Subscribe
My mother used to make turmeric halwa, but I didn’t like it and rarely ate it. Since asthma runs in our family, I used to catch colds and coughs very easily. I clearly remember that a school trip was coming up in two weeks, but my cold, cough, and fever were so bad that my father refused to let me go. At that time, on my mother’s insistence, I started taking one to one-and-a-half teaspoons of turmeric halwa every night with warm milk, and within 10 days I felt much better. Seeing my recovery, I was finally given permission to go on the trip. Even today, every winter I make this recipe and give it to my children like medicine, at least two or three times a week.
Wash, peel, and grind 250 g raw turmeric into a paste. Heat 50-100 g pure ghee in a pan and sauté the turmeric paste until it starts releasing ghee. Add 100 g gram flour (besan) and roast it well. Add 5 g dry ginger powder (saunth) and continue roasting. Add jaggery according to taste and a little water, stirring continuously to avoid lumps. Keep cooking until the mixture thickens into a halwa. Let it cool, store it in the refrigerator, and consume daily. You can adjust the quantity of besan as per taste, using less besan makes it healthier, but children usually prefer it with more besan.
My Food Story is a collection of stories and recipes that celebrate India’s traditional plant-based ingredients sourced from local biodiversity. You can see these recipes on our interactive dashboard (https://www.cseindia.org/page/myfoodstory).
Sonika Kulshrestha is a homemaker from Uttar Pradesh