Badi making

Badi is a traditional preparation made in Uttrakhand where urad dal is mixed with some vegetables like arabi stems called naal badi, radish, Pumpkin, Pethas and dried up in the sun during the winter seasons.

I know for  sure that this is also made in Uttar Pradesh, Himanchal,Punjab and Rajasthan too. This becomes a good preservative of the dal and vegetables and it is then fried and made into a curry eaten with chappatis or rice. May be in the winters when nothing much was available in the hills this was the items to which housewives turned for their  cooking and it is often cooked at home in the hills. However this has become a delicacy for us. When ever we travel to the hills our baggage consists of a lot of variety of these and the hill dals of beans,soya and the masalas and what not. In fact many times at the airport, I had to pay excess baggage charge, much to the annoyance  of my husband and children, but the joy of getting this stuff home to Hyderabad was unmatched. My mother always supplied us with a variety of badi and mungodis, moong dal preparation, year after year for many years and now when she is not able to do this due to her age, we get this from the cooperative stores of the hills of Nainital, Haldwani and Almora.This year there was no travel to home town or any other place due to carona. I tried my hands at making these petha badi  at home. It was a sheer joy of achieving some thing great. My memory of childhood is of lines and lines of these being made for days together in my grandparents home and other friends homes. My small effort, the  time and labour spent with some inputs from Suresh Pande too in the background preparstion, made me appreciate the labour of the housewives, un recognised and unsung that was used to make such a vast amount of these and some thing which is taken for granted by many and the famillies. It was sheer joy looking at my achievement.