Instant Tomatoey Dosai

This is one of the dosas that you can make without prior preparation. Isn't it amazing that you can make dosa without dosa batter? Yes, all you need is rice flour and a little rawa (sooji/semolina)! Add tomato juice to it and spice it up - there you go, thats the batter! This is absolutely handy on those weekday-nights when you're exhausted and want to whip up something real quick for dinner.

Instant Tomato Dosa with Sambar

Yield - 6 Dosas
Time - 15 mins

What You Need -

Rice flour - 1/2 cup
Rawa/Sooji/Semolina - 1/4 cup
Ripe tomatoes - 3 medium
Jeera/Cumin powder - 1 tsp
Red chilli powder - 1/2 tsp
Hing/Asafoetida - a pinch
Salt - 1/2 tsp (adjust to taste)
Oil - as required to make dosas

How To -

• Chop off the root of tomatoes and cut each into 4 pieces, add the spices - jeera powder, red chilli powder, salt and asafoetida, and extract the juice using an electric mixer.

• Take rice flour and sooji/rawa in a bowl and pour in the tomato juice.

• Add some water if the batter is too thick.

• The rest of the procedure is familiar. You can choose to keep the batter kinda thick and make it like uthappam. Here, you can also add finely chopped onions as topping. 
•  Another option is to make thin batter and make dosas the way you would make rawa dosai - i.e., just pour the batter and not spread it with ladle, but allow the dosa to take its natural shape.
• Pre-heat tawa and grease it with a little oil before making the first dosa. Once the first side gets cooked, flip sides and let the other side cook too.

Serve hot with sambar or onion chutney or  vegetable chutney.

Oats-Brown rice Dosai - Healthy meal

Well, I'm addicted to brown rice now! Good for me coz its healthy! My mom makes oats-dosai and it tastes absolutely yummy. I innovated a bit and replaced the usual 'idli rice' with brown rice and made this new variety of dosai :) To all my Singaporean friends, this is new to me as brown rice and oats are not part of everyday food in India. I tasted brown rice for the first time in Singapore in one of the Chinese-Vegetarian stalls in the local food courts here and it was love at first bite :)

What I Used -

Brown rice - 1 cup
Cooking Oats - 1 cup
Urad dal - 2/3 cup
Fenugreek - 1 tbsp
Salt - to taste

How To -

• Soak Brown rice and Urad dal separately for atleast 3 hours. I just soaked them with lots of water overnight.
• Oats need not be soaked. 
• Strain off most of the water.
• Grind brown rice adding water little by little and make a paste. It can be a little watery. That's ok because the urad paste will thicken the overall batter.
• Grind urad dal with fenugreek and get a thick paste.
• Finally, grind oats with brown rice batter (instead of water).
• Blend all the three together well by grinding them all together for 1 cycle in your electric mixer/blender. You can add salt in this final round. I added 1 tsp (leveled) of salt for the above quantities specified.

That's your dosa batter :) Yeh!!!

Oats-Brown Rice Dosa Batter

Now, the rest of the procedure is simple. Get your dosa-kal (tawa) ready, heat it, grease it and pour the batter on it and spread it in a circular shape. Once browned on one side, reverse the sides and let the other side get cooked too. Now, in pictures,

Healthy Dosai - Oats+Brown rice Dosai

Serve dosas with chutney. Ummm....delicious :)   It is very filling and makes a proper meal indeed :)

Sending this recipe to Dosa Event

Masala Dosai

Masala Dosai is a common breakfast/tiffin item in South India and has pervaded to places like Malaysia and Singapore where a lot of South-Indians have migrated decades earlier. It's a nice way to make the simple dosa(or dosai) a sumptuous meal with the addition of potatoes. Even foreigners to Indian cuisine (basically, non-Indians) like dosai so much that they even learn the art of dipping it in a pool of sambar and topping it with chutney and enjoying the delectable dish :) And yes, Indian cuisine is the fifth most preferred in the world by globetrotters according to a recent survey conducted on Hotels.com :) Italian cuisine, known for its pizzas and pastas, came in first, followed by French, Thai and Chinese.

As a child, I always loved paper-crisp dosas and masala dosas and still do. The art of making dosas comes only with practice. That being said, masala dosa is an easy way to spice up a not-so-good dosai :) You can also sneak in other veggies, like shredded carrots, green peas, and many more to the masala and make it healthier!

What I Used-

Potatoes - 4 (boiled)
Carrot - 1 (shredded)
Onions -1 cup (chopped)
Green peas - 1/2 cup
Ginger - 1 tsp (finely chopped)
Green chillies - 4 (cut length-wise)
Besan (kadala maavu) - 2 tsp
Salt - 1 tsp

To temper-

Oil - 1.5 tsp
Mustard - 3/4 tsp
Jeera - 3/4 tsp
Urad dal - 3/4 tsp
Channa Dal - 1 tsp
Curry leaves - a few

How I Made It- 

• Take a kadai, do the tempering in that order. As always, allow oil to get heated then add mustard, allow it to splutter, then follow through the rest. 
• Add green chillies and ginger and fry for a minute.
• Add in the chopped onions and fry till they turn slightly pinkish.
• Mash 2 potatoes, cube the other 2 and add them. This is to ensure you have some mashed up potatoes to form a base but still can spot some in good shape.
• Add salt.
• Now goes the shredded carrots and then the green beans (I just microwave the frozen ones and then add).
• Mix everything well. When you feel it's going dry, just mix 2 tsp of besan in water (without lumps) and stir that in. This gives a gravyish texture to the masala. There you go! You just need to make the dosas and fill about 3-4 tbsp of masala to each dosa. Enjoy with sambar and/or chutney! :)

To Make Dosa Batter -

• Soak idly rice and urad dal, for 4 hours (I do it overnight, it's easier), in two separate bowls in the ratio of 3:1 
• Add 1-2 tsp of methi seeds (vendayam) to urad dal.
• Blend them to a smooth paste by adding water, little by little, as necessary, and get the required consistency.
• Add salt and allow it to ferment.
• Your home-made dosa batter is ready! :)

Do not forget to refrigerate it after 4-5 hours. You may have to add some more water if its gets too thick later.

If there's too much masala left over, get creative and make a quick sandwich for the next morning's breakfast or pack it for your tea-time snack :) I used multi-grain bread and it makes such a wholesome meal :)