Home Garden Green Beans

Home gardens are real treasures. The produce is very easily accessible and also can be plucked very tender and young as its growing. This is what we kept doing to the green beans that grew in our garden. Pluck them tender, wash them and eat them raw. Until we went away over the weekend on travel. When we were back there was a refreshing lush yield of green beans waiting for us.

Nivagrya

Ukadiche modak are steamed dumplings filled with sweet jaggery and coconut filling. The rice flour is cooked with hot water to make the dough more elastic and allow makingn a very thin skin for the modak’s. The dough that is left over is flattened into discs and steamed to eat as a savory snack dipped in ghee or coldpressed oil. When our mom was visiting us and made modaks for us we experimented and mixed in cilantro and green chili in the dough and got green Nivagrya. However the flavor didnt sustain from the green additions although color was very appealing.

This time with green beans available so fresh we decided to make a quick dumpling snack topped with green beans.

We cooked our rice flour mixing it with equal amounts of hot water and mixed it to a very shiny smooth well hydrated dough. We set the steamer to steam and once it was steaming added the dough flattened gently into discs on butter paper.

We then steamed them covered for 5 to 10 mins checking them for done ness after 5 minutes of steaming.

Meanwhile we chopped the green beans fine and boiled them in salted boiling water for very little time till they got greener in color and then drained and cooled them in ice water blanching them.

We also love the earthy and smoky flavor of toasted cumin. We toasted the cumin then crushed it rough in a mortar and pestle.

We also chopped some garlic and green chilies fine. We had some delicious micro cilantro on hand as well.

When the nivagrya were steamed, we just brushed them with some melted ghee till hot, then rubbed them with little bit of garlic-chili almost reminding us of the brushing of garlic onto garlic bread. We topped them with the green beans and sprinkled the toasted crushed cumin. We also added a few grains of salt from our friend Uday. Flaky salt or rock salt as we had from uttarakhand salt mines adds a lovely savory touch and texture when you encounter that one grain of salt every now and then. We served these on top of kardal leaves which meg also had growing in the garden and topped with micro cilantro.

These are best eaten warm and steaming and feel like a light and filling snack with the flavors of ground cumin – garlic and green beans giving the underlying steamed rice flour flavors of sweet starch a very nice lift.