Recently I have heard from a friend that Bangalore has too many foodies and after started to write reviews, I come across too many food festivals. One such food festival is this, “Avere Bele Mela” known as Averekai Festival, Averebele Jathre (Jathre means festival).
Averebele or Averekai is nothing but Indian beans/Cow beans and Mochikkai in Tamil – This festival is celebrated to welcome the harvest of the bean in the winter season. This festival is celebrated annually in the month January and this year this festival ends by tomorrow. This festival is celebrated for almost 18 days around Sajjan Rao Circle, V.V. Puram, the famous, “Thindi Street” means “Eat Street” of Bangalore.
This festival is organized by Mrs. Geetha Sivakumar of Vasavi Condiments who decided to help Avarekai farmers by helping them in selling their averekai. Not only they (Vasavi Condiments) sell the raw averekai but also they prepare varieties of sweets, savories, rice, dosa and so many dishes with this averekai and host this event. They put up massive shamianas outside their store with open air kitchens and prepare these dishes.
Being Bangalore for almost 5 yrs, this was my first visit to Averekai Festival, which I came to know through one of our Whatsapp group (foodie friends) J and thanks to those people’s. There was three shamianas with the same dishes in the street, they have a coupon system to purchase the bill, and the packing of the dishes and serving of dishes are too good. I had akki roti and ragi roti, then packed little quantity in each and every variety, for my kids as they were to school.
I stunned when I got to see the dishes from Gulab Jamun till Vada’s made out of Averekai. I heard there will be crowd and so decided to go by a week day morning (Friday) as I hope the crowd would be little less. Also my hope came to existence, as there was only little crowd, which helped to click beautiful pictures.
So people those who stay in Bangalore, try to go there and enjoy variety of sweets, savories and dishes. Price was reasonable, hardly including packing most of varieties it came around some Rs.600.
Also I got to see some street vendors selling kitchen utensils on the road side, and got a kadai, as the quality was good and price was less.
Madraasi - a tamilian tales 