Cornflakes Chaat

It is really tough for every mother to meet the dietary requirements of highly active & energetic teens today as she needs to serve them 4 meals a day that satiate their hunger, nourish them adequately, and importantly, please their palate. Since it is almost near to impossible to prepare healthy hearty delicious meals four times a day, it is a good idea to prepare a dish that can be reused for the next meal and also made appealing to them.

For example the dough used for banana bread for the breakfast can be tweaked to make banana cupcakes in the evening, or the batter used for making pesarat in the morning can be used for making paniyaram in the evening, or we can use any kulambu prepared for lunch as an accompaniment for idli, dosa, adai, uthappam, etc. for breakfast or dinner. Furthermore, we can serve delicious chaat as an after school snack, and serve the same gravy with chappathi or poori for dinner.

Chaat is the most popular street food enjoyed by the people of all ages, and we can find small eateries or fast food joints serving chaat ubiquitous across India. Chaat is a savory snack typically made by mixing a long list of ingredients of varied texture & flavor like pav (bread), puri (deep-fried bread), patties, ragda (curry), spice powders, chutney (sauce), sev (crunchy noodles), fruits, vegetables, herbs, etc. Since chaat foods require a comprehensive list of ingredients, people generally prefer to pay a visit to such eatery rather than making it at home. Nevertheless, I like to prepare chaat at home for 2 reasons: 1) I can make delicious & nutritious chaat by cutting down unnecessary carbs, fats & sugar or replacing them with wholesome ingredients; 2) I can re-use the same curry (ragda) for my next meal also.

Here I have prepared nutritious cornflakes chaat using yellow peas curry, tamarind-dates chutney & mint chutney, replacing deep-fried puri with cornflakes, and garnishing with home-made sev, pomegranate arils, finely chopped apple, onion & coriander leaves. Now let us look into the recipe for yellow peas ragda.

Ragda recipe:

Ingredients:

Cooked yellow peas	1 cup
Pureed yellow peas	1/4 cup
Onion	1
Tomatoes	3
Garlic	3 pods
Ginger	1″
Red chilli powder	2 tsp
Turmeric powder	1/2 tsp
Cumin seeds powder	1/4 tsp
Kitchen King masala	1/2 tsp
Pav-bhaji masala	1/2 tsp
Oil	1 tsp
Cumin seeds	1/2 tsp
Salt	1 tsp

How to cook ragda:

• Chop the onion, tomatoes, ginger & garlic roughly.
• Microwave them for 5 minutes after sprinkling some water.
• Blitz them until smooth.
• Heat a heavy bottom pan with oil on low flame.
• Add cumin seeds followed by red chilli powder, turmeric powder & cumin seeds powder.
• Saute for few seconds.
• Pour onion tomato mixture followed by pureed peas and stir in to combine.
• Now add cooked peas & pour required water in to the pan and bring it to a boil in high flame.
• Add salt & spice powders and mix well.
• Leave the curry simmering until plating.

Tweaks:

• I have used chickpeas (channa) in place of yellow peas, prepared the same ragda and served with pav bread as below. It can be served with normal bread also as bread-channa for breakfast.

• We can use any other legume namely black eyed peas (karamani), rajma beans, lima beans (mochai), green peas, butter beans, etc. in place of yellow peas.

• We can also replace yellow peas with mixed vegetables and pureed yellow peas with mashed potato.

• Here I have not added chaat masala into this ragda (but I sprinkled some chaat masala while garnishing the chaat) as I wanted to use this for my dinner also.

Ingredients for cornflakes chaat:

Hot ragda

Corn flakes

Sev (oma podi)

Dates-tamarind chutney

Mint chutney

Chaat masala

Finely chopped apple, onion, & coriander leaves

Pomegranate arils

How to serve corn flakes chaat:

Tweaks:

I prefer to add sweet & sour flavors, crunchy texture and vibrant colors in here, so I like to choose the ingredients accordingly. We can also garnish this chaat with a variety of ingredients like grated carrot, diced cucumber, chopped tomato, grated raw mango, diced mango fruit, finely chopped guava (koyya pazham), puffed rice (pori), rice flakes (poha or aval), roasted almonds, fried peanuts (or masala peanuts), boiled green peas, etc.