Parippuvada

This was your great grandmother's favourite frittters, so is mine. When you were born, I was hoping you would like to eat it too and I remember making this one day when you were about 18 months old. You took the first bite and spit it out the next second. I was so disappointed. You refused to eat it till you were 5 years old. I remember that day very well. We were shopping at the pasar malam in Bangsar and I bought the vada from Lotus restaurent. You asked if you could have a bite and I gave you a small tiny bite, thinking that you are going to spit it out anyway. You finished all the vadas in the packet(4 vadas!!)and I knew my Ammachi would be smiling in Heaven!

Parippuvada is easy to make at home. But remember there are few rules to follow when you heat oil to deep fry.
1. Use either sunflower oil or corn oil, they have higher boiling point, and are ideal for deep frying
2. Oil gets heated up fast. Do not leave oil on fire and yack on the phone!
3. If the oil did get very hot, take the pan off the fire and let it cool
4. If the oil got very very hot and you can see flames, Don't add water to douse the flames, water makes the oil float and help to burn the whole house down. Don't panic, just use a lid and close the pan. The lid limits the air entry to the pan and as you know fire needs oxygen.
Take the pan off the fire and remember Mama told you never to leave oil on fire Unattended! and you Disobeyed. bad, bad girl!

Ingredients

All that you see in the photo
1 cup Channa dhal
1 inch ginger scrapped and chopped
2 shallots chopped fine
2 green chillies (remove seeds)
5 curry leaves cut in to tiny pieces.( not the sprig,,just the leaves).

Soak the Chana dhal in warm water for 3 hours.Drain and keep aside for 30 mints.
Pound the dhal along with onion, ginger, greenchillies and the curry leaves using the pounding stone. It doesn't have to be too fine. Look in the photo below, you can still see bits and pieces of the dhal. Add salt. Mix well.

Form in to patties and deep fry.
If you find it difficult to form the ground mixture to patties, then you didn't pound the dhal well! Pound the mix again!
Do not add water at any time during the process of pounding or mixing