The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Sooji or semolina, as Wikipedia tells us, is

the coarse, purified wheat middlings of durum wheat used in making pasta, breakfast cereals, puddings, and couscous.

That description covers wide ground, taking in its span popular Indian dishes like  halwa and upma – versions of pudding/breakfast cereal made of semolina.

Cooking sooji as a cheela (pancake) is a relatively unusual way of using the flour, but once you try it, you’ll definitely want to do frequent repeats.

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A vitamin-filled start to the day with carrot poha: flattened rice cooked crisp with grated carrot and pepper.

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With tomatoes at throwaway prices in these parts nowadays, who wouldn’t be tempted to buy the red juicy vegetable (fruit?) by the sackful? I gave in to the lure and have been happily cooking tomato-based stuff since – pasta in tomato sauce one day, potatoes in tomato gravy the next.

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When you have really fresh long green eggplant on hand, capitalize on the goodness of its insides. Cook it in a way that retains its juices. Ditch chopping and cubing, go for slitting and spicing. This recipe of spice-lined long green eggplant curry shows how.

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This Andhra-style hot and sour tomato peanut chutney is great on the side with boiled rice, especially on days when you don’t have another curry to go with your meal.

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A recipe from my grandmother’s kitchen – a tangy aloo chutney laced with mustard. The original version is made with jimikand (yam) instead of potatoes, and as those of us who cook with yam know, that vegetable is tricky to handle raw. And so we switch to the friendlier, more accessible tuber. Potato chutney is just as good and is super easy to make.

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The magic of some recipes lies in exclusion: the dish tastes so good because certain conventional ingredients are knocked off from its making. This recipe of saadi lauki sabzi (simple bottle gourd curry) , passed down from my grandmother’s kitchen, falls in that hallowed category.

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