There are several individual blogs and pages that have millet recipes.
I wanted to make a momma of all pages for the millet recipes, so that
you can get all at the same page!
To start with, I have compiled the currently active pages that have the
millet recipes. In the future, I want to update this blog into sections for
breakfast, lunch, dinner, sweets, occasional recipes, so that you can quickly
find the ones that you are looking for.
Standard disclaimer: As with anything that you intake, you should consult with your doctor/nutritionist/dietitian on your personal health circumstances on what is appropriate for you.
Have you heard of Millets, by the way? Some of us would say No. Because we have forgotten.
Well, Millets is a staple food, just like rice and wheat. They consume just 10% of water compared to rice while production.
Millets are rich in micronutrients and better for health than rice and wheat – it releases sugar in the blood very slowly. Guess what that means? Less risk of diabetes and better diabetes management.
Now, about Proso Pongal… the recipe is the same as traditional rice Pongal, so no need to rack your brain!
Go get Proso Millet from your nearby retailer for around 70 rupees per kg. It’s a bit expensive than rice, but it’s all worth it considering the health benefits and the social cause of water conservation!
We have decided to skip rice Pongal from now on, and going for Millets Pongal at our home. How about you?!
We are all gearing up for making millets as an integral component of our food again in India. I am excited to share that India’s National Campaign on Millets is starting on September 28th in Pune! Details about the event can be found here.
I have been talking to a few households and they have lot of questions about how to replace rice or wheat with millets. The short answer is ‘Google!’, but that would not be palatable (no pun intended!). I intend to introduce how millets can be introduced as meal item, rather than just a breakfast or dinner item.
I came across this awesome ‘Lemon Millet Rice‘ recipe by Swasthi. It would answer the question about how millets can be used as a meal. In this recipe, Swasthi has used Kodo (Varagu in Tamil) millet, but she says we can use other millets like foxtail, little and barnyard too!
I encourage you to go through it, give it a try, and let me know your feedback in the comments. It could be great if you could post a video of your trial too!
In my recent post, I wrote about the major two reasons why as a country and people, India should shift to millets from rice and wheat.
That post received a very good response as a guest post, and several people wanted to change to millets from rice and wheat, but they were not sure what and how.
The good news is that I found a very nice article that gives a gentle introduction to millets which you can use as a starting point to introduce millets into your diet.
The article covers the types of millets that are generally available in India, their content and benefits, and guess what, a few millets-based recipes too! I would strongly suggest that you go through this post for your own introduction to the millets.
Disclaimer: As with everything that we consume, we need to be careful about the balance and the suitability, because what we eat, we become, and there are medicinal side-effects and consequences too because of what we eat. As the article points out, people with thyroid issues should be careful about replacing rice and wheat completely with millets. The reader is advised to consult their dietitian, doctor and the nutritionist before changing their food consumption habits.
By the way, I found a good book on healthy millet recipes, you might want to check that out too, for your reference – ”
India has gone through roller-coaster rides in terms of food. There have been huge famines, but of late, there’s huge availability of food in terms of rice and wheat. We should be pretty happy, but at the same time, got to be very cautious on what we consume, as the rice and wheat food has led to chronic health conditions because of the unhealthy life style that we adopt.
Last week, I saw an article on how rice and wheat are consuming too much of water to grow, and how it is not sustainable. No, this is not a propaganda of the Genetically Modified crops lobby. I also read another article on how heart diseases in India has increased in the past 26 years.
Reading these has led me to believe that we should cut down on rice and wheat cultivation and grow more millets, which are healthy as well as consume less water. A healthy lifestyle is of course necessary, but not every one of us get the opportunity (sometimes it is even a luxury) to exercise, work out and stay fit. Diet is an important component in the equation (by the way, the whole equation is Diet + Exercise + Less Stress) for a healthy lifestyle.
As we already know, because of our sedentary life style, India has been declared as the diabetic capital of the world, so we should only help ourselves with less rice!
Here are some stuff that I have in my list to improve the situation:
Cut down on the rice and wheat consumption myself, and let my family and friends know
Talk to the land-owners and agriculturists that I know about this and make them grow more millets
Talk to the healthy food restaurants chains about this and make them deliver more millets-based food rather than rice and wheat based
Oh, and yes, share a lot of millets-based menus and recipes!
So, what is your plan of action? A small step in the right direction makes a lot of difference!
Please feel free to re-blog this blog. This is public information, written for awareness for everyone’s well-being. Spread it far and wide.
Some 10 years back, I left coffee. I was told by someone that coffee and tea are nervous stimulants, which, when taken without discretion, will lead to nerves weakness. The effect of nerves weakness will be the inability to sit peacefully at one place. No, I am not talking about meditation. Even for getting your work done at your computer, looking and attending to files in the office in a careful way, doing any work diligently, studying for your exams be it school or college, you need calm and alertness, which will be available to you only if your system is stable.
