Pepper Rasam Recipe | A dedication to my mom

Mother’s Day is observed the second Sunday in May. It is a time to honor mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers for their contribution to family. Today’s post is dedicated to my mother. She is my friend, philosopher guide, my every thing. I am very very close to my mom than my dad. I can discuss almost any thing under the sun with my mom.

After my graduation I stayed alone away from home, away from mom in a city that was new to me. I had to learn to cook as I couldn’t eat out side food. Started off with the most basic things like learning to cook rice in pressure cooker, to cook dal perfectly, slowly graduated to rolling roti’s(flat bread) which resembled different continents each time I rolled it(took me three months to learn to roll perfectly round roti’s). I would spend hours on the phone talking to my mother, writing down the ingredient lists, recipes. And then I would keep trying to cook those recipes a few times, until I was satisfied. That’s how my cooking journey started.

After marriage, the real challenge started. Those days I cooked because I had to cook, I wasn’t sure if I liked cooking. After my daughter birth, like all other mom’s I started to cook for her and I had to try a lot of new recipes, healthy recipes, and I had to make food interesting for her. I started exploring more into food and cooking. Slowly I started liking to cook. Every time I cooked some thing new, my hubby would give me honest feed back, there was a lot of faults he used to point out. After hearing the faults I started to concentrate and my cooking improved. Hubby started to like them. Then gradually my cooking got extended to my friends region. I cooked every time we had a get to gather at home.

Coming back to mother day’s post, where I’m dedicating this post to my mom, it’s her recipe, which I have made it exactly the way she would make. Pepper rasam is a best remedy to fight cold and cough. On those sick lousy days, a big glass full of pepper rasam open up your sinus and makes you feel better.

Here’s my mom’s pepper rasam recipe

Ingredients:-

Tamarind Juice – ½ cup(use small lime sized tamarind ball)
Tomato – 1 small
Dried red chillies – 3 nos
Curry leaves – 1 sprig
Mustard seeds – 1 tspn
Asafoetida – ½ tspn
Oil – 2 tspn
Salt – to taste

Water – 1 cup(as required)

To make pepper rasam mix-
Black Pepper corns – 3 tbspns
Cumin seeds – 1 tbspn
Garlic cloves – 5 nos

Coriander leaves – for garnish
Instructions:-

1. Wash tamarind and soak it in hot water for about 30 minutes. Extract the juice of tamarind and discard the residues.

2. Into the tamarind juice add roughly chopped tomato and squeeze it well. You want all the tomato pieces to me mashed.

3. In a mortar pestle smash pepper corns, cumin seeds, garlic cloves. Crush them until you get a coarse paste mix, Do not add water.Keep aside.

4. In a deep bottom pan heat oil. Add mustard seeds and allow it to crackle. Next add asafoetida, dried red chilies, curry leaves and the prepared pepper mix. Saute for 5 seconds.