The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Chickpeas lend themselves generously to experimentation. The classic channa masala with its onion-garlic base is by no means the only way to cook this legume curry-style. Chickpeas CAN be curried without a shred of onion and garlic – check out these recipes from the blog archives, for example: aloo chhole, dahi chhole.

And now, let me add yet another no-onion-no-garlic chickpea recipe to your repertoire.

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While cucumber is great raw, a light sautéing brings out in the gourd a delicious flavor dimension. The key is to cook the cucumber just enough to let it soften, not so much that it turns limp or watery. This cucumber side dish recipe, flavored with fresh lime and mustard, shows you how.

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When you have run out of vegetables, make jhunka.

This piece of wisdom that I received from my Punekar friend was worth its weight in gold during the pandemic lockdown. With just besan and my backlog of onions, the barebones jhunka recipe gave me several filling, comforting meals.

So, what exactly is jhunka? Wikipedia defines it as:

…a vegetarian traditional Indian dish prepared in Maharashtra, Goa and North Karnataka. It is essentially a chickpea flour porridge.

Hmmm. Calling it a “porridge” is rather a stretch! Do they mean pithle? I’ll let the matter rest with a Shakespearean reference and point you to the blog becauseanyonecancook, which describes pithle and jhunka with more nuance.

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Take the basic semolina pancake recipe up a level: fortify it with carrot and cucumber, flavor its base with a dash of dahi, spice it up with ginger and chilies. Carrot cucumber rava cheela works really well for brunch or in the lunchbox with tomato pickle on the side.

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I love cooking greens with toor dal – my go-to combination is spinach toor dal, mostly because spinach is easier to procure than other greens. When I do get my hands on poi saag (basale leaves/Malabar spinach), I alternate between cooking them in Bengali style or Andhra style – this poi saag toor dal recipe closely follows the Andhra style as in Sailu’s excellent blog.

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When a friend returned from Austin to Chennai, she brought back for her mother an ornate crockpot. Her mother unsurprisingly did not find much use for the contraption in her home cooking. For a while the crockpot was relegated to the far corner of her storage shelves. Till inspiration struck – and she converted the crockpot into a tulsi planter.

My story is not as drastic as that, but seeing my mother use her paddu maker for cooking littis raised a smile much like my friend’s story did. Paddus are not a staple food for us, so her paddu maker would mostly lie forlorn. One day my mother decided to give the equipment a "litti maker" makeover. The rounded fissures of the paddu griddle work perfectly as receptacles for litti balls. Slow cooking on the fire, with a turn or two in between, gives us littis close to the traditional fire-roasted ones.

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A starring recipe for a party menu: lauki kofta – spiced balls of grated bottle gourd, deep-fried and simmered in a rich tomato gravy. The preparation of lauki kofta takes a bit of planning, and the steps for making the bottle gourd balls can’t be rushed or parallelized – but the end result makes the dish worth every bit of the effort.

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