The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Boiled drumstick (moringa pods, or sahjan in Hindi) swathed in a chili yogurt base for an unusual drumstick raita. With very few add-on flavors, this recipe lets the drumstick shine.

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Dahi vada (lentil dumplings in yogurt) is standard fare at our place during the festive season. Come Diwali or Holi, dahi vadas are made in big batches and, along with chhole and sweets, laid out for visitors during the day. At night, dahi vada is served on the side with poori sabzi. Dishfuls that stocked the fridge in the morning are all lapped up by dinnertime.

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Fenugreek seeds (methi) are packed with nutrients and healing properties – no surprise that Ayurveda swears by them. But as it happens with most things are good for you, fenugreek seeds are hard to like. In Indian cooking, fenugreek seeds are usually added in tadka and then picked out by most people (self included), never to be eaten.

I have recently discovered a trick to make these bitter brown devils palatable. This methi dahi (fenugreek flavored yogurt) recipe uses a generous amount of fenugreek seeds without rendering the final dish overly bitter. Here’s how.

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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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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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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…)