The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

I often do a dry stir fry of cabbage, peas and onions with Indian spices, to accompany plain parathas in my office lunch box. This time I looked towards pan-Asian cuisine for inspiration, putting in honey and soy sauce in place of cumin and coriander.

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When chefs with expertise in other cuisines turn to Indian, it is lovely to see their interpretations of dishes well-known to us. Parathas are regular fare at my place but I learnt of this interesting variation courtesy MasterChef Australia.

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Onions are indispensable to cooking in many Indian households, so much so that the humble bulb has caused governments to topple. To those for whom curries without onions seem inconceivable, I heartily recommend this recipe for stuffed eggplant in peanut sesame sauce. The sauce, with tamarind juice to give it body, is rich, thick, and entirely sans onions. I like to make this gravy when I have guests over, especially my no-onion-no-garlic folks.

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I don’t exactly have a sweet tooth. The effort needed to prepare most desserts doesn’t match up to the high I get in eating them. So I doff my hat to Sailu’s recipe for til laddoos – the simplicity and attractiveness of these sweets shook my no-dessert spell.

Here is my version of sesame laddoos. As an almond fan (or shall we say, "nut nut"), I hiked the amount of almonds to make up for the omission of oatmeal. The result was not bad at all.

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I was planning to make Sailu’s bhindi sambhariya for dinner when to my dismay, I found that my okra wasn’t the right fit for it – too large, not tender enough. So instead I cut the okra into vertical strips and cooked it with a sort of Indo-western masala. The result was an unexpected delight – nutty and fresh, delicate and sharp – I loved it.

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This is 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.

And that, coming from someone rarely enthused about string beans, is saying something.

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I’ve been trying out different dishes with my new find this year – the vegan, gluten-free red chilly paste from Thai Kitchen. This Thai-inspired recipe using potatoes, onions and sesame seeds is one I specially liked.

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