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Chocolate dipped strawberries

Tomato Garlic Rasam/Soup

Eating healthy and eating the food should always be our motto to lead a healthy life. Often times we side track from this and go munch on all kinds of junk and sweet items. Sometimes we need to get rid off those extra pounds we earn in this process. Today I'm gonna talk about the home made soup/rasam which helps us in easy digestion and to burn additional calories on a given day. You can just mix it with rice or just have it like a soup before having your meal.



The ingredients are very simple. You can alternate the ingredients a lit bit here and there and name the resulting dish accordingly. We have tomato rasam, pepper rasam, dhal (yellow split pigeon peas) rasam, lemon rasam, horse gram rasam and the list is endless! Let's have a look at the recipe of tomato garlic rasam here.




Ingredients:

1 medium sized tomato
1 gooseberry sized tamarind
3 cups of water
salt to taste
1/2 tsp of turmeric powder
1 garlic
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp black pepper corns
5-6 strands of coriander stems, with leaves too
1-2 broken dried red chilli
1 tsp rasam powder (optional)
1 tsp oil for tempering
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp split black gram
1 sprig curry leaves

How to make tomato garlic rasam:

1. In a sauce pan, add tamarind and 1 cup of water. Heat it for 2 minutes.



2. Once cooled down, extract the tamarind juice and let the remains of tamrind be in the tamarind water. You can optionally remove it too. The tamarind remains give more tangy flavor to the dish.



3. In a mixer, add half of tomato, cumin seeds, black pepper corns, garlic pod. Without adding water, grind it to a coarse mixture.





4. Add the ground rasam mixture to the sauce pan with tamarind water.



5. Add 2 more cups of water, salt, turmeric powder and rasam powder(optional). The rasam powder gives little more spice.





6. Then add the remaining tomatoes (finely chopping it) to the sauce pan.



7. Bring it to boil.



8. Check for salt and switch off the flame.

9. For tempering, heat a tsp of oil or ghee/clarified butter ina pan. Add mustard,split black gram or urad dhal and broken dried red chilli.



10. Switch off the flame when the mustard seeds start to sputter. Add it to the rasam bowl. Top it with few coriander leaves.



11. Tomato garlic rasam is ready!



12. Our dining table was spread with white rice with chettinad chicken varuval(fry) and tomato garlic rasam.



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