Milagu sadham - Black pepper rice

Some of you might already know that I plan my meals for the week every Friday and do my grocery shopping accordingly. Once, while I was planning the menu and wanted to try something new, I browsed a few of my favourite Indian recipe blogs and found this recipe in 'Sailu's Kitchen'. I bookmarked the page and did not prepare it until the Halloween day.

When we were planning for our Halloween potluck, I decided to make all my food based on Halloween theme. I think, many of you would agree, it is not that easy to make Indian food look 'Halloweeny'. I wanted to make orange and black rice for the main course. Orange rice - hands down, I decided to make my mom's special Tomato rice... When I was racking my brain on how to make black rice, I remembered this recipe that I had bookmarked... And here goes my Halloween rice...

I substituted black sesame seeds for white to intensify the black colour. One thing, I loved about this recipe is, you can make the powder in advance (add salt to taste) and it stores well for quite a long time. You can just mix the powder to rice with a teaspoon of sesame oil and food is ready in minutes. Now, along with Dal powder (paruppu podi), this has also become a staple for quick and easy lunch.

It is interesting to note that, the three main ingredients of this recipe, pepper, sesame seeds and curry leaves are all native to India and unknown to rest of the world for a very long time. I was reading up on history and was surprised to find that pepper was so expensive and rare in the west, that only the rich and royal could afford it. It was even treated as  money, that in Portugal, it was used to pay rent. Hope you all enjoy this recipe as my friends and I did at our Halloween potluck.