Non Recipe : Pongal

I know pongal is not today. As I have other recipe post for tomorrow, I am posting it today. Anyways its Bhogi so here I am..

Pongal at our household was always with fun and fight.

• It’s fun because of the rangolis and of course food. ;-) I love to do rangoli so usually for pongal it will be big one in the front yard with colors and same in the backyard too. As we worship Lord Sun for pongal, we do the puja in the backyard. (Close to Tulsi plant.) We decorate the place with rangolis and keep the sugarcane, turmeric all that stuff.
• Fight because of the pongal timing. They keep pongal paanai only during that particular muhurtham/nalla neram.  If it comes before 10am well and good else we have wait till that time for lunch ;-) we can have breakfast and all but all those savories and stuff can be eaten only after neivedhyam.  My appa wants me to be in the backyard during the entire puja, which means I can’t watch any special pongal programs in TV so fight again. (Silly me, but that’s how I was.)

But the moment we moved to Madras, I started missing those backyard pongal and in US literally nothing. No timings and all, just do the pongal before going to office, a quick neivedhyam and you are done with pongal festival. Thats what going to happen tomorrow. No sugarcane, no fresh coconut nothing. We always wish for what we don’t have right?

At least this year, in kiddo’s Tamil school they are celebrating pongal and they had competitions like drawing, singing, Tamil Elocution and couple more. I am glad they did so that I could explain him about the festival and its importance and all that stuff. I asked kiddo if he wanted to participate in any of these. I didn’t surprise me when he said yes to drawing but when he said yes to singing I was bit surprised. I know he learns music and all that. But doing it for a competition that too this particular Tamil song, I didn’t expect that. I am so happy because, I sang Bharathiyar song for my first competition and kiddo now sang Bharathiyar song too for his competition, but different songs though. Thanks to our music teacher who taught him song and perfected his tune and I hope he rendered the song without killing Tamil (He needs to improve his zh ). She made him sing at a different stage the same day. Also she taught the same song for me to play in veenai too. Glad that my first Tamil song in veenai was Mahakavi’s. (Errr I am a big fan of him.)

Here is his rendering and here is the picture that we taught him to draw for the competition. Only God knows what he did. We can see the pictures only on Jan 18th.

Wishing you all a very Happy Pongal.

Before letting you go, you can find my pongal recipes here. Both are easy versions. I do it in pressure cooker. :-)

• https://www.vidhyashomecooking.com/2014/01/13/sakarai-pongal-sweet-pongal/
• https://www.vidhyashomecooking.com/2012/06/04/ven-pongal/