Laddus for the season

The ashram is currently playing host to thousands of guests who have come visiting from all over the world to celebrate Navaratri.

So some of us TTC Phase I volunteers went to the ashram today to help out in the kitchen. We thought we'd have the usual vegetable cutting routine. But we were in for a surprise when we were given 'Laddu seva'!


I never thought rolling round sweet laddus in the ashram would be so much fun! Large plates brimming with tiny white spinach seeds mixed into jaggery (unrefined sugar) syrup were placed in front of us. We sat around these plates, quite confident that rolling the mix into tiny balls would be a cakewalk (pardon me for the pun!).

But we were wrong. The mix was sticky, gooey and hot. It stuck to the palms of one hand and every time we tried to use the fingers of the other hand to strip the mix off the palm, the fingers would be covered with the stuff! If we let the hot mix cool a bit, the adhesive quality would reduce considerably, and then it would have been mighty hard to roll the mix into balls!

We tried rubbing ghee (clarified butter) on our palms and then handled the mix, but the palms got the mix stuck on alright! Finally someone brought corn flour and then we lightly dusted our hands with the flour before handling the mix. Now we could roll it into round 'laddus'.


There was yet another trick to making good round laddus. We had to take some mix into our right palm and use the forefinger and middlefinger of our left hand to shape the mix into a round ball. We needed to use strength in order to make the laddu really hard and sticky. Else it would come undone and break off into a powder.

Yes, I learnt a lot today!