Off lately, I’ve been trying to learn different indigenous recipes whenever I go back home from my mother in-law. For the people who are not interested in eating much of the things from outsources, she belongs from a space whose roots are so much into the ground, that I get to listen or experience something interesting every single time we meet. She belongs from a village in Haryana and having a farmers’ background believes in curating things herself, even if they are vegetables and pulses and even if they are snacks and sweets. It is something that is very intriguing for a person like me, belonging from a different diaspora of space and time with all my food technology background knowledge of the processing industry and being a daughter of a working mother.
This time when we went home, since it was the festival season, she made this recipe of hers which is entirely beloved in the whole house, a simple yet crispy methi mathri. Fenugreek, I believe, is a gift of the cold weather in the northern part of the country and creating something of a ‘snack’ that is home made, fresh, crisp and absolutely delightful to have. And since I am also in the initial stages of my cooking explorations, I tried to compliment it with a simple recipe of home-made chocolate cookies which are one of my husband’s favourites these days, though I’d say they didn’t match the level of crispiness and flavourful-ness of my mother in-law’s mathri. I was told that when she went to her parents’ house, she’d make huge batches for the kids and adults like during the winter vacation days. The mathris made were swept off of the plate in minutes and we were also given a separate batch that I’ve been enjoying till date, even a month later. For a food technologist who has become so used to consuming things with added preservatives for longer shelf life, no preservative added almost feels like a magic, the magic that lies in the humble Indian kitchen. I’ll be sharing the recipe of both the things, the mathris and the cookies, though there’s no doubt in my mind as to which one was the star of the show.
Methi Mathri
Ingredients:
1. Refined wheat flour (maida)
2. Salt
3. Carom seeds (ajwain)
4. Fenugreek leaves (Methi)
5. Oil
Procedure:
1. Wash the fresh fenugreek leaves in water for sometime and then chop them roughly.
2. To prepare the base dough of the recipe, take the refined wheat flour along with salt and carom seeds (that have been grounded a little) and knead a dough using oil and a little amount of water.
Now this process in entirely crucial to the recipe, because the dough should be harder than the one used to make chapati or puris, almost similar to the ones used by the Indian halwais to make samosas. The key is to knead using oil and with lesser amount of water and almost upto the hardness that it should sponge back to the same texture and point when pressed with a finger.
3. Heat the oil in the pan in the side for frying till the assembling of ingredients is being done on the other side.
4. Once the dough is ready, the assembly starts. First try to make a ball out of the dough that can be flattened in the shape of a huge roti (or flatbread) using the help of a rolling pin (belan) and/ or a rolling board (chakla).
5. Now, evenly spread the chopped fenugreek leaves onto the roti and roll it gently until it forms a huge single roll.
6. Cut smaller pieces from the roll of ½ to 1 inch size and you can leave the either ends as such or you can use them to make the mathris as well
