Harvest Festival Cooking for Uruka and Magh Bihu 🎑🔥🌾🍚
Shalgam Bharta or Turnip Curry | Chicken Ghee Roast | Aloo Pitika or Mashed Potatoes with Mustard Oil, Onions, and Chillies | Red Lentil Fritters
Uruka marks the end of the harvest season. It's a night of festivities, bonfires, feasting, and building big houses made of hay, where people sometimes spend the night too. The next day the hay houses are burnt as an offering to the god of fire and Magh Bihu is celebrated with more food!
The food is usually rich in ingredients like butter, ghee, mustard oil, cream, etc. as it's eaten in very cold weather, sometimes outdoors. But it uses simple ingredients like grains, and various vegetables that are roasted over the fire or cooked inside bamboo reeds, or just in the kitchen! Fish is a must, besides other non-vegetarian foods, although I only made chicken curry.
This time I didn't make any desserts because I still have so many sweets and cakes left. But a large variety of traditional desserts called Pitha are made for the festival using rice, sticky rice, lentils, coconut, sesame, milk, and jaggery.
Similar festivals are celebrated all across the country such as Makar Sankranti, Lohri, and Pongal. Happy Uruka to all who celebrate!
And I made the turnips!! 😄😄