A curry with easy-to-chop, quick-to-cook veggies – mushrooms, spring onions and tomatoes – and a dash of Italian spices, for a weekday dinner.
Mushroom spring onion curry doesn’t require much watching over while its cooking and is ready in the time you make half a dozen chapatis. Just what you want on a day when you don’t have much time to spare for the kitchen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chana dal (Bengal gram lentils) in a gloriously spiced curry, the kind one describes with epithets like "meal fit for a king".
