The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Ginger lovers: this one is for you.

A spicy sweet and sour chutney, with ginger as its star. (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…)

Did you know that the cucumber originated in India? It is only fitting that this gourd gets used to add the “cool" factor to Indian cuisine. Here’s to the pitta-placating, palate-cleansing cucumber raita (yogurt dip).

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Osaman is Gujarat’s answer to rasam: a light broth with ‘dal water’ as base. It gets its kick from the high-power tempering – salt, sweet, sour and hot all at once.

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You’d expect the last mangoes of the season to be ripe yellow, robustly sweet and oozing juice, but nature has a way of subverting expectations. I cut open a fat Banganapalli this Sunday to have mango cubes as a post-lunch dessert. The mango’s insides turned out to be half-white and tending towards sour.

My first thought was to make sweet mango chutney but then the fresh aromatic ginger in my pantry nudged me to try something different – a chunky mango and ginger chutney.

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The big purple baingan is generally used for bharta in my kitchen. Not so tonight. A yummy brinjal-ginger chutney awaits the rice that’s still cooking.

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Surplus coaxes us towards invention as much as scarcity. I hate to throw food items away and equally hate to have them beyond their "best before" dates. So I’m using up my pack of poppy seeds that’s dangerously close to expiry in varied ways . Ditto for my bunch of fresh mint leaves. I used some in pudina chutney last night when the mint was freshly plucked – the rest went into this kala chana recipe.

How awesome it is when untried combinations of flavours turn out well.

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