Coffee and tea will give you the sudden briskness with which you can carry on with your immediate tasks, but on a long run, it will lead to inability to focus and sit calm and alert to attend to whatever you are doing.
More so in the old age, when you have nothing much to do – you are retired, your kids are settled, and you enjoy your bliss – if you find yourselves restless, that will be very sad. Your mind will want to be active, but your body won’t co-operate, and you will be a mess.
There’s one more aspect to it – which is milk that’s added to the coffee and tea, in the Indian context. If you don’t add milk, it’s even worse, because the ill-effects is more-prone and immediate.
But, if you have coffee and tea with milk, just consider where the milk is coming from. In western countries, there are complaints that cows are being artificially milked and they are sent to death long time before they are supposed to die – because they extract the milk faster and faster, and the cow loses the ability to give milk pretty soon. Even in India, you might have seen loads of cows and buffaloes being carried in lorries and trucks. Where do you think they are being taken to? To get killed because of their inability to give milk.
Food that goes inside us is supposed to nourish us and give energy. Cow’s/buffalo’s milk, however, makes us dull and lethargic. Cows’ milk is meant for calves, and not for humans.
And food that goes into us is supposed to be a blessing and enable us to become better human beings. Food that come from sources as mentioned above, and having the properties that tend to negatively influence our ability to perform at our full potential may not be good food options, isn’t it?
Especially in the context of India Population, where loads of milk is consumed by millions of people, it’s pretty necessary that we consider.
Please feel free to re-blog this blog. This is public information, written for awareness for everyone’s well-being. Spread it far and wide.
What would be your take on being a Nature’s friend?
There are so many themes that are talked about today on Nature or the environment, but to me it’s about protecting and nurturing the wonderful planet that we have been given. It’s a privelege to be in this algae-bluish-green rock that’s 2 stones away from the sun, breathing the fresh air, thriving and frolicking in this awesome earth!
But, for our conveniences and comfort, we have almost destroyed this planet in the past 3 decades in so many ways. Especially, the last two decades has seen the individualism rise to its peak – with people looking for individual comfort, diverging from the landscape of the past of few well-to-do and many minions. Well, that’s fine, only if we didn’t have this many heads! Especially, in India, the 1.3 billion!
Once a person is here in this earth as a human being, you cannot ask them to limit their aspirations – be a miser on their wishes, earn less money and live within the means – all these advices are not going to bear fruit – in this age of technology enablement, democracy and freedom. The only other option is not to bring in more and more human beings to this planet. We all have that choice as individuals, and if we really care about the Nature, that’s the best way of being the Nature’s friend!
Let me explain in more detail with some statistics – with data – for the folks who are not convinced of this.
Out of the 7 billion population of the world, 1.3 billion are in India! That’s 17% of world’s population living in 2% of the world’s land! You will very well agree that every human being need the basics of – air, water, food, space to live, education and job. Let me just take these basic 6 parameters without going into other extended parameters like energy, aspirations, travel and entertainment. Now, let’s look at where we stand in each of the 6 basic parameters:
Air
There’s oxygen depletion happening in earth, and they say that by 2025, we will have 40% less oxygen. Can you imagine breathing 7 times a minute instead of the regular 12 times a minute?
Water
Several business stalwarts are beating their chest that they have invested on water resources since the next world war is going to be on water! Fair enough if you want to be an autocrat who want to rule and control large masses of people, but if you want to be a sensible human being, you would rather contribute to creating awareness about containing the no. of people such that we all have water to drink. Water conservationists talk about conserving every drop of water from the tap, saving every water resource, etc. That’s all fine, but if the no. of human beings keep on increasing, how are they going to find land to live and water to use? They will encroach lakes, and thus bring down the amount of water available, in addition to consuming more & more water!
Food
No doubt India has done well on agriculture, but of late, we have lost our traditional grains and millets, and also looking for imports of wheat from foreign countries! This could be because of mismanagement, but the point is if we mismanaging with the existing levels of population itself, how will we able to manage more? We should be ashamed to that the sons and daughters of our agricultural workers do not even eat a single good meal everyday. As it stands, this scenario does not support ‘Nature’.
Space to live
Needless to say – the more no. of more human beings – more demand for living space – lakes, foothills, riversides enroached and houses built – and we cry foul and blame God when earthquakes, floods and natural disasters kill people – as happened in Uttaranchal recently. Well, is it the Nature’s fault ?
