Mathanga Van payar Erissery - Pumpkin and Black eyed Beans curry

 Onam is a major cultural festival in my home state, Kerala. It marks the end of the monsoons and bringing in the harvest. There is an abundance of vegetables, legumes and fruit and the people celebrate for 10 days. Over the 10 day period, a lot of food is cooked and it is mostly vegetarian and vegan.  There are also parades, dances, the snake boat race and other festivities happening in the state.

The beauty about this festival is that it is celebrated all over the state irrespective of religion.  The other thing that everyone does is create a flower carpet in front of their house called athappoo. It gets very elaborate and takes hours to complete.  The women and children usually get up early in the morning to set up the flower carpet.  

In Melbourne Onam usually comes around at the end of winter and I do not have many flowers in my garden.  But to keep up with tradition I always get anything I can from my garden to set up a small carpet.  This year we used geraniums, dandelions, grass flowers and parsley for our athappoo. We set it up on our lazy Susan on top our table.  You can see the picture at the bottom of this post.

Moving on to our pumpkin curry, lets us see how to make it.

 Ingredients:

1 cup of cooked black eyed beans (soak beans for a couple of hours and cook with enough water till beans go soft.  Alternately, use tinned black eyed beans)

3 cups of butter nut pumpkin cubes

1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder

a pinch of nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon of sugar

1/2 cup water

3 tablespoons grated coconut

1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds

2 green chillies

1 tablespoon oil  (coconut oil is the oil of choice, but you can use any vegetable oil)

1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds

1 dry red chilli

1 sprig curry leaves

salt to taste

Method:

Cook the pumpkin with the turmeric, nutmeg, sugar, and water till tender.

Grind the coconut with the cumin and green chillies and set aside.

Mash the pumpkin roughly, add the beans and coconut.  Mix well and return to the stove for another 5 minutes.  Add salt to taste.  

In an another saucepan, heat oil and when the oil is hot add the mustard seeds.  When the mustard seeds crackle, add the curry leaves and red chilli.  When the curry leaf releases its aroma, turn off the flame and  pour on top of the pumpkin curry.  Serve hot.