Water Melon Rind Chutney

It's water melon season and we buy almost one melon per week.

Photo by Prathyush Thomas,

My mother-in-law, who was a Malayalee, once told me that the white part of melon rind could be used as a substitute for Kumbalanga or winter melon. This white fleshed pumpkin is a frequent ingredient in Kerala cuisine. I have often made a simple dish which I learned from her using this substitute: a mulakushyam . The recipe in the link is almost similar to how I learned it:

Mulakushyam

Ingredients:
1 cup tuvar dal
1 cup chopped kumbalanga
1 or 2 green chillies
A pinch of turmeric powder
Salt to taste
A few curry leaves
A few drops of coconut oil

Method

Wash the dal and cook it with about 2 cups of water. When it is nearly soft, add the cubed vegetable and salt and turmeric and continue to cook till the vegetable is soft. 

Add the green chillies (slit if you like the heat or un-slit if not or not all if you can't take the heat). 

Take the vessel off the fire and add fresh curry leaves and a drizzle of coconut oil.

Since this gourd is hard to find in North India, I delight in using melon rind in summer.

I've had to become more adventurous as the quantity of melon rind is more than I can cope with using only the one recipe.

I've made a chutney over the weekend which tastes quite like coconut chutney.

We morphed the recipe a lot - merely roasted the dals and some red chillies and the rind and ground them coarsely and tempered with mustard seeds, curry leaves, a red chilli and some channa and split white urad dal.

I'm still in the throes of trying to make a melon rind candy. There seem to be a lot of things one can do with melons!

Instant Chutneys

A "chutney" is something of a semi-spicy, semi-tangy Indian dip.

When I was a kid, growing up in Bangalore and Pondicherry (in the States of Karnataka and in the vicinity of Tamil Nadu respectively), a chutney was basically made with fresh grated coconut.

Simple Coconut Chutney

Blend one cup of freshly grated coconut until properly pulverised.
Heat a wee bit of oil (about one teaspoon) and add to it a quarter teaspoon of black mustard seeds. When these have fully spluttered, add one dried red chili, a quarter teaspoon each of channa dal and split white urad dal. Go easy with the fire so that nothing burns. Lastly, add a few curry leaves.
Pour it on the ground coconut and add salt to taste.

There are many variations on this.

When, at the raw age of 20, I met the love of my life, who is from Kerala, he introduced me to chutneys made with shallots.

Uli Chutney

Some 4-5 shallots
Half a tomato
1 dried red chilli
About one teaspoon of coconut oil.

Heat most of the oil and saute, one by one, the chili, shallots and tomato.
Blend them well in a grinder and add salt to taste. Drizzle some coconut oil just before serving.

And this is what we have been whipping up over the more than twenty odd years that we've been man and wife.

Somewhere along the way the Love of my Life once told me of a friend who claimed that a chutney could be made with almost any left over.

And so it came about that, today, I opened the fridge and beheld a plate of leftover bits of spaghetti in some Prego sauce. It was laced with some stir fried zucchini, onions, green bell peppers, etc.

Chutney with Leftovers

1 cup leftover veggies (Do try anything else that takes your fancy)
1 or 2 dried red chillies
A teaspoon of coconut oil

Saute the chillies in a bit of oil until brown but not burnt.
Blitz with the left overs and drizzle with coconut oil before serving.

Serve with "idlis", "dosas", any type of Indian bread, rice, any type of bread, tortillas, enchiladas or anything else which comes to mind!