The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Dal is usually cooked in soupy form, but yellow moong dal – the skinned and split form of moong beans – lends itself to very interesting dry recipes. Sookhi moong dal is one such.

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This aloo mooli kadhi (potato radish sticks in gram flour curry) recipe, adapted from Sanjeev Kapoor’s, is a simpler alternative to pakora kadhi, besides being an interesting way of adding radish (mooli) to the diet. The Indian white radish has a taste so powerfully pungent that one can’t have much of it raw. I like mooli paratha, but other ways of cooking mooli don’t excite me. Aloo mooli kadhi, though, had me sold from the word go. The potatoes tone down the sharpness of mooli, and the yogurt and gram flour cloak it all in a rich, delicious sauce.

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A healthy fresh fruit preparation that you can serve as a snack or an after-meal dessert.

Traditional rabri can be pretty heavy with its high content of sugar and condensed milk. Its usual pairing with malpua and jalebi (while delicious!) doesn’t help either if you’re watching your weight. Enter my recipe of fresh fruit rabri – the best sort of dessert to satiate your sweet tooth even on a healthy diet. No refined sugar, no tinned condensed milk – this rabri is sweetened only with natural nutrient-rich dates and apricots. No canned fruit either – only wholesome seasonal stuff. 

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Here’s a way to sneak in some cabbage goodness into your meals, without cooking up a full-blown cabbage curry: make patta gobhi paratha / cabbage paratha. With a generous spiking of cabbage (patta gobhi in Hindi) and spices, this wholesome pan-fried flatbread is a satisfying meal on its own. With chutney or pickle on the side, cabbage paratha is just the thing for a weekend brunch or a lunchbox treat.

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When I cook arbi (colocasia/taro), my default recipe is the tomato-based curried colocasia. Last week I tried something different and loved it: dahi arbi, a pairing of colocasia with yogurt.

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A variety of vegetables go into this Chinese-style recipe that’s great on the side with chapatis or fried rice. Chili garlic mixed vegetables is cooked on high heat  (using the Chao technique, or so Wikipedia tells me), which retains the texture and color of the vegetables. The dish gets its zing – and its name – from the pre-made chili garlic sauce that’s added to it.

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Capsicum and cherry tomatoes are tailor-made for worknight meals, with simple chopping needs and small cooking times. Combine with some pre-cooked tomato masala and you have a capsicum cherry tomato curry that looks so regal, it’s hard to believe how easy it was to create.

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