My first ever “Modak”

Written on Aug 25, 2017. Edited on Sept 2, 2019.

Happy Ganesh Chathurthi everyone !! Ganesha has indeed done his job today by removing a major social obstacle in the form of Baba Ram Rahim by putting him in jail. It’s unbelievable though, that the Haryana Govt was caught napping and all of us are praying that the mobs are brought under control soon. Even God cannot fix stupidity :(:(. As the armed forces and police deal with the situation in Sirsa and Panchkula, many of us can only pray for the people impacted by this mad mob.

While we are not celebrating Ganesh Chathurthi today because of my mother-in-law’s passing, I wanted to make the “Modakam”. It’s one of the few sweets that is a favourite of mine but my mother has never managed to make it when I was young. She would make the filling and it would be yummy, but the outer covering would often split, and I love the outer covering !! When I started cooking, I had no patience to make sweets and both Krishnan and I don’t have a sweet tooth so I never made the “modakam”. I would keep checking around with friends to see if their mothers made the “modakam” and bum a few :).

Once we relocated to Delhi, “modakam” became rare and that was that. But this Ganesh Chathurthi is different. Ganesha brought me a few people who I need to thank today – Nisha for introducing OPOS to me, Ramakrishnan and UBF for inventing-discovering and continuing to discover-innovate new OPOS techniques and finally to OPOStar Roopa Raghav for posting her OPOS recipe on the FB page. I followed her recipe and made the “modakam” – and they turned out yum ! Ranjeet came home on a surprise visit and he liked them too. The filling got a little chewy when cold, but on warming the “Modakam” the filling became fine. Some of them cracked a bit on steaming, but the majority stayed intact.

Modakam and Modak are one and the same – south India calls it Modakam and Maharashtrians call it Modak. Am not aware of any difference in the filling though I may be wrong.

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