The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

A fantastic potato curry from my mother’s kitchen, that we love to have with pooris and dahi vada on the day of Holi. I hope you like this one as much as I do.

Wish you a happy Holi!

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When you have really fresh long green eggplant on hand, capitalize on the goodness of its insides. Cook it in a way that retains its juices. Ditch chopping and cubing, go for slitting and spicing. This recipe of spice-lined long green eggplant curry shows how.

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There are times when we want to exclude onion and garlic from our diet – religious festivals, a lifestyle choice borne out of ayurvedic principles, or more earthly matters such as exorbitant prices.

The good news is that a “no onion no garlic” diet need not be one of frugality. Just because you aren’t eating onion or garlic does not mean you are doomed to subsist on bland watery boiled vegetables instead. Curries without onions and garlic can be so tasty, you will not even notice that a conventional ingredient is absent.

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The magic of some recipes lies in exclusion: the dish tastes so good because certain conventional ingredients are knocked off from its making. This recipe of saadi lauki sabzi (simple bottle gourd curry) , passed down from my grandmother’s kitchen, falls in that hallowed category.

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Gorge on this gorgeous green dish that fills you up with protein goodness, and is so simple to put together you can master it even if you’re a kitchen newbie.

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As promised in the last post on moong dal salad, here comes my recipe for eggplant tomato curry.

I most often use the fat purple eggplant for bharta, but on long workdays the whole roasting process seems too labor-intensive and I want to make a curry that moves from kitchen to dinner table quickly. This no-onion-no-garlic recipe is a godsend on such days. (more…)

Most Indian curries involve a little extra cooking of the vegetables. We like to keep the crunch for salads – curries are soft to the bite. With capsicum tomato sauté I make a departure from that general rule: here the tomato slices retain their shape, the capsicum remains a bright green.

This is a frequent weekday dinner dish for me, and not just for its ease of chopping and cooking. Nothing perks one up at the end of a stress-filled workday as a vibrantly colored dinner!

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