The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

As promised in the last post, here comes my recipe for eggplant tomato curry.

I most often use the fat purple eggplant for bharta, but on long workdays the whole roasting process seems too labor-intensive and I want to make a curry that moves from kitchen to dinner table quickly. This no-onion-no-garlic  recipe of eggplant tomato curry is a godsend on such days. (more…)

Most Indian curries involve a little extra cooking of the vegetables – we like to keep the crunch for salads; curries are soft to the bite. With capsicum tomato sauté I make a departure from that general rule – here the tomato slices retain their shape, the capsicum remains a bright green (or yellow/red, depending on your choice of pepper).

This is a frequent weekday dinner dish for me, and not just for its ease of chopping and cooking – nothing perks one up at the end of a stress-filled workday as a vibrantly colored curry. :-) (more…)

Masoor dal – the salmon-pink, hulled lentil – is a quick-cooking dal that needs neither prior soaking nor laborious cooking. My masoor dal tadka recipe rides on the pliability of masoor and has the dish ready to serve in a matter of minutes.

In case you’re wondering, tadka is the process of tempering spices in hot oil and pouring them along with the oil into a dish. I use ghee for tadka in this recipe, I love  the body and aroma that ghee adds to the earthy flavor of masoor dal. (more…)

Okra is one of the most versatile vegetables around, isn’t it? I cook it with onions or without, deck it with Indian spices or sometimes look westwards for inspiration. Despite the same core ingredient, each of these okra dishes tastes worlds apart from each other. Dahi bhindi – okra with yogurt – is another such unique recipe. (more…)

Green eggplant in mustard-fenugreek masala is for those who turn their noses up at nuts or sugar in their curries, who say no to recipes like bittersweet baingan. The spices in this one are heavier, headier, not for the faint-hearted.

I made this dish with long green eggplant, which is the mildest-tasting variety of eggplant I know of. The eggplant’s blandness gives a nice base to the strong flavors of the spices. (more…)

Confession time: I had to Google "nenua in English" for this post. I learnt that the vegetable is called sponge gourd: the name comes from the fact that the fibrous core of the gourd is dried and used as a sponge/loofah. Not surprisingly, the Latin name of sponge gourd is Luffa cylindra.

Be that as it may, it feels stilted to call the very Bihari nenua "sponge gourd" especially since I’m blogging about a very Bihari recipe. I’ll continue calling it nenua in this post.

Gourds pair well with dal, as in the lovely ridge gourd moong dal. Nenua chana is another case in point. This is a very uncomplicated recipe with few ingredients, the perfect kind for a new cook to test their skills on.

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Sem is Hindi for broad beans, a variety of beans with a distinct robust flavor. This recipe for aloo sem – i.e. potato and broad beans curry – is the typical way the curry is made in a "pure" vegetarian (no onion or garlic) household in Bihar.

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