Daily Delight

Daily Delight is a Kerala food brand, and its frozen range is processed and packed in Kerala by Parayil Exports. The idea is simple: the vegetables and coconut that a Malayali cook would buy fresh at home are cut, frozen and shipped, so dishes like aviyal and thoran do not have to wait for a trip to a specialist market.

On our shelves Daily Delight sits in frozen vegetables and coconut, part of the frozen department. In frozen vegetables there is the cut vegetable mix for aviyal, snake gourd and tender jackfruit. In frozen coconut there is freshly grated coconut and thin coconut slices, both ready to cook straight from the bag.

Aviyal is the mixed vegetable dish of the Onam sadya, cooked with a coarse paste of coconut, green chilli and cumin, soured with a little yogurt and finished with curry leaves and raw coconut oil; the aviyal mix and the grated coconut together make it in well under an hour. Snake gourd, padavalanga, goes into thoran with coconut and mustard seeds or into a kootu with chana dal. Tender jack, idichakka, becomes a spiced thoran, and sliced coconut, thenga kothu, is fried until brown for chicken fry and kadala curry.

Store at -18°C and cook from frozen; grated coconut can go straight into a hot pan or be thawed briefly for chutney. Do not refreeze once thawed. For tinned and dried vegetables from the same kitchens, browse jackfruit and Sri Lankan vegetables, and for the oil that finishes most of these dishes, see coconut oil.