The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Red pumpkin does a great job of absorbing spices and mingling with a range of flavors: spicy, sweet, tangy, salty. These traits of the vegetable are put to perfect use in this glorious red pumpkin curry recipe.

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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.

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A recipe from my grandmother’s kitchen – a tangy aloo chutney laced with mustard. The original version is made with jimikand (yam) instead of potatoes, and as those of us who cook with yam know, that vegetable is tricky to handle raw. And so we switch to the friendlier, more accessible tuber. Potato chutney is just as good and is super easy to make.

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The magic of some recipes lies in exclusion: the dish tastes so good because certain conventional ingredients are knocked off from its making. This recipe of saadi lauki sabzi (simple bottle gourd curry) , passed down from my grandmother’s kitchen, falls in that hallowed category.

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I am a fan of the fierce, bitter methi chutney, but I gather that not many are on my side. Most friends find it "a bit much" for their taste. And so – for them and for those of you that share their taste – here’s a milder, nuttier version of it: sesame fenugreek chutney or til methi ki chutney. (more…)

Baingan bhaja is so easy to make that this post barely qualifies as a "recipe" – and yet it is one of those dishes of which the taste belies the simplicity.

A staple side dish with meals in a typical Bihari home, a quickly made add-on to liven up a dal-chawal-chokha meal. That’s baingan bhaja for you.

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As promised in the last post on moong dal salad, here comes my recipe for eggplant tomato curry.

I most often use the fat purple eggplant for bharta, but on long workdays the whole roasting process seems too labor-intensive and I want to make a curry that moves from kitchen to dinner table quickly. This no-onion-no-garlic recipe is a godsend on such days. (more…)