Pachai Milagai Tokku - Green Chilly Pickle

PACHAI MILAGAI TOKKU
GREEN CHILLY PICKLE
Urugais and Tokkus (Pickles) are an integral part of a South Indian kitchen. Most of the pickles are prepared in large scale during the season with the seasonal ingredients and stored for the whole year. Pachai milagai or green chilly is a widely used every day ingredient in almost all homes and a tokku using the same can be prepared whenever desired.

We recently got to taste this delicious tokku at a dinner party at our cousin's home at Sydney. My daughter fell head over heels in love with this spicy tokku and we not only brought back some tokku, but also jotted down the recipe from our cousin's mother who had prepared the same.

My daughter has prepared this tokku giving it a few of her own touches and we are happily relishing it with ever meal.


INGREDIENTS
Green chillies - 250 gms (We have used a long green chilli variety that we found in Sydney. It is not as hot as the typical Indian chillies, but nevertheless packs in quite a punch !)
Corriander leaves - 2 or 3 stalks
Tamarind - one small ball the size of a lime
Salt - 2 tbsps
Til (Sesame) oil - 1/2 cup
Mustard seeds - 1/2 tsp
Turmeric powder - 1 pinch
Asafoetida - 1 pinch
Powdered jaggery - 1 level tsp
METHOD
1. Clean the coriander and green chillies.
2. Soak tamarind till soft in little water.
3. Grind green chillies, coriander leaves, tamarind, salt and jaggery into a smooth paste.
4. Heat oil in a kadai and add mustard seeds.
5. When mustard splutters, add asafoetida and turmeric powder. (Reduce the flame if required, so that the turmeric does not burn.)
6. Now add the ground chilly paste and stir.
7. Keep stirring until all the moisture evaporates, and the oil separates out of the tokku. It took us about 25 minutes for all the moisture to evaporate and the oil to come out.
8. Cool and store in a clean dry jar.

If well prepared and stored without any traces of moisture, this tokku can last for a long time like any other pickle. Remember to use a dry spoon.

The tokku prepared with only green chillies can turn out to be very hot. You can add as much corriander leaves as you want to subdue the sting of the chilly.
Relish the pachai milagai tokku with plain steamed rice, curd rice, idlis, dosas, chapatis etc. It also makes a tasty bread spread. Mix a little with curd or sour cream for a very tasty dip. We even spooned in some into pastas, soups and other western dishes.

Milagu Kuzhambu with Baby Brinjals ~ SpotLightBlog Recipe

Thanks for the support to the SpotLightBlog series. The second recipe from Shoba's virtual kitchen is milagukuzhambu with baby brinjals in it. Unlike in ennai kathrikkai kuzhambu, here the brinjals are not deep fried, they are just cooked in the tangy, spicy gravy.  I too make milagukuzhambu. But Shoba's recipe was different and addition of brinjals interested me. With hot rice and roasted pappad, its pure bliss.

Ingredients

Black Pepper – 1 tspn

Bengal Gram/kadala paruppu – 1 tspn
Red Chilli – 3 nos
Coriander seeds – 3/4 tspn
Grated Coconut – 3 tspn
Hing - few shakes

Tamarind – lemon sized
Brinjals - 5 small ones
Tuermeric - 1/4 tspn
Curry Leaves, Salt.

Method

Roast pepper in a teaspoon of ghee. Remove the roasted pepper and  add a tablespoon of oil. Roast chana dal, coriander seeds, red chilli. When you are about to remove, add the coconut and roast for few seconds. Cool and grind all the roasted ingredients along with pepper to a smooth paste by adding little water.

Soak the tamarind pulp in warm water for 10 minutes.  Wash and wipe the brinjals clean. Slit each brinjal into four keep the stalk intact. Extract the tamarind pulp in a cooking vessel. Stir in ground masala, salt, turmeric, hing and curry leaves and boil the mix. When it starts boiling, add the whole brinjals with the stalk, one by one to the boiling liquid. Continue cooking on low flame and allow the kuzhambu to simmer and let it reduce to one third. The brinjals would have been cooked well and absorbed the flavors.

Q & A On Recessed Lighting in Eichlers

This is a strictly West Coast Q & A.
Eichlers are contemporary California homes built by Joseph Eichler back in the 50's, 60's and 70's.































































I have helped design kitchens and baths in many Eichlers over the years, and there are some unique issues about their construction that present interesting challenges.

1. They are built on slab floors with radiant heat built into the slab in the form of piping which carries hot water from a boiler.

2. The design is open plan, with beams and posts to support the structural load (which is the roof).

3. As Tiana mentions in her question below; the roofs are tongue in groove wood, with no room for insulation. The roof is made waterproof with tar and gravel on top of the T&G planking.

4. The electrical actually runs on top of the roof in conduit. Lighting is mostly ceiling mounted ball glass pendants.

Q.
Dear Peggy,

Just saw your blog while noodling around trying to find recessed lighting using very shallow cans. We have an Eichler home in Lucas Valley (outskirts of San Rafael) and were wondering whether we could possibly put in recessed lighting in conjunction with a new foam roof.

This is usually not an option because the roofs are just tongue and grove ceiling boards over the exposed beams, then tar paper, old tar and gravel roof, then foam. But we have 2 inches of rigid board foam in between the tar paper and the tar and gravel on top.

Soooo, when we pour another 1.5 inches of foam for a new roof, we should have approximately 3 inches to work with being then flush with the surface about to receive the new roof.

Is there any recessed lighting which could be used in such a way? -- and ok to use with a sealed in application like that (conduit wired over the roof and permanently
sealed in?)

I was hoping with all these new low heat LED lights, someone would come up with one-- perhaps one more commonly used in cabinets. LEDs are quite bright so the lights could possibly be smaller than normal and still give plenty of light at counter level.

Any ideas? If you have a solution, there are lots of Eichler owners all over the Bay Area who would love your input!

thanks,

Tiana

A.
You would likely make a good kitchen designer Tiana. Our profession is consumed with getting the most out of every inch we are given. ;-D

Getting back to your question: In fact LED recessed fixtures are just a big as the old incandescent fixtures above the ceiling line.

It's true that the lights themselves are tiny, even when ganged together to form a downlight. But they generate a great deal of heat, in spite of your misconception. So a lot of room is taken up by the attached heat sink.

Thus:



























This is a Cree LR6. 3/4ths of the light is the heat sink. See the little fins on the sides? They help dissipate the heat. This fits inside a typical recessed fixture that takes up even more height. Then there is the wiring on top of that.

The only ways that I can think of that you could mount recessed lights in your Eichler ceilings would be two:

1. Apply sheetrock to the bottom of your ceilings beams. That would provide enough clearance to recess the fixtures.

2. Build insulated boxes, big enough to provide the prescribed air space around the fixtures, on your roof at the point of each fixture.

I'm afraid either solution would compromise your Eichler home to the point of making it not an Eichler any more.

The only other solution I can offer is to refer you to my favorite lighting designer, Randy Whitehead. I assure you, if there is a solution I have not presented that solves your problem, Randy knows it.

Please let us know if Randy has an answer for all those other Eichler owners out there because I'm sure that this post will draw them like flies.

Good luck Tiana,

Peggy