Little Millet Sweet Pongal

Pongal Festival – A salute to the Sun ! A custom to celebrate ! A tradition to taste ! Together, let us thank the farmers who invest their hard-work to harvest our ingredients !

This Pongal is so special to me as my happiness is doubled by being featured in “Chellamaey”(A tamil magazine from ParentCircle). Click here.

Actually, they asked me to mail the recipes with photos 1.5 months before Pongal. I wanted to click sakkrai pongal with sugarcane in the bg. But luck didn’t favor even after a long hunt for black sugarcane. Finally, I grabbed a thin white sugarcane with fresh leaves from my cousin’s field. I changed it to black using water color 😉 There ends the story behind these clicks 🙂

Hearty Pongal wishes to my readers. Make this Pongal healthy by making this healthy Millet Pongal… Pongal ‘O’ Pongal 🙂

Preparation

1. Wash and soak little millet rice in water for 20 mins.2.In a pressure cooker, add soaked saamai rice along with 1.5 cups water and 1.5 cups milk. Let it cook well for 3 whistles.3.In a pan, add jaggery, water(till jaggery immerses well), a generous pinch of cardamom powder. Let this boil well till nicely bubbles up.4.Filter jaggery syrup. Once pressure releases, open cooker lid and mix the cooked rice with a ladle.5.In a medium flame, add jaggery syrup to cooked rice and mix well.6.In a separate pan, add 1 tbsp ghee, fry cashews and raisins.7.Add 1 tbsp ghee to pongal and mix well for a minute. Finally add ghee fried cashews and raisins and mix well.   Tasty and healthy Little Millet Pongal is ready! A healthy treat for you & your kids !

Tips/Tricks

• Millets might have tiny sand and stones. Take water immersed millets in a vessel. Hold one end of the vessel rim and slightly lift up. While you shake the vessel to and fro using one hand, gather the millets in the other palm and transfer to another vessel in batches. In this way, the sand settles in the bottom to discard easily. Repeat this process twice or thrice until no sand settles down.
• 1 tbsp Moong dal(Paasi paruppu) can be slightly fried and soaked along with millet.
• You can add finely chopped dates topping to Pongal.