salna | Traditionally Modern Food

Vegetable Salna

I like vegetable salna with parotta, but almost all of the restaurants I visit offer vegetable kurma and raita as side dish for parotta. Recently when we went to have dinner in a restaurant, I saw parotta and vegetable Salna in the menu card. I was excited that I finally found it, and ordered without a second thought. One thing I noticed is the predominant coconut flavour in the Salna. It was also pretty oily. I altered mixed vegetable kurma recipe from mom’s cookbook to make vegetable salna.

Vegetable Salna:

Preparation Time: 15 mins | Cooking Time : 25 mins | Serves: 2

Recipe Category: Side dish

Ingredients:

Cut Vegetables (I used carrot,beans, potato,cauliflower) – 1 cup

Onion –1 finely chopped

Tomato – 1 roughly chopped

Cinnamon Stick – around 2 inch

Fennel seeds powder- 1/2 tsp

Mint leaves – handful (Around 10)

Coriander leaves – handful

Coconut Oil – 2 tsp

Salt – to taste

To grind:

Onion – 1, diced

Tomato – 2

Ginger – 1/4 tsp, peeled and chopped

Garlic – 4 cloves

Cashewnuts – 3

Fried Gram (Pottukadalai) – 1/2 tsp

Fennel seeds – 1/2 tsp

Poppy seeds – 1/4 tsp

Red chilli – 2

Peppercorns – 1/8 tsp

Coriander powder – 1 tsp

Cumin powder – 1/2 tsp

Cinnamon powder – 1 tsp

Garam masala – 1/2 tsp

Cardamom – 2 pods

Cloves – 2 nos

Oil – 1 tsp

Method:

Add oil to the pan and in a medium flame, saute the ingredients listed under ‘to grind’ (including the masala powders, except coconut and fried gram). Once tomato shrinks, add coconut and saute for 2 mins. Switch off and cool down. Once it comes to room temperature, transfer the roasted ingredients to a mixer, add little water and grind to coarse paste. Set aside

Add coconut oil to the pressure cooker. Saute onion, tomato, curry leaves, cinnamon and fennel seed powder. Saute the ingredients till the tomatoes become mushy. Add the vegetables and saute for a min. Add the masala paste and salt and mix well