The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

For a really good baingan bharta, getting the eggplant perfectly roasted is half the battle won. And for a perfectly roasted eggplant, the ingredients you need most are patience and balance – patience in cooking the eggplant on a low, open flame through till the core, balancing the heat all around without charring, leaving no spot raw or burnt.

The proportion of other ingredients and spices, the duration of post-roasting sautéing, can vary, but if the heart of the dish – the mashed eggplant – is nicely done, baingan bharta turns out delicious.

With that thought, on to my baingan bharta recipe in all its smoky splendor…

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Red pumpkin does a great job of absorbing spices and mingling with a range of flavors: spicy, sweet, tangy, salty. These traits of the vegetable are put to perfect use in this glorious red pumpkin curry recipe.

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Capsicum and cherry tomatoes are tailor-made for worknight meals, with simple chopping needs and small cooking times. Combine with some pre-cooked tomato masala and you have a capsicum cherry tomato curry that looks so regal, it’s hard to believe how easy it was to create.

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Weekdays are busy times for many of us who come back from work late evening and then fix a meal. We want easy weeknight dinners that take little time to move from kitchen to plate. [Not counting the blessed few like Rohit’s boss who can whip up a fancy meal at that hour ;) ]

One could cook loads on Sunday and freeze for the week. But that’s not so exciting, is it? So how does one attain that elusive balance between easy + quick (pre-cooked) and tasty + interesting (freshly cooked)?

Here’s a middle ground.

Make ahead food parts. Mix and match. Embellish.

Use the Pareto Principle to your advantage: identify the steps in cooking that consume a majority time and labor, and do them beforehand. The chopping of greens. The slow-frying of spices. The boiling of dal. When the time comes to make your weeknight dinner, all that remains to be done is the remaining 20% of cooking that produces 80% of the result.

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Few things compare to the taste and smell of just-fried onions. What’s usually an embellishment in meals plays starring role in this recipe: spiced fried onions strips with an aromatic peanut-sesame spice mix. Try it!

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A quick-cooking curry with kachcha kela (raw bananas or plantain) that’s easy enough to make for beginners – no intricate slicing, no artful pounding/grinding, no watchfulness needed while the dish is on the heat. Everything chopped or grated "roughly", all spice measurements  open to personalization.

The only detail to take care of is to avoid the blackening of plantain when it is peeled and sliced – there’s a simple tip below to prevent that happening, which doubles up as a way to keep the stickiness of the plantain at bay.

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The tart sweetness of roasted cherry tomatoes and the freshness of coriander leaves come together in this lovely chutney.

Garlic and dry red chilies give it that extra zing.

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