The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

A crunchy, nutty, leafy side dish for an Indian meal – cabbage and peanuts stir fry. This is just right for the day after gorging on pooja delicacies, when your tummy says "no more" to pooris and dum aloo. I had today cabbage and peanuts stir fry with a simple meal of tomato toor dal, mint raita and boiled rice.

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Inspired by the chapter on curry leaves in Ratna Rajaiah’s fascinating book How the Banana Goes to Heaven, I recently resolved to eat curry leaves as much and as raw as I possibly can. The prospect wasn’t enticing, let me say up front. Though I like curry leaves, I find their taste overpowering and use them sparingly even in tadka. I would have to steel myself to eat curry leaves raw, or so I thought.

How wrong I was.

A tentative stab at making curry leaves and peanut chutney turned out to be hugely successful. Peanuts balance out the bitterness of curry leaves, making this chutney not only palatable but also delicious.

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Till a month back, I had had sundried tomatoes only in the bottled, preserved form. Much as I liked it, I was cautious of its salt and preservative content and would use it sparingly.

I never knew how delightfully simple and light sundried tomatoes could be till I got myself a pack of Ladakhi sundried tomatoes – they are chewy, tomatoey (as opposed to pickle-y), and induce no "junk food" guilt pangs.

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Tinda gets its English name from its visual similarity to green apples. A member of the gourd family, tinda has a mild flavor, high water content and lots of vitamins/minerals. The vegetable is ubiquitous in Delhi – at arm’s reach in the local market, cooked every other day in office cafetarias. Not so in Bangalore. Here this gourd graces only the bigger stores, cellophane-wrapped and stocked with imported veggies like yellow peppers and Chinese cabbage.

I didn’t realize I’d crave for tinda till it became scarce. As with parval (pointed gourd), my love for this vegetable has been a recent change of heart. Whoever said that absence makes the heart grow fonder knew what he was talking about. 

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Osaman is Gujarat’s answer to rasam: a light broth with ‘dal water’ as base. It gets its kick from the high-power tempering – salt, sweet, sour and hot all at once.

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You’d expect the last mangoes of the season to be ripe yellow, robustly sweet and oozing juice, but nature has a way of subverting expectations. I cut open a fat Banganapalli this Sunday to have mango cubes as a post-lunch dessert. The mango’s insides turned out to be half-white and tending towards sour.

My first thought was to make sweet mango chutney but then the fresh aromatic ginger in my pantry nudged me to try something different – a chunky ginger jaggery chutney with mango.

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Those beautiful pale green berries on the vegetable vendor’s cart looked so bewitching, I had to pick them up. I used them in this delicious amla dal (gooseberry dal) and loved the result, I can heartily recommend the recipe to you.

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