When that sly red chilli in the hotter-than-you-thought curry gave you a nasty hiccup, remember who came running to help? The invincible bowl of curd! That's right, if you take to curd, half your food issues are already solved, for this magic food shoots down a lot of unnecessary digestive problems right away. Let's start with what the nutrition chart says about curd. If you consume 6-ounce of curd, you will provide your body with 100-150 calories, 2g of saturated fat, 3.5g of fat, 20g of sugar and about 8-10g of protein. It also provides your body with 20% of your daily vitamin D portion with 20% of your daily calcium value. That's a great start, isn't it? Now, let's notch things up a bit and quickly glance through the benefits of including curd in your daily diet. 1. It helps improve digestion, as it easily makes it possible for the body to absorb its nutrients. Also quite the winner when dealing with stomach upset and bloating 2. Curd is a neutralizer. It brings down the heat produced by other foods in the body, and helps in the absorption of their nutrients as well. 3. Curd undeniably boosts immunity and keeps you healthy. 4. And yes, it does help with losing weight. The calcium in it prevents the body from pumping more cortisol that keeps hormonal imbalances from taking place. 5. Curd also relaxes, reduces stress and lowers blood pressure. These are a few among the many more virtues one can sing about this wonder food. But how do you include this in your daily diet? Of course, scooping it with a spoon and slurping it up directly is one way. But we are here with recipes that would make you experiment with curd and enjoy it too. **Mixed fruit pachadi** A splendid dish, slightly on the sweeter side, it has the goodness of fruits like pineapple, pumpkin and banana along with jaggery and thick curd. **Kalan** An all-time favourite sadya regular, Kalan has caught the fancy of even the curd-haters. Yam or raw bananas cooked and then doused in finely mashed coconut with chillies and cumin along with curd, just makes for an irresistible treat. **Curd rice** The unmatched soul food that the people of southern India swear by, the curd rice/thayir sadam is for all seasons. It's a cooling main dish, where milk, curd and butter make for the best coating that rice could have asked for. Seasoned tastefully, it goes perfect with a handful of _vadams_ or chips with hot pickles. **Vendakka kichadi** This is a great recipe to include wholesome curd in your meal and completely enjoy it too. Subtely flavoured, and with fried okra, it makes for a great side dish especially when it's something heavily flavoured for main course. **Beetroot pachadi** We do know that we're repeating a pachadi, but this one, red, hot and gorgeous is more savoury and is a burst of goodness with beetroot and curd keeping all other elements simple. **Thayir vadai** A Tamil Nadu specialty snack, medu vadas doused in curd is its simplest definition. However, it's not as simple. There's enough method and detail in this dish to finally fork out that perfectly soft vada from the boondi rich curd. **Mango lassi** Bring 'em right in! There's no known ways to resist the lassi that the people of northern parts of India relish after every meal. So let's add to the charm and make a delicious mango lassi!
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