Parippu Vada or Masala Vada

I used to think that making parippu vada was not my cup of tea! Even though this was a childhood favorite of mine, I never really succeeded in making good parippu vada whenever I tried it during the early days of cooking on my own.Some of the best parippu vada I ever ate were from a street vendor at Bangalore, who used to sell these near to the college where I studied. In the part of California where we live, though we could get fairly good quality medu vada from the store, the quality of the store bought parippu vada wasn't so good and my hubbie used to complain about this - being nostalgic about the good quality, crispy vadas he had in his youth. So this time when he complained, I checked around in the internet for good recipes to make this and trusting my taste buds to recreate some of the good ones I had eaten before, I came up with this. And they did taste soooo good that out of the 30 vadas I made, the three of us finished half of that at one go- as we couldn't stop at one or two. Since these are heavy on the tummy, we ended up skipping the dinner to compensate for this over indulgence.
Ingredients:
Chana dal-3 cups
Onion-thinly diced1 cup
Ginger-thinly diced 2 tbs
Green chilli-thinly diced 4 nos
Red chilli-3 nos diced
Chilli powder-1/2 tsp
Cumin-1 tsp
Hing 3/4 tsp
Curry leaves-1/4 cup finely diced
Cilantro-1 cup finely diced
Salt-to taste
Method:
Sock the dal for at least 4hours and then drain it well. Keep a handful of this aside.Grind the rest of the dal along with red chilies and hing to a coarse paste without adding any water.The dal should be ground well so that you can make a ball with it if you press it in your closed fist. Now add all other ingredients including the dal that was kept aside and mix it all well. Make small balls the size of a ping pong ball and flatten them as thin as possible.Deep fry them at high, turning it over till it turns golden brown on both sides.I always make a test one first and taste it to make sure that I have added enough chilli and salt and before proceeding with the rest of the batch. After all, the key to a good vada is right amount of salt, chilli and spices..