Education
70% of India lives in villages, and we all know the story of rural education. No intervention is helping because of the sheer no. of children that need be educated. Quality is already suffering, and in addition, if we have more and more babies, who is going to educate them? Let’s not forget that uneducated, unskilled people are a burden to the nation than being assets. If they are not educated, how will they be sensible enough to take care of ‘Nature’ ?
Job
Our workforce population between the age of 22 and 60 is going to increase from 575 million to 810 million in the span of next 15 years. This is without counting the babies that might come by in the next 2 decades. How are we going to give job opportunities to them, and what will happen to the ‘Nature’ while we build office and factory infrastructure for these people?
As it stands, we are looking at a very gloomy, bleak picture at Nature and its resources. We have leveraged to the maximum extent possible, wherein the demand can never be met with the supplies. It’s time that we need to reduce our demands by containing the no. of people – abstaining from having babies for the next two decades, and every one of us working in whatever ways possible to spread the message and making personal decisions in life – to be single, to marry but not to generate babies, but may be adopt, etc.
Government policies can be enforced to reward familes without children or families that totally adopt children, and not give the financial benefits for the families that generate babies. India, being a democratic country, will take many years for the people to accept any government initiated measures – and economic carrot being the prime motivator that could work in this market driven picture. We cannot enforce things on people, and we have known by experience that it does not work. Only way is to create awareness.
The urban people can adopt. The rural can stop generating babies for labour, while their economic wellbeing can be taken care by social enterpreneurship, NGOs and government measures.
If we all put our heart and soul on this, this can really work, and we will be doing a very big favour to the Nature by being a sensible race that nurture this planet and not destroy it for its selfish needs.
Otherwise, any amount of trees planted is not going to help. Any amount of water conservation is not going to help. And any amount of pollution control is not going to help. Because, we have exceeded the threshold of those measures being helpful and being scalable.
Please send your comments to populationvision2050@gmail.com
The above is just to give you an idea about the population density in cities. And, the amount of food that is served to the people out there. Restaurants and hotels are a major chunk in the food distribution. We need to closely look at the food generation, utilization and wastage.
Ingredients of food like rice, fruits, vegetables, grains come from villages to cities. They are then distributed to the restaurants and hotels. The restaurants and hotels prepare the food, and deliver it to customers. The customers eat and they waste too!
A study says that 3 out of 10 people all over the world are hungry each day. It’s a crime that we waste the food when there’s non-availability of food in some portions of the world. I have seen in restaurants and hotels that lot of food is getting wasted and just thrown away. It’s not only a cost problem, but it’s also a wastage and an environment problem, as unsegregated waste leads to environment issues.
Many steps can be taken by the restaurants and food chains in the city to prevent food waste:
When they procure, they carefully look at the demand-supply situation, and order only the quantity required
In spite of the above precaution, if ingredients are still not being used which might go waste, donate it to the elderly homes, orphanages and needy people
When the cooked food is served to the customer, and if the customer wastes it (which can be identified by the server as above some limit), then a ‘waste processing fee’ should be levied on the customer to clear the waste. Many times, especially in India, only money brings awareness and commitment to the people, so they will be afraid of paying penalty, and will not waste food. They will order only the amount of food that they can eat. This ‘waste processing fee’ could be anywhere between 10 to 15 percent of the total cost of the ordered food. Notice boards can be kept in the hotel to make the customer aware that they will be charged if they waste food.
Ingredients can be shared among the food chains and hotels so that they don’t order stuff that is already available in some other hotel in the city. An online database of availability can be maintained between the partnering hotels so that they know among each other on what stuff is surplus
By following ideas like the above, food and its ingredients wastage can be considerably reduced. Restaurants and hotels definitely have a huge role to play in avoiding food waste.
How would you feel – if you meticulously study from your 5 years of age to your college, and then just thrown out of the circulation without recognition?
That’s exactly the same when you throw & waste the food that’s put on your plate.
The food has come all the way from earth, taking in resources like water, labour & sweat, grew for 3-4 months, got transported from the village to a processing center, and then to your city, reached the shop, and you bought it. And how wise is it for you to just dump it in the trash just because you can’t eat it? If you can’t eat it, why do you allow it to be put in your plate in the first place? Or why did you ask for that extra second serving when you well know that you cannot complete it, and your stomach is full? Think !
We have a whole lot of people who don’t have one good food a day, and here we are wasting food in our own homes, not to mention the marriage halls and big show-off functions. I saw idlis and vadas (tasty) ones getting wasted in one of the institutions which expressly discourages wasting food ! Now, that’s sad. I am going to talk to the Principal and let him know.
At all levels, starting from buying the groceries, to cooking, to having the food in the plate, think twice, thrice & four times, whether you really need it. With the kind of population we have in India, we are going to have problems buying carrot (not caret!). And when that happens, you will feel the pinch! We need to change !
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