Saagu is a traditional dish of Karnataka in which the spices are blended with coconut and cooked with varieties of vegetables. It’s a side dish for poori, chapati or even some hotels in south India serve set dose, rave dose along with sagu.

We have a preference of poori-sagu combo during winters on a cold & wet day for 2 reasons i.e. I don’t get prickly and provoked by the time I finish frying the pooris and we can do a good batting and justice to our stomach too ;).

Chopping veggies are a bit time consuming, as the range has to be cut into small pieces. After this part everything gets ready in a zoom. If your kid gets hang of this masala, I think you can add sagu as 1 of the top dish in your list as it’s a good mixture of vegetables in 1 go.

Here goes my style of making Sagu

Ingredients:

Carrot finely chopped – 1Cup

Cauliflower cut into small florets – 1 Cup

Beans finely chopped – 1 Cup

Potato finely chopped – ½ Cup

Green Peas – ½ Cup

Masala to grind:

Cumin seeds/Jeera – 1tsp

Green chilly – 2 or 3

Ginger – 1inch

Poppy seed /Gasgase/ khus khus – 1tsp (sleep-bringing

poppy ;)…..na don’t worry its just 1sp)

Cinnamon – 1inch piece

Roasted chanadal / Putani/– ¼ Cup

Freshly grated coconut – ½ Cup

Onion – ½ (optional, its just that I am ‘irulli priye’;)

Coriander leaves – ½ bunch

Few leaves of curry leaves

For tempering/tadka

Oil –2 tbsp

Mustard seeds – ½ tsp

Turmeric powder – ¼ tsp

Asafetida – ¼ tsp

Method

Grind all the masala ingredients into a fine paste by adding little water and keep aside (this looks like a chutney consistency).
Heat oil in a pan or kadai. Add mustard seeds and allow it to splutter. Then add turmeric and asafetida.
Next add the vegetables that take more time to cook like carrot and cauliflower mix well and cook for sometime. Then add beans, potato and mix well.
After that, add salt, mix well, cover and cook.
Lastly add green peas (this hardly takes a min or 2 to cook so u can add just before adding the masalas). Add the masala paste to this vegetable mixture, mix together and cook. Add water do your desire consistency and bring it to boil. Stir intermittently and make sure that it doesn’t catch the bottom.

Saagu is ready to be served.

Variations: There’s no hard and fast rule with the vegetables to be used here. You can use vegetable of your choice. Sometimes I do use sweet corn kernels to make sweet & spicy style sagu! My mom uses green leafy vegetables also in sagu but am not sure which 1 in particular will ask her and update here soon.

Serving Suggestions: Poori + Sagu is an ideal combination aging from centuries. It can also be served with chapati or rice or even dosa. We luv eating leftover sagu with mosaru anna or curd rice :d.

I hope you are enjoying my array of cooking. Any suggestions/feedbacks to perk-up abhi-ruchi are always welcome at abhiruchi_kitchen@yahoo.com

Have A Nice Day J!!!