Gori Manchurian

Yes, you read it right. There is no spelling mistake in the title of the post. I accidentally made an important discovery which will come in very handy to serve a vegetable which is inherently so dry that it usually gets relegated to second cousin status as compared to beans. Cluster Beans or Gori kayi as it is called in Kannada is a thin and dry variety of beans.
I used to be an extremely fussy eater as a kid and gori kayi was one of the many vegetables that I did not like to eat. Adding to my misery was the abundance of this vegetable in the local market in Hyderabad, thus finding its way to my plate more enough than I would have liked. My mom tried to encourage me in various ways to eat more... well lets just say eat. With gori kayi she found an ally in numbers.She always told me that eating gori kayi would make me really good at math! That was a good reason for me to eat it all up although I might say that 101/100 times I might have got my numbers mixed up! I did hallucinate about pieces of gori kayi making its way up my blood vessels to the math controlling part of my brain.
Coming back to the recipe, it was a fridge clean out session where i discovered a bag of gori kayi and pizza sauce left over from last weekend. The rest as they say is Manchuristory.

Gori Manchurian

Servings: 2 cups
Prep Time: 25 mins   Cook Time: 15 mins

Ingredients

2 cups of Cluster Beans (Gori Kayi in Kannada)
1/2 Medium sized Onion
1/2 cup Toor Dal
1/2 cup Pizza sauce
1/2 tsp Mustard seeds
1/2 tsp Cumin seeds
A pinch of turmeric
3 Green Chillies cut lengthwise
3 tsp Oil
Salt to taste

Instructions 

1. Cut cluster beans and onion into small pieces.
2. Wash the toor dal under running water, atleast three times
3. Pressure cook toor dal and cluster beans and keep aside
4. Heat oil in a heavy bottomed vessel and add in mustard seeds. 
5. When the mustard seeds splutter, add in green chillies and cumin seeds and saute for a minute
6.  Add in onion and saute till transluscent.
7. To this, add the pizza sauce and fry for a few minutes till the raw smell of tomato has gone
8. Mix in the pressure cooked cluster beans and toor dal. Add salt and continue to cook for a few minutes till the first boil.
9. This curry tastes good with roti or chapathi or plain rice. I enjoyed eating it as is!

Instant Pizza sauce

Ingredients

2 Tomatoes / 5 heaped tsps of unfavoured natural tomato paste

2 garlic pods

1/2 tsp Salt

1/2 tsp black pepper

2 tsp Olive oil or Vegetable oil or Canola oil

Instructions

1. Grind all the ingredients together adding 1 tbsp of water if required