Have you ever wanted to just feel the environs of a temple, while being at home? I mean, the smell of that old granite stone, with residue vibudhi and kungumam smeared all over it. Now here is an extremely strenuous and boring procedure that you can meticulously follow, so as to create the same feel in your kitchen.

1. Soak Black-eyed Peas overnight ( Not the singing dancing ones. Leave them alone. ) 

2. Boil them Black-eyed Peas. 

3. Heat some arbitrary amount of oil in a suitably sized pan and put some moong dal ( instead of urad dal), cumin seeds and asian mustard seeds into it.

4. Strain the water from the boiled peas  and put it into the pan. Stir randomly till you get bored.

5. Put some italian chunky pasta sauce into the pan. But before doing that, check for fungus in the bottle. If fungus is found, throw the bottle into trash and remind yourself to never buy that thing ever. Forget about this point. Stir a little.

6. Put sambar powder, haldi powder, salt, MTR chutney powder ( Idly/Dosa Kaara podi ) and asafoetida powder in proportions as deemed comfortable for your taste buds. Pour half a cup water which should help in stirring the whole thing.

7. Pour 6 cap-fulls of lemon juice concentrate. Mix the whole thing up very well.

At this point of the preparation, the smell that emanates from the pan will make you nostalgic and you will start reliving every single temple prasadam that you have ever devoured. I went to Himayat Nagar’s TTD temple. I like that temple. There was hardly anyone there every time I went. I went there regularly in my final year, bunking my GATE prep classes. Now tell me who would be willing to forgo curd rice at 6 am, after a refreshing early morning bath. Plus, the peace and serenity combined with forced divinity, was any day far more alluring to me, than a classroom fit to hold 50 skinny students, but overflowing with 300 oversized ones. Hopefully, I’ll go to that temple in a week and have their excellent curd rice once again. By the way, the temple-smell goes away in about 3-4 minutes and then settles down to something I could not smell. I have a very weak sense of smell you see. I can only smell really strong ones.

8. Take the pan off the stove.

Whatever you  have just made, is very much an edible preparation. As such, if you put some grated coconut, you can easily pass it off as kovil chundal. Name it whatever you want. Eat it with, bread, rice, roti, whatever. I had it with bread and it was filling.