The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Did you know that the cucumber originated in India? It is only fitting that this gourd gets used to add the “cool" factor to Indian cuisine. Here’s to the pitta-placating, palate-cleansing cucumber raita (yogurt dip).

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Osaman is Gujarat’s answer to rasam: a light broth with ‘dal water’ as base. It gets its kick from the high-power tempering – salt, sweet, sour and hot all at once.

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You’d expect the last mangoes of the season to be ripe yellow, robustly sweet and oozing juice, but nature has a way of subverting expectations. I cut open a fat Banganapalli this Sunday to have mango cubes as a post-lunch dessert. The mango’s insides turned out to be half-white and tending towards sour.

My first thought was to make sweet mango chutney but then the fresh aromatic ginger in my pantry nudged me to try something different – a chunky ginger jaggery chutney with mango.

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The big purple eggplant is generally used for baingan bharta in my kitchen. Not so tonight. A yummy eggplant-ginger chutney awaits the rice that’s still cooking.

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Surplus coaxes us towards invention as much as scarcity. I hate to throw food items away and equally hate to have them beyond their "best before" dates. So I’m using up my pack of poppy seeds, that’s dangerously close to expiry, in varied ways Ditto for my bunch of fresh mint leaves. I used some in pudina chutney last night when the mint was freshly plucked – the rest went into this kala chana recipe.

How awesome it is when untried combinations of flavors turn out well.

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I was planning to make Sailu’s bhindi sambhariya for dinner when to my dismay, I found that my okra wasn’t the right fit for it – too large, not tender enough. So instead I cut the okra into vertical strips and cooked it with a sort of Indo-western spice mix. The result was an unexpected delight – nutty and fresh, delicate and sharp.

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Bhindi (okra) with a generous mix of onions and Indian spices – bhindi do pyaza (literally: okra with twice the amount of onions) is a lovely vegetable dish to go with chapatis.

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