Sambhar with Zucchini

As always, there are days I just like to be a bit adventurous in the kitchen...while rummaging through one of the racks in the fridge, I realized that I had these three beautiful zucchinis smiling back at me, one of them unfortunately went into the sambhar, the other two can model outside to give me a perfect shot of what I made the sambhar with :)



This was made in less than ten minutes, all I needed was to get the toor dal/lentil into the pressure cooker. As it was a quick fix meal owing to the intolerable heat in the kitchen, I dumped the diced zuccchini, some inch long drumsticks,diced carrots, a sliced onion along with a tsp of cumin seeds and turmeric powder in some water so that all these veggies were submerged and cooked it for around five whistles from the pressure cooker. Kept it aside.



In a heavy bottom vessel, poured in a tbsp of coconut oil,splutter in some mustard, two or three dry, red chillies, sauteed another sliced onion with half a tomato, green chilly, a tsp of cumin seeds and added to it the store bought Eastern Sambhar mix/powder. Added at tbsp and a half to that till the raw smell left the pan, added half a tumbler of water and squeezed in my tamarind concentrate by eye and taste. Adequate salt was added as well.
As this mixture gets cooked, I grated in nearly a tbsp of jaggery/gur/sharkara...don't ask me why, I just felt like doing something odd and weird along with the zucchini. Felt like having a sweet sambhar...believe me, the result was fantabulous...but you may or may not agree with me:) Then toss in the cooked dal with the veggies and give it a nice big stir, let them all merge well for a while. Sprinkle in some hing/asafoetida.



Garnish with cilantro and fresh curry leaves. I didn't have fresh cilantro so I skipped that. Enjoy with your idlis/dosas/plain rice