My neighbor gave me a big Zucchini and looks like we are celebrating a Zucchini week lately. I started with a sugar free fat free white flour free healthy Zucchini bread .Now it's turn for a simple healthy thoran.
Thoran is nothing but a Kerala special dry side dish,a great accompaniment with rice & curry for lunch/dinner.It is not that spicy but a subtle flavored side dish.It is a quick make flexible side dish as the main ingredients are coarse shredded coconut and any vegetable that can be shredded .Therefore different varieties of thorans can be made.Here I made a combination of Zucchini,carrot and cabbage.Isn't that a colorful and healthy combination? It goes well with rice and especially any spicy curry like fish or chicken curry. Besides,thorans are also unavoidable part of the Onam/Vishu Sadya (Kerala festival's grand feast).
By the way I can't believe how many different types of vegetable thorans,curries I am making since marriage.Who would have thought (in my family) that the one who would grin(sarcastic) at the name of vegetables and make a big deal about it and my parents ending up lecturing about different health benefits of each vegetables to make me eat them ,which would infact hardly budge me,is trying to incorporate different vegetable items into her menu these days .Well what to do ,"Health is wealth" afterall .As they say,"If health is lost,everything is lost"...and my health did give me a wake up call already so here I am...I am patching up with the vegetable world,even have a small vegetable garden in my backyard. Marching into a healthy direction I guess....left right left....
Coming back to this dish ,here is the recipe for ,Zucchini carrot cabbage thoran:
Ingredients
Zucchini shredded - 1 cup
Carrot shredded - 1/2 cup
Cabbage shredded - 1/2 cup
Coconut shredded - 1/2 cup
Chopped onion - 1/2 cup
Green chili - 5 no.
Turmeric - 1/4 teaspoon
Turmeric - 1/4 teaspoon
Cumin seed- 1/4 teaspoon (optional)
Garlic - 1 no. (optional)
Curry leaf - 1 stalk
Dry Red chili - 2 no.
Mustard seeds- 1 teaspoon
Urad dal/Black gram lentil/skinfree white lentil - 1/4 teaspoon
Coconut oil/any cooking oil - 2 tablespoon
Preparation
- Shred the zucchini,carrot and cabbage using the shredder.
- Shred the coconut or use the readymade shredded coconut.
- Chop onion and green chilies in to small pieces.
- Combine all above -shredded vegetables,coconut,chopped onion and green chili together.
- Make a coarse paste of cumin seeds ,garlic and one curry leaf in a mixie or in a mortar & pestle and mix with the above mixture really well and keep it aside .
- Heat oil in a pan (use coconut oil for the authentic Kerala taste otherwise as you wish) and splutter some mustard seeds , add urad dal to it and make sure it doesn't get brown ,also break red chili into it with the curry leaf stalk.
- Now add the above vegetable mixture (step 4) into the tempering above and give it a stir ,low the flame and let it cook by it's own.It doesn't need any water or need to be covered as Zucchini itself has lots of water in it which is sufficient to get the dish cook by its own.Do make sure that you stir it once in a while though so that it doesn't get burn at the bottom.
- After a while when the vegetables appear no more crunchy and all water is aborbed ,The Zucchini carrot cabbage thoran is ready to be served.
Here's for you.Serve it with rice :).