The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

When you want a simple tasty vegetable curry to be ready without much effort, this stew of bottle gourd, potatoes and tomatoes is your answer. Use a pressure-cooker to make lauki aloo and you save a lot on time too.

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After a day in the hot sun or with a heavy meal, buttermilk feels like a blessing. Famed for its therapeutic, digestive properties, buttermilk is also delicious.

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Sabudana, also called sago, is used as fast food in India. No, not the fast food of the burger-and-fries ilk. Fast food, as in vrat food. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, explanation follows. Others, please bear with me a minute or feel free to skip the next two paras directly to the sabudana khichdi recipe.

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Beans with crushed peanuts and sesame – one of those dishes in which you keep adding this and that, taking tentative bites to check if it tastes good, and end up liking the result enough to make note of it for repetition.

Each bite of beans with crushed peanuts and sesame gives you a variety of flavors – spicy and sweet and tangy and nutty. Yes, vegan and gluten-free CAN be adventurous!

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Puffed and crisp, a poori is the epicure’s delight – a delicious bread to accompany potato curry, chhole or aamras. While chapatis are everyday fare, pooris sit proudly as the "special occasion" treat.

Pooris aren’t so easy to make, though, are they? I say they are, once you’ve learnt the ropes.

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Baby potatoes look so adorable they make me want to pop them into my mouth whole. When I can resist that urge, this is one way I like to cook them.

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Is it just me or does a simple change like cutting vegetables in a different shape give a dish a whole new spin?

For dinner last night, before I started chopping up the okra (bhindi) into my usual 1-cm disks, I noticed that some of them were bulging – which means the seeds were big and ripe. I didn’t want those seeds and yet the bhindi good enough to eat. What could be done?

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