The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

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…)

Cool homemade yogurt, flattened rice that needs no cooking, honey/jaggery and fresh fruit. A breakfast so healthy it’ll give you a palpable halo around your head. Presenting for you staple morning-time food from Bihar – dahi chura.

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Corn on the cob is so good boiled, I mostly have it without taking it through any elaborate "treatment" routine. A little salt, a little chilli powder, a dash of lime juice – rub it on and bite directly off the cob – that’s my usual mode of having boiled corn.

Then again, there is something to be said for the occasional exoticization.

Presenting for you my recipe of corn with spinach and cheese. Serve it with garlic bread for a sumptuous weekend brunch.

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Fresh fenugreek and onion dumplings fried and dunked in a yogurt-based gravy [my mouth is watering as I type this!] – that’s methi pakora kadhi. For those of you new to Indian cooking – kadhi is a sour gravy traditionally made with lightly spiced yogurt. Different regions of India have distinct styles to making kadhi. In North India, kadhi is served with fried dumplings (pakoras). In Karnataka, a similar dish majjige huli is popular – this is a lighter version with boiled vegetables in place of pakoras. In Gujarat, kadhi is sweetened with jaggery. And you wouldn’t typically add onions to kadhi in Bihar – my mom certainly wouldn’t.

This recipe is closest to the style of Punjabi kadhi.

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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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Today’s post is about a much-loved breakfast dish in India – besan 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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