Thenga Pooranam

I will always have super festive spirits. I am not a very spiritual person. What attract to me to these festivals are the special foods that are prepared during these days. I try to plan ahead and make the preparations in advance, so that I will not spend much time on preparing these on that day.

Likewise for vinayagar chathurthi, the Thenga pooranam can be prepared the previous day and can be refrigerated.  The pooranam stays good for a week when refrigerated.

Ingredients:

• Grated coconut – 1 cup
• Paagu Vellam / Jaggery – ¾ cup
• Water – Just to cover jaggery
• Cardamom Powder – ½ tsp
• Ghee – 1 tbsp

Optional Ingredients :

• Poppy seeds – 1 tsp
• Roasted chenna dal – 1 tsp
• Ghee – 1 tsp
• Cashews – 5 broken roughly into small pieces.

Preparation :

Grate the coconut.

Powder the jaggery or you can grate them too. Grating is messy. You can also buy powdered jaggery in the stores directly.

If you are planning to add poppy seeds and roasted Chenna dal, dry roast them separately till it is fried well and powder them and keep aside. This gives good texture and aroma to the pooranam. If you don’t have these, just skip this step.

Break the cashews into small pieces, fry them in ghee and keep it aside.

Method:

Take powdered jaggery in thick wide kadai.  

Add water till it is covered. Leave it for half an hour.

Most of the jaggery will be dissolved, for the rest of bigger pieces, just mash it with ladle. I powdered the jaggery with help of coconut, that's the reason you can see the lil pieces of husks floating :).

If you do not have much time to soak the jaggery, heat it low flame, till it melts.

Filter to remove any impurities.

Now transfer again to the thick kadai, add ghee and heat it in medium flame.

Once it starts boiling well, add the grated coconut.

Add the poopy seeds and Chenna dal powder at this stage.

Add fried cashews.

Mix all the ingredients well and keep stirring  for about 5 mins, till the mixture leaves the sides of the kadai.

Add cardamom powder and mix well.

Let it cool down completely.

The mixture will look little watery when hot, it will solidify once it cools down.

Now this is ready to be stuffed in modak or kozhakkatai.