The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

A fresh fruit preparation that you can serve as a snack or an after-meal dessert.

Traditional rabri can be pretty heavy with its high content of sugar and condensed milk. Its usual pairing with malpua and jalebi (while delicious!) doesn’t help either if you’re watching your weight. Enter my recipe of fresh fruit rabri – the best sort of dessert to satiate your sweet tooth even on a healthy diet. No refined sugar, no tinned condensed milk – this rabri is sweetened only with natural nutrient-rich dates and apricots. No canned fruit either – only fresh seasonal stuff. 

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Creamy mushroom soup made at home – this is so much tastier, so much healthier than canned stuff. Simple ingredients, no fuss, very easy to make.

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An exotic rice kheer (pudding) that gets its sweetness entirely from jaggery and dried figs. A hint of saffron that elevates it to greater heights.

A dessert fit for royalty with the best kind of calories you can hope to get from such indulgence. Jaggery may come from the same source as white sugar – sugarcane juice – but it’s miles ahead in terms of nutrition. The process of refining strips white sugar of sugarcane’s mineral contents, while the simpler method of jaggery-making retains them.

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Add a chocolatey twist to banana milk shake. That one tweak does not just adds to the taste of banana chocolate shake, it also makes the nourishing beverage a lot more visually attractive.

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There was a time when I lived next to a dairy that sold really fresh, soft paneer (cottage cheese). Now the only paneer I can lay hands on is the store-bought variety. Fridge life of three weeks says the wrapper, but within three days it starts to feel rubbery and sour.

Homemade paneer has acquired irresistible charm. Pre-packaged paneer will do no more – the taste buds crave the real deal.

Fortunately, this is an easily satiated craving. It is surprisingly easy to make paneer at home.

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Custard mix, coffee and cocoa, sugar and milk, plus a few minutes on the fire – and you have your eggless coffee pudding ready to set and savor for your next meal.

I am not much of a dessert person (as you can see from my recipes – this is the first dessert recipe on the blog in months); I make this when guests are coming over, a more elaborate meal is cooking and I am pressed for time.

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The lovelier the item, the scarcer it is. Ripe mangoes are in season for only a short while. This is that heavenly time. And so we have the fruit in myriad ways – in mango raita, in mixed fruit rabri, in custard, or simply cubed. Mango shake is a regular breakfast drink for me while the good mango times last.

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