The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

I often do a dry stir fry of cabbage, peas and onions with Indian spices, to accompany plain parathas in my office lunch box. This time I looked towards pan-Asian cuisine for inspiration, putting in a honey soy dressing in place of cumin and coriander.

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This post is dedicated to all those who believe their culinary range is limited to cooking instant noodles and heating ready-made food, for whom pasta sauce means a pricey jar of red substance bought from the supermarket.

Please. Don’t let those packaged pasta sauce bottles burn a hole in your pocket and inject a million preservatives into your system. Making homemade tomato sauce for pasta is the easiest thing in the world. At least, if you go by this recipe I’m going to share with you.

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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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A traditional recipe from Bihar/Bengal that revels in the heady potency of mustard. If you like the sharpness of mustard and mustard oil, you are in for a treat with sarson wale aloo (potatoes in mustard sauce).

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You know those mangoes we get this time of the year, neither ripe nor unripe but somewhere in between. Too sour to be eaten as-is or used in milkshakes, but not raw enough for panna. What to do with such mangoes?

Make sweet mango chutney, if you ask me.

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Today’s post is about a much-loved breakfast dish in India – besan ka cheela. For the uninitiated, besan is flour made from Bengal gram (chana dal), used in Indian cuisine in a variety of dishes such as kadhi, jhunka and pakoras.

In cheela, batter is made out of besan and other ingredients, shallow-fried like pancakes on an skillet/tava and served hot.

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Doesn’t food acquire an exotic sheen when described in language alien to its roots? Mangodi sounds like something grandmas from my native place would add to curries simmering in earthen pots. Sundried lentil dumplings? That’s like stuff my hostel-residing cousins in Bangalore would cook on a rare Sunday, as they do pasta and bruschetta.

But there you have it. Mangodi = sundried lentil dumplings. Choose the name you like. Made of ground moong dal with a hint of salt and spices, mangodi globules are sun-dried for 2-3 days before they are ready to use in curries.

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