Kalyana Murungai Vadais or Pankarapaan Beiri

A classic Madurai-famous Sourashtra snack made with rice and three native, medicinal greens: kalyana murungai or pankarapaan, murungai or drumstick leaves, and thoothuvalai or the leaves of the purple-fruited pea eggplant. I've used both the Sourashtra name and the Tamil names for each of these invaluable greens in the recipe below.

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Ingredients

For the vadais

1 cup parboiled rice
1 tablespoon urad dal
A generous handful of cleaned kalyana murungai leaves/ mullu murungai/ pangara paanu
A few thoothuvalai keerai leaves or mushti paanu, optional
A cup murungai keerai/drumstick leaves/ sevga bhajji, optional
½ teaspoon siththirathai/lesser galangal [Alpinia officinarum]
¼ teaspoon athimaduram/ liquorice [Glycyrrhiza glabra]
¼ teaspoon val milagu/cubeb pepper [Piper cubeba]
¼ tsp sukku or dry ginger
Salt to taste
A little rice flour if needed
2-3 cups of oil for deep frying

Paruppu podi

4 tablespoons Roasted gram dal/pappulu/pottu kadalai
1 tablespoon urad dal
2-3 red chillies
½ teaspoon black pepper
Salt to taste

Instructions

Soak the rice and the urad dal for 4-5 hours. Together is fine.
Prepare the podi by dry-roasting all the ingredients except the salt just until fragrant. Powder in a spice grinder, add salt and set aside.
Wash the kalyana murungai leaves, and remove the stalks and veins from each leaf. This is important, as these will not grind well and produce an overly fibrous dough.
Drain the rice and the urad dal almost completely. Grind the prepped leaves with the rice and urad dal—adding no additional water. You want a dough at the end of this, not a batter. If you need to, you can sprinkle a little rice flour to bring it together into a tight dough ball.
Add the siththirathai, athimaduram and val milagu powder, and salt to taste. Mix well.
Now make small lime-sized balls of the dough and set aside.
Heat oil in a heavy pan and while it’s heating, start patting the dough balls into small patties. Don’t make them too thin; they should be just smaller than the palm of your hand. You can use a wet cloth to get these ready or an oiled banana or other edible leaf. Avoid using plastic!
Once the oil is hot enough, slip the patties one at a time into the hot oil. They will sink to the bottom, but slowly start to rise. Use a slotted spoon to keep them immersed, coaxing them to puff. Once they’ve puffed and are floating—flip them to cook the other side.
And once they’re turning just slightly golden, you can lift them out and set them on paper towels to absorb any excess oil.
Repeat this process with all the remaining patties.
Arrange the warm vadais on a plate and sprinkle each with the podi prepared earlier. You can store any remaining podi for subsequent use (or substitute for your regular chutney podi or idli podi).

Notes

To make this the authentic Sourashtra Pangarapaan Bhairi or Beiri, use a mix of murungai keerai, thoothuvalai, and kalyana murungai leaves as noted in the recipe above.
Kalyana Murungai goes by a few names: mullu murungai and pangara paanu (“paanu” is leaf in Sourashtra) or pangarapaan/ pankarapaan. I’ve seen it explained as a “type of spinach with small leaves,” but there cannot be a more erroneous description than that.
If you can’t get kalyana murungai and thoothuvalai, then you can substitute just murungai keerai and curry leaves (says Rani of Rani’s Sourashtra Kitchen) or use some other local green (Rakesh Raghunathan skips the search and just uses mudakathan/Indravalli greens/Cardiospermum halicacabum)
If you can't find athimaduram/licorice and val milagu/cubeb or tailed black pepper, you can leave those out, but do not leave out the siththirathai!
Siththirathai is usually sold as dried rhizomes, which you can powder or soak and then grind with rice and leaves. If you follow the latter method, use a rhizome that is about ½” or so long and make sure to soak it at the same time as you soak rice or it will not soften sufficiently. Hand pound it before grinding or it will not grind!