R053Vanpayar Thoran
Brown cowpea with grated coconut
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
The re-engineeringNo coconut at all, which is unusual in this book and deliberate — this is the recipe for a day when the saturated fat has to go somewhere else. Oil at 10 g, 300 g of greens against 150 g of dal, and lime rather than more salt at the finish.
Greens and dal in the same pot is the plainest good idea in South Indian cooking, and cheera is the green Kerala grows most easily: amaranth, 3.29 g of protein and 4.41 g of fibre per 100 g at 31 kcal, in the ground everywhere from a March sowing. The dish takes twenty-five minutes, needs no soaking, and delivers 12 g of protein and 8 g of fibre a serving at 187 kcal with 2 g of saturated fat. If someone asks what a re-engineered Kerala dish looks like, show them this one.
Before you start: Wash the greens in three changes of water — amaranth grows low and carries grit — and chop the tender stalks along with the leaves; they have more fibre than the leaves and cook in the same time.
Parippu with Cheera
Active 20 minutes Total 30 minutes
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓150 g (¾ cup) moong dal (split skinned green gram)
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) ground turmeric
- ✓450 ml water
- ✓10 g (2 tsp) coconut oil
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) mustard seed
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) cumin seed
- ✓60 g (about 6) shallots, sliced
- ✓12 g (about 4 cloves) garlic, sliced
- ✓15 g (about 3) green chillies, slit
- ✓20 fresh curry leaves
- ✓300 g amaranth leaves and tender stalks (cheera), washed and chopped
- ✓3.5 g (⅔ tsp) 70:30 salt (M07)
- ✓10 g (2 tsp) lime juice
Allergens: Mustard.
Equipment: Pressure cooker or heavy pot; 26 cm pan. Substitute: one pot does both if you cook the dal first, tip it out, wilt the greens, and return the dal.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 187 kcal |
| Protein | 12 g |
| Fibre | 8 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 25 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 33 g |
| Sugars | 5 g |
| Fat | 4 g |
| Saturated fat | 2 g |
| Sodium | 270 mg |
From ICMR-NIN IFCT 2017 and USDA FoodData Central. Per-serving figures stay the same when you scale.
Method — tap a step to mark it done, tap a time to start a timer
- Rinse the moong dal twice and pressure-cook with the turmeric and 450 ml of water for at full pressure. Release naturally. In a pot, . The dal should be soft but not a purée.
- Heat the oil in the pan over medium-high heat, add the mustard seed and wait for it to pop, 30–45 seconds. Add the cumin and let it sizzle 10 seconds.
- Add the shallots, garlic, green chilli and curry leaves. Cook until the shallots are soft and the garlic is pale gold, . Do not let the garlic brown; it turns bitter.
- Add the greens in two batches — they will look like far too much and will collapse to a quarter of the volume. Toss over high heat until wilted, glossy and dark, .
- Cook more, until the water the greens released has gone from the base of the pan. Amaranth holds a surprising amount and a wet base makes a watery dal.
- Add the cooked dal and the salt. Stir, mashing lightly against the pan, and simmer to bring the two together. It should be thick enough to hold a shallow furrow from a spoon for a second.
- Take off the heat, stir in the lime juice, and taste. The lime is not a garnish — it is what lifts the dish, and it is the reason the salt can stay at 3.5 g.
Why this worksAmaranth's leaves are high in oxalate and in soluble iron, and the vitamin C in the lime juice, added off the heat where it survives, improves the absorption of that non-haem iron in the same meal — a real and specific mechanism rather than a general claim. The garlic goes in early because allicin's pungency needs to mellow into the dish; the lime goes in last because its volatile aromatics do not survive heat at all.
Sourcing note
Any tender green works: amaranth (green or red), spinach, colocasia leaf — which must be thoroughly cooked — drumstick leaf, water spinach, or beet tops. Frozen chopped spinach at 300 g, thawed and squeezed hard, is a good substitute; an unsqueezed block will flood the pan. Red amaranth gives a startling magenta dal that tastes identical to the green.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: 25 g of net carbohydrate at a pulse glycaemic index, an estimated load near 8, with 8 g of fibre and an acid in the pot. There is very little in this cuisine that does more per calorie.
Blood pressure: 270 mg per serving. Amaranth is also potassium-rich, which is the other half of the blood-pressure equation and the subject of Chapter 10.
Cholesterol: 2 g of saturated fat — the coconut-free version of a Kerala dal, and proof that the reduction can be total where coconut is not the flavour. Garlic is the one aromatic in this book whose effective dose overlaps ordinary cooking: pooled across 108 trials and 7,137 participants, garlic gave −3.7/−2.0 mmHg and LDL cholesterol −5.9 mg/dL (Behrouz et al., 2026). Twelve grams here is three cloves.
Swap it
Toor dal → 130 g, pressure-cooked 6–8 minutes. Earthier, heavier, and it stands up to stronger greens.
Drumstick leaves (muringayila) → 200 g, added at step 4 for 2 minutes only. The highest-protein green in the Kerala list at 6.41 g per 100 g. Claim nothing therapeutic for it; a meta-analysis of nine trials of moringa supplementation found no consistent cardiometabolic effect at very low certainty (Crișan et al., 2025).
Add 30 g grated coconut at step 5 → the more usual Kerala version, with about 3 g more saturated fat per serving.
Add 2 eggs, beaten in at step 6 → protein to 17 g per serving, and the dish becomes a one-bowl meal. (Allergen: this swap introduces egg.)
Make ahead · store · freeze
Cook the dal up to three days ahead; the greens want to be done fresh, and take four minutes. Fridge 3 days finished, though the greens dull in colour. Freeze 2 months; texture is fine, colour is not. Reheat with a splash of water, 3–4 minutes, and add fresh lime after reheating.
Leftovers
Thin it into a soup, or thicken it and use it as a filling for pathiri. Cold, with rice and lime, it is a better packed lunch than most things.
Troubleshooting
Watery: step 5 was skipped. Cook the greens' water off before the dal goes in.
Bitter: the garlic browned, or colocasia leaves were undercooked. Colocasia needs a full 6–8 minutes.
Grey and dull: overcooked greens. Four minutes at high heat, not eight at low.
Serve with
R015 Matta Rice · R008 Ragi Dosa · R027 Ayala Varuthathu · R093 Coconut Chutney
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