The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Chayote slow-cooked in a tomato base – simple flavors that get their kick from a tempering of mustard and asafoetida. This is one of those curries that only ask for time, not exceptional skill or effort.

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Each kitchen stint with the chayote teaches me something new. When I began cooking with this gourd, peeling it was hard – till I learnt the techniques of making triangular notches around its folds and boiling it before peeling. Soon I discovered a different variety of the chayote: the “Ooty chow chow”, which has a smooth exterior that demands no fiddling with folds at all.

So I switched loyalties to the Ooty chow chow, as my observant regulars would have noticed in the post on chayote dal.

While cutting raw veggies and fruits, I sometimes pop a few chopped pieces into my mouth. A reflex action if you will, this usually leads me to grimace and move on – but when I did this with the Ooty chow chow I stopped in my tracks. This vegetable didn’t just look like a pear, it tasted startlingly like one. Do I even need to cook this, I wondered. (more…)

Dal and chow chow (chayote), when cooked together, give you a dish with wonderful texture and taste. The juicy pear-like chow chow softens and melds into dal, adding an interesting counterpoint to the dal’s “porridginess”. When I want to do a bit more with chayote than make an easy stew, I usually turn to this chow chow dal recipe.

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Dhansak – in which legumes, vegetables and aromatic spices come together in a celebration of Persian and Gujarati flavors. The name tells us as much: “dhansak” comes from dhan (Persian for “seed” – legumes) and sak (Gujarati “shaak” – vegetables).

This recipe is a meatless take on the dhansak template, with plenty of vegetables and a freshly prepared dhansak masala.

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“If you don’t know what to do with it, boil it” is a mantra that serves me well with unfamiliar vegetables. Chayote (or chow chow as they call it where I live) has long moved out of the *unfamiliar* category for me, and yet, the decision to boil the chayote brought with it an unexpected benefit – it simplified the task of peeling its creased, curvy skin.

This chayote / chow chow raita recipe leverages on that goodness of boiling. Fresh seasoning and a spice-infused tempering give the raita a robust kick of flavors.

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Chayote was an untried, untasted vegetable for me until an article in The Awl piqued me enough to cook with it.

Since then, it is as if Destiny has been conspiring to make me eat the chayote. Every few days I get a sign that points me towards this modest squash. The latest was this scene from the film Chef:

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Chayote is commonly used in south Indian cuisine (here’s a nice kootu recipe), not so much in the north. It is not a vegetable I grew up eating and, even as I saw it everywhere in vegetable markets, I wasn’t enticed enough to try it.

Not until I read this about the taste of chayote in The Awl:

…sort of like a jicama: mildly sweet, incredibly crisp and juicy, somewhere between a potato and an apple, or a crisp pear.

That article called Eat the Chayote did, in fact, make me eat the chayote.

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