Vegetable Dahivada

My maushi's vegetable dahivada is melt-in-your-mouth delectable. But I find the procedure long and tedious. It's fun to eat when she makes them but making it all by yourself?Naah!! Her recipe is like this. Boil all the veggies including potatoes. Mash potatoes nicely and other veggies coarsely, add ginger-garlic paste, salt, garam masala. In short, make a stuffing like you would do for a cutlet or patties or aloo tikki. Then make balls or ovals or flat rounds, dip them in urad daal batter - like you would make for making meduvadas, then deep fry them and then dunk them in sweetened yogurt, sprinkled with chaat masala and chili powder and sweet-sour chutney. Now, you know why I find it tedious!!

One day, when I had some appe batter left, I thought of maushi's dahivada. But I decided to just add minced veggies and that's it. That's my way of making vegetable dahivada.

Vegetable DahiVada

Ingredients

2 cups leftover Appe or biscuit ambode or Idli batter

1 cup minced veggies (I used red & yellow & orange bell peppers, grated purple cabbage, green beans, spinach, grated carrots)

salt to taste

Oil for frying

For yogurt

2 cups yogurt

water as needed

sugar per taste

salt per taste

Garnish

A generous pinch of chili powder

A generous pinch of chaat masala

1 tbsp minced cilantro/coriander leaves

Method

1. Mix minced/grated veggies and salt if needed, to the leftover batter.

2. Heat Appe patra/kayili/pan. Grease it and add spoonful of batter

3. Cover and let it cook on one side. Flip and cook again on the other side. Drain on the absorbent paper. Set aside.

4. Whisk yogurt with salt, sugar and water as needed to make cake batter like consistency.

5. Dunk the vadas in the batter.

6. Garnish with powders and cilantro.

7. Serve immediately.

Note -

1. You can also add grated pumpkin, butternut squash, yellow corn, green peas or any veggie of your choice.

2. If you want you can dunk the appe in a bowl full of water and squeeze out the water before adding to the yogurt. This step will ensure the soft consistency of the appes and yogurt will be totally absorbed, thus giving it melt-in-your-mouth taste. I didn't follow this step.

3. When making veggie dahivada my maushi's way, you don't have to put them in water. The potatoes make the vadas very soft.

4. You can also drizzle some sweet - sour tamarind-dates chutney.