The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

An exotic rice kheer (pudding) that gets its sweetness entirely from jaggery and dried figs. A hint of saffron that elevates it to greater heights.

A dessert fit for royalty with the best kind of calories you can hope to get from such indulgence. Jaggery may come from the same source as white sugar – sugarcane juice – but it’s miles ahead in terms of nutrition. The process of refining strips white sugar of sugarcane’s mineral contents, while the simpler method of jaggery-making retains them.

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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 – sesame almond 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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A chunky, nutty tomato ginger chutney with a sprinkling of roasted peanuts. Like the sound of it?

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Beans with crushed peanuts and sesame – 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.

Each bite of beans with crushed peanuts and sesame gives you a variety of flavors – spicy and sweet and tangy and nutty. Yes, vegan and gluten-free CAN be adventurous!

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I must warn you before giving you this recipe – methi chutney (that is, chutney made of fenugreek leaves) is not for everybody. It is bitter, it is really hot. If you are like me, you will love it. If you are not, I warned you, didn’t I?

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Classic imli chutney – a sweet and sour chutney made of tamarind (imli) and jaggery. Drizzle tamarind jaggery chutney over dahi vadas and chaats, dip your samosas and kachoris into it or have it on the side with any Indian meal.

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Peanuts and jaggery in toor dal? It sounded bizarre and it wasn’t something I had cooked or eaten before. When I saw this recipe for Gujarati dal on a food show on NDTV Good Times I decided to try it in my own kitchen that very day.

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