Vegan MoFo: Jaggery Dosas with Tofu Scramble

Short post today. My personal J is Just let me lie down... Just for a little bit! I am well exhausted. Along with my normal 8 mile roundtrip to/from work and a good amount of running around at work itself, I also carried the Emperor to his doctor's appointment. We were going to take the bus, but I had good reason to suspect it would be late (it was raining, the bus is always late when it rains) and it was raining and I wasn't going to stand around waiting for it. So we walked 2.5 miles instead... with all 32 lbs of him strapped to my back. Used to be, this wouldn't have been anything to me. But I'm getting too pregnant and too out of the habit of hauling him huge distances and boy, I am beat.

I suspected I might be pretty tired post checkup, so I cooked this afternoon and just reheated at dinner time. Yay!



For J, we somehow ended up with jaggery, also known as brown palm sugar. I love the stuff... it smells and tastes quite like the discs of palm sugar my mom used to buy from the Asian market when I was a kid. The only thing I ever remember her making with it were coconut pancakes, but I have such huge nostalgia of those. No idea why I didn't make them. Maybe because I was specifically thinking-- make something Indian with your Indian ingredient!

Looking around the internet, I saw about a thousand recipes for jaggery dosas on the internet. All almost the same, all slightly different. I was perplexed because almost none of them specified an amount of water to add... just add water until you have correct consistency. Not being much of a dosa maker-- actually I've never made them before-- I had no clear idea what this meant so I just went for a thin pancake consistency. Here's the recipe I used:



Jaggery Dosas
makes 8 small dosas

1c whole wheat flour
1/2c brown rice flour
1/2c grated jaggery
2 tbsps shredded coconut
insides of 8 cardamom pods
1.5c water

1. Combine all ingredients except water.
2. Add the water bit by bit, starting at 1c and going up from there. Stop when you have a fairly thin consistency.
3. Use a 1/4c measure to pour batter out onto a non-stick comale (flat sideless griddle thing) or other light non-stick pan over low heat.
4. Cook for about 2 minutes on the first side. Edges should be visibly dry.
5. Carefully slide a super thin spatula under the dosa. Lift up gently, flip over.
6. Cook second side for about 1 minute. Repeat til you're through the batter.

I also made a simple tofu scramble to top the dosas with. (They weren't really big enough to roll.) Tofu, cumin, turmeric, red onion, tomato, spinach, black salt. Not much to it, but quite tasty.

It was sort of an odd pairing. The jaggery dosas are VERY, VERY sweet. I was a little surprised by this-- but of course, it has 1/2c of sugar in it so maybe that's not so surprising. These might be nice with some sort of savory but very bland filling, like a plain tofu ricotta. I didn't have an urge to eat them all on their own but I also didn't really like the tofu scramble with them. It was actually too flavorful.

It was fun to make something with jaggery though! And something other than boiled jaggery with nuts in it which, while delicious, does not really constitute dinner.

Well, I'm about to fall over here from tiredness. Here's your bonus picture of the Emperor en route to his checkup: