Divya Rabindra@NFC, divya.r@news4children.com
India celebrates 72 Independence Day today! Happy Independence Day folks. We have something special and fun you could do with your kids on this day. Read on!!
Do you wish your child would have yet another piece of veggie? Then dip/sauce is the way to go.
We can actually lure these littles into tasting and trying new food just by placing some dips/sauces by the side.
Involve them in washing and chopping of veggies and arranging the veggie platter. Make patterns or silly faces. And most importantly let them see you eat them and relish them.
Here’s a recipe for an easy and simple yoghurt dip called Tzatziki (pronounced ZAT-ZEE-KEY). Sounding it out for you because I never asked for seconds as I didn’t know how to say it!! We all have been there, haven’t we?
So Tzatziki comes from Greece. It looks very similar to our Indian raita but they taste quite different. The herb element differs in them and raita can be made in many different ways depending on what region of India you come from. I was once served with fruit raita and I don’t want to say more.
This dip is very versatile that it could be used as a spread on sandwiches( no mayo please), salad dressing, in roti rolls, in place of sour cream, on grilled meat and veggies.
Let’s get to it.
Ingredients
- Plain whole milk yoghurt – 2 cups
- Peeled and deseeded cucumber – 1 cup
- Garlic cloves – 2
- Dill leaves – 2 tbsp
- Lemon juice – 1 tsp
- Olive oil – 2 tbsp
- Salt to taste
Directions
1. Pour 2 cups of yoghurt into a fine mesh strainer with a container at the bottom to catch the excess water.
Let sit for 3 hours in the refrigerator.
You could use the yoghurt without this step too but it won’t result in thick yoghurt that’s needed to make this dip.
2. In the meantime, chop the cucumber finely and place it on a kitchen paper towel and sprinkle a little salt and let sit for like 30 mins. The salt helps remove excess moisture from the cucumber. Then squeeze out any more water and keep aside.
3. Finely chop garlic and dill leaves.
4. Now mix all the ingredients along with lemon juice, olive oil and salt.
5. Stores well in an airtight container for a week in the refrigerator if this lasts for a week, which generally isn’t the case in our house 🙂
Okay now to use Tzatziki in this tricolor platter.
Chop carrots and/or orange bell pepper and cucumber length wise. Chop and steam some brocolli crowns. Arrange it to look like India flag. Use the dip for white in the flag. To make the Ashoka chakra. Dip some toothpicks in blue dye and chop into halves. Now to get all the 24 spokes, place 4 toothpick halves to make a cross and place 5 toothpick halves in each quadrant.