Pongal 2012

This past weekend, I was in Austin to celebrate Pongal with my family. Pongal is the South Indian version of Thanksgiving. It's actually more of a Harvest Festival. It's a four day celebration where we give thanks to God, the Sun, our cows and our friends for a good harvest.



On the first day of Pongal, my true love gave to me...just kidding. The first day is kind of a psuedo-day. It's a time for cleaning the house and scrubbing it from top to bottom. This is called Boghi Pongal. We hired a maid service to take care of this. (Our middle name is "lazy".)

The second day, Perum Pongal, is when the festivities really start. We start early in the morning boiling milk and watching it run over as we think of God and our loved ones.



We then make traditional dishes out of our 5 staple crops-- plantains, yams, potatoes, white pumpkin and snow peas.



We offer jaggery sweetened rice pudding, rice and our "harvested" (dug up fresh from the bins at the grocery store, y'all) veggies. We thank God for a good harvest.



And then, we head out to the deck to do the same thing for the Sun.



And finally, after 4 hours of cooking, 2 hours of (watching the maids) clean, and an hour of pujas...WE EAT! The highlight of this year's spread was vegan pongal!



This is the first year my mom experimented with vegan pongal and it was amazing. I was a little bummed leading up to Pongal that I wouldn't be able to have any of the good stuff, so the vegan version made my day.

The other days of Pongal, we give thanks to our families, our elders and our cows. We did the family and elders stuff over the phone. And, well, the closest thing we have to a cow is this...