ~ Indian Dal

Dear Friends,

Cucumbers generally we eat as salads and make raitha. If I see cucumber, I remember summer in India, when we go out we see lot of sellers selling pieces of cucumber adding salt and chili powder.

This cucumber is good coolant, we all know that. This dal with cucumber and moong dal is very easy and simple to make. Many will feel that flavour of cucumber is raw and wont taste good. But here we give tampering with ghee and finally add lemon juice which gives a different aroma and I hope every one will like this.

This is my first dish which I made when I was young and started cooking. J

Ingredients:

Moong dal                                 – 100 Grams

Water                                       – 500ml nearly

Cucumber                                 – 200 grams (One small cucumber)

Red Chili Powder                        – 1 Spoon (Based on your taste)

Salt                                           – To taste

Turmeric Powder                       – 1 Spoon

Chopped Corriander leaves        – 1 Table spoon

Lemon Juice                              – 3 Table spoons (Optional)

Tampering Ingredients:

Ghee                               – 2 Table spoons (You can use oil+ghee also)

Mustard seeds                 – 1/2 tspoon

Cumin or Jeera Seeds      – 1/2 tspoon

Curry leaves                    – 10 leaves (Nearly)

Dry Red Chili                    – 1 or 2

Asafetida                         – Pinch (Nearly 1/8^th t-spoon)

Procedure:

1. Take any deeper vessel, put the moong dal and wash it. Then add water of two portions to the washed dal (if moong dal is one cup then more than 2 cups of water you can add). Add turmeric powder to this. Boil it in a medium flame. Stir it often as moong dal while boiling will form like foam and it will over flow out of the vessel. Also avoid closing the vessel with lid as the liquid over flows.

2. Wash Cucumber and peel it off. Cut the cucumber into small cubes. Remove the seeds if they are not tender. Other wise you can use the seeds also. Add this cucumber pieces and Salt to dal while it was half boiled. If you see you can notice the dal will be split to half. If you feel water is less you can add little water. Remember some liquid will come out of cucumber also.

3. Once the dal was totally cooked and cucumber pieces become soft, add red chili powder. Take off the vessel from flame.

4. Now you can do tampering in a small pan. Take small pan, put ghee into it  and heat it until ghee melts and heated. Now add mustard seeds, once they popped up. Turn off the flame and add cumin seeds, red chili, curry leaves and hing.

5. Add this tampering to the cucumber moon dal. After 5 mins add lemon juice squeezed out of half portion of lemon/lime. If you don’t like lemon flavor you can avoid this. With ghee and hing you already have good flavor.

6. Add chopped coriander leaves to the dal finally.

Here you can feel why we can’t use pressure cooker to cook the dal!

Simple, Moong dal will always tastes good when it is cooked with out pressure cooker. If we use pressure cooker the dal is over boiled some times.

Some types of moong dal will not be cooked easily with out pressure cooker, in that case if there is no choice you can use.

If you don’t like lemon juice you can add either tamarind juice or amchur powder. If you don’t want sourness then add nothing.

You can also tomato and add green chilies instead of chili powder.


The same procedure you can follow using ridge gourd or spinach leaves or Black Nightshade/ sunberry leaves (Manathakkali keerai in tamil and Kachakku in telugu) instead of cucumber.

Hope you will make and enjoy eating this recipe.

Your suggestions and comments are most welcome.

Thank you.