Yummy Coconut Chutney Recipe - How (not) to Prepare Chutney!!

About : This article is intended to help(warn) Bachelors and Married men(with wives gone to Sasural/with cooking duties) who are trying a hand at preparing Coconut Chutney.

Ingredients : Pick the one’s mentioned in any of the YouTube cooking channels. It's the same one’s. !!

How (not) to Cook :

1. Open a YouTube video on Coconut Chutney Recipe with highest views.
2. Search for ingredients in your kitchen.
1. Main ingredient is Coconut. You find it in Kitchen. Cool :-)
1. Break coconut with full force. Notice that the kitchen floor is messed up totally to get enough bashing from wife(Oops. No. 1!!!)
2. Leave the mess as is and slice coconut into smaller chunks.
3. Video says, take 1 cup coconut. But you have no idea how much 1 cup means and which cup to use to measure. Take as much as you can slice. Stash it into the smallest Mixer Jar.
2. Second ingredient is Channa Dal. You have no idea what it is. Search for it in Google. Oh it's just normal Dal but bigger in size. You found it.. Woo hoo..
1. But wait… The lady in video says it's soaked in water for 4 hours. Oh oh!! That can never happen now.
2. Search for emergency alternative - YouTube again - Second most viewed Video on Coconut chutney.
3. There it is. The lady says fry the chana dal dry in a pan for 2 minutes. That would work.
4. Take a pan, put some chana dal and start frying. There is no way you can measure exact 2 mins. Observe that chana dal turned to black from yellow before you blink your eyes. (Oops!! No. 2)
5. Put the black chana in the jar anyway.
3. Next ingredient is green chilli. The video says take 2 chillies. But didn’t mention the size of the chillies. You take 3 big chillies in fridge because you think you like it spicy and Bangalore chillies are usually not hot. Slice and put them in the jar.
4. Now the lady in video puts many items into the jar in hurry.!! Ginger, ground nuts, salt, sugar etc.. try to gather all quickly.
5. You realize you don't have ginger. !! Time to think OOTB. You see garlic instead. Thinking - (Oh will it work? Ginger and Garlic always are mentioned together. It may work). Decide against it. But you find Ginger Garlic paste. Oh yeah that would work. Put some imaginary quantity of it in jar.
6. Put salt, sugar. Observe that the small jar is really full. You can't close it. Fine.. take out some of the coconut out. Now it looks fine. Start to grind. Realize you forgot to put Groundnuts.!! You carry on anyway.
7. Observe some strange sound!! Stop the blender and see what happened. After 5 mins of research it looks like you might have broken the small jar as the size of coconut slices were big!!! The blades of the jar are no more spinning. (Oops. No. 3!!!).

**lessons learnt : You always remembered you mom or wife using small jar for chutney. But you never observed the quantity of the contents of the jar. !!

8. With no other choice, pick the bigger jar. Transfer the contents into that and start grinding. Its working!! After multiple rounds it finally looks like chutney. Hurreyy!!!!
9. Take a spoon of it and try to taste it to see if it's as yummy as it looks. Suddenly your mouth is on fire.!!! The green chilly have cheated you. It's too spicy. You feel like running to bathroom.
10. You can't eat that, look around for a quick solution. You see sugar - could work but no. You see left over coconut - Yes that's the solution.
11. Transfer the spicy chutney into a bowl carefully. Take the same jar and repeat the steps with no chilly and more sugar. There you go. Got an exact opposite of first batch. Mix them both in the jar. Grind one more time. Yippyyyy!! It looks perfect now.
12. Feel proud of yourself for a moment, think that you should be a chef. Observe that the video is still not over. Continue watching.
13. Next step is to mix chutney with tadka. The lady says chutney would be nothing without tadka. You put your imaginary master-chef hat on and start preparing tadka.
14. You observe that there is a pan on stove already and you forgot to turn off the stove. Quickly put some oil in it.
15. You can never tell when the oil is hot enough to put mustard and cumin seeds. Wait for a minute anyway and put them.
16. Put dry red chilli slices and curry leaves too. You hear a sudden blast of oil and by the time you realize all the contents of the pan are black. (Oops No. 4). It looks and smells bad.
17. You think for a minute and plan to throw it away. But volume of chutney looks way more than tadka. You mix the tadka anyway into chutney.
8. That's it. There is your chutney. :-)

Happy cooking. :-)

P.S :- Try out and share the pics of your chutney's with me. :-)

Karteek Joshi

Bangalore, 12th Nov 2016