This Yugadi has been special for me for the sweetest of reasons - bella (jaggery). I was blessed with a serendipitous discovery of the famed Mangalore "ole bella" - dark, brown palm jaggery, in a neighbourhood store. Not only that, a thoroughbred city-girl that I am, I finally got to appreciate the nuances of various forms of jaggery - I was very generously allowed to taste exotic forms of jaggery like karupatti vellam/ thaati bella (palm jaggery) and norae bella (special form of sugarcane jaggery). As if this was not enough, definitely the jewel in the crown, rather, the icing on my (jaggery) cake was the taste of "nolen gur er sandesh" I had just this evening, courtesy, my Bengali friend. She managed to fly down the very last batch of them with her - nolen gur (date palm jaggery) is highly sensitive to temperature and so at the max - a day's shelf life; nolen gur season ended much before the start of IPL- in Jan itself! Bless her! Oh! the small, sweet pleasures of life!
For a "gur taste of bella", head to http://muse-a-day.blogspot.com/.
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