Keerai Koottu / Spinach-Coconut Curry

Bright, vibrant-looking spinach leaves are not only more appealing to the eye but more nourishing as well. Spinach leaves that look fully alive and vital have greater concentrations of vitamin C than spinach leaves that are pale in color. Doctors recommend that we need to include spinach in our diet 1-2 times per week. Most of the people, already knew about the health benefits of spinach. It helps to protect against inflammatory problems, oxidative stress-related problems, cardiovascular problems, bone problems, and cancers at the same time.

We can feed spinach in many ways. Keera koottu / Spinach-coconut Curry uses dhal too. Here is the simple way to prepare it.

Ingredients:

Spinach - 1 bunch
Moong dhal / Blanched split green gram - 1/4 cup
Coconut - 1/4 cup shredded
Cumin seeds - 2 tsp
Onion - preferably pearl onion 10 nos cut into halves. Or finely chopped onion 1/4 cup
Green chillies - 5 nos. Up to taste. Chopped finely
Turmeric powder - 1/4 tsp
Salt - to taste
Oil - 2 tsp
Mustard seeds - 1 tsp

Procedure:

• Cook moong dhal with turmeric powder. Cook spinach adding salt to it, in a separate vessel.

• Heat sauce pan and sputter mustard seeds. Saute onion and green chilies. 
• Meanwhile course grind spinach in a mixer.Add spinach to the saute.

• Add dhal to it.Grind coconut and cumin seeds. Add some water while grinding. It need not to be a fine paste.

• Add coconut paste to the spinach-dhal.

• Let it boil for a minute. The raw coconut smell goes off.
• And the koottu is ready to serve. Serve with hot rice. Also it goes good with chappathi, dosai.

Note: While cooking spinach, open cook it always, what ever the variety it is. It will retain its original green color.