Poppadums - Wispy Thin Indian Crackers plus Dips

America's Test Chicken consists of two separate chickens, each with her own take on this cooking thing. Check out Chicken One's related blog, A Travel for Taste where she shares travel stories and recipes collected whenever she ventures abroad. And give Chicken Two's new, also-related blog, Poop from the Coop a read. There you can find stories about her personal adventure re-experiencing the kitchen after many years away. Please join our Facebook group to share your own recipes, kitchen practices and know-how. We are also on Pinterest and Instagram.

From Chicken One: Despite the recipe at the end for the luscious avocado dip, the star of this post isn't the dip, it's the crackers! These typical Indian thin wafers are called poppadums, papadums, papads, or about a thousand other spelling variations. The reason for this is that the word comes from the Tamil language spoken by about 52 million people in southern India and Sri Lanka. Because Tamil has a different alphabet than English, the translated spellings are all over the board. The Indian restaurant my husband and I frequented in Germany served poppadums with three types of dipping sauces as an appetizer. Think chips and salsa at a Mexican place. We loved them! Suffice it to say that these crackers are light, crispy and really fun to toast. They are made of urad flour, which is ground from a type of lentil, which also means they are gluten-free. Initially, the Chickens had decided to make poppadums from scratch, but we were unable to find the right kind of flour. That turned out to our advantage, but I still reserve the right to do so in the future. We made yet another pilgrimage to our favorite Indian market. There were about 20 types of poppadums on the shelf. Not knowing what we were looking for or at, we chose two types at random. Chicken Two toasted our papads and made an avocado "dip" from one of our favorite cookbooks, Indian Cooking Unfolded by Raghavan Iyer. The dip was amazingly close to guacamole. I made a topping from the same book called chile-spiked onion, which was freakishly similar to pico de gallo. We determined that, at least in this case, Indian food was Mexican food with Indian spices, or vice versa. In fact, cumin and cilantro feature heavily in both culinary traditions. I'm not posting the chile-spiked onion recipe here, but I have a killer pico recipe on my other blog, A Travel for Taste. Click this link for the recipe. The third dip in the picture below is a raita, an Indian yogurt sauce that can be flavored in many ways. This particular one had mint and cilantro. It wasn't spectacular, but I look forward to trying more combinations in the future!

From Chicken Two: This was really great fun to do, took very little time and the results were quite tasty.  I think the hardest part was gathering the ingredients!  I ran all over town to various stores looking for urad, or black lentil, flour because the recipe I found for poppadums called for using one or the other. (Actually, I found out later you can use other flours like chick-pea.) Of course these flours were not to be found in any of the usual food stores and I was a little panicky about being able to make these, thinking we were doing it from scratch. Thankfully, we decided to use the prepared ones, which we found at our favorite Indian market! Now the really fun part was watching them bubble up.  Place them as close to the broiler elements as possible for just a few seconds. (If your stove runs really hot, back off a little; use a lower rack.) Watch carefully! And I do mean WATCH! Here's what happened when I took my eyes off them for a second! (I swear, just a second!!!) And here's what they are supposed to look like. The result was light and crispy and wonderful to use with the dips mentioned by Chicken One. Check out the recipe below!

Avocado Pomegranate Dip for Poppadums

Ingredients

• 2 teaspoons coriander seeds

• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds

• 1/4 cup firmly packed fresh cilantro leaves and tender stems

• 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime or lemon juice

• 1 teaspoon coarse kosher or sea salt

• 1 small onion, coarsely chopped

• 3 large garlic cloves

• 2 - 3 fresh green serrano chiles, stems discarded

• 3 large ripe Hass avocados

• 1/2 cup fresh pomegranate seeds

Cooking Directions

1. Toast the coriander and cumin seeds in a dry skillet over medium-high heat, shaking every few seconds for about a minute until they turn reddish brown and smell nutty and citrusy. Place on small plate to cool. When cool, grind to a powder in a spice grinder.

1. Place cilantro, lime or lemon juice, salt, onion, garlic and chiles in a food processor. Pulse to mince; don't let it run continuously or there will be too much liquid.

1. Pit, peel and cube the avocados into 1/4-inch pieces. Place in medium bowl and fold in the cilantro and spice blend and pomegranate seeds.

1. Serve immediately or seal tightly and refrigerate for up to 2 days.