Vella Aval | Aval Nanachadhu | Beaten rice with jaggery

No, the title doesn't indicate white - beaten rice. Vellam also means jaggery. So the title is jaggery + beaten rice. In kerala people also call it as aval nanachadhu - literally meaning beaten rice soaked. This is a quick preparation made in minutes and ideally used for poojas / neivedhyams.

Though there are a lot of diabetics in my family, almost everyone of them don't like sweets. Atleast I have not seen them craving for sweets. So I have never thought of making sweets in the "diabetic-friendly" way. When I took up this topic for this BM it was a real challenge for me. Somehow I came up with 2 recipes. But for the third recipe I really had to rack my brains. That is when H asked for some snacks last week; one day evening saying he is very hungry. And I immediately prepared this dish. After he finished eating I realized that this would be an ideal "diabetic-friendly" sweet!! But I didn't take any snaps. So after 2 days I again prepared this recipe for evening snacks. 

To make it diabetic friendly, I did a small change. Decreased the amount of jaggery and added little dates to make the recipe more interesting.

Ingredients:

Aval / beaten rice - 1 cup
Coconut (grated) - 3 tbsp
Jaggery (grated) - 2 tbsp
Dates (seedless) - 4 nos
Salt - a pinch
Cashewnuts - few

Method:

• Wash/soak the beaten rice/aval preferably in mineral water. Wash it for about 20-30 seconds and strain the aval. We do not want the aval to be soaked and soft. Rather it should be crunchy.
• Chop the dates into small pieces.
• Mix the aval, dates, jaggery and coconut. 
• Also add a pinch of salt. Mix well and garnish with some cashewnuts.

Instant snack is ready!!

Notes:

• The salt enhances the taste of the jaggery. So add only a pinch.
• We can garnish with other nuts like ground nuts, badam etc..

Check out the Blogging Marathon page for the other Blogging Marathoners doing this BM#66