Three colours: Red, Yellow, Green

Back in the days when I was sleepwalking through my career in an advertising agency, my visualiser friend drew a caricature of me post my Fido Dido haircut. I looked at it and shrieked! “Ouch.. my nose looks like a capsicum!” I cried. “Didn’t you know that?” said Paddu, my only buddy in that maze. That was it. My big fat capsicum nose—my great inheritance from my dad, apart from the tropical forest of a mane, was immortalized.

Since then, capsicum and me always had a special relationship. As I grew older, may be I grew into my nose, so life was more about the capsicum and less about the nose.

Well cooked, grilled or raw, peppers (as they are more stylishly known) work well any which way, unlike most salad-based vegetables— that’s what sets them apart. A friend of mine who incidentally hates cooking taught me this delectable red and yellow pepper infused dip that makes the most ordinary slice of bread transform into a thing of exotica. The fact that she could make it made me realise that it’s not easy to screw up a capsicum, unless you are deplorable. And if you go wrong with good old aloo simla, you may as well kill yourself— the natural chemistry between the two will always come in the way of your bad cooking.

Simla mirchi (in desi lingo) is also one that ups the sexiness quotient of almost any subzi, or tandoor platter (yes, the vegetarians have a humble paneer-capsicum equivalent). While its red and yellow brethren come quick to the rescue to jazz up a salad, tomato-based pasta or just a stir-fry.

I have never understood why the red and yellow ones come gift-wrapped and cost a bomb compared to the green ones (is it possible they have more flavonoids or anti-oxidants? Must check). Personally, they work the same, although the green ones are more piquant and the red and yellow ones make it look like you truly are bringing out your best veggies for your guest.

Whatever your colour, any time is a good time for peppers. Enjoy!




Pepper dip

An ode to the lazy and fabulous.. lasts a week and all you need is anything to mop it up—bread works well.


Ingredients:

One red pepper

One yellow pepper

4-5 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

one teaspoon roasted sesame seeds

olive oil

balsamic vinegar (or soya sauce)

salt to taste



method:

On an open flame, grill the red and yellow peppers till the skin turns charcoal black and can be peeled off easily. Cool and set aside.

Peel the peppers, and slit them vertically, scooping out the seeds. Slice into thin strips.

Put the pepper strips into a glass or ceramic bowl, and add the roasted sesame and roasted chopped garlic. Douse liberally with olive oil, and then round off with a drop of balsamic vinegar (you can also use soya sauce) and mix well, adding salt to taste.

Use this as a dip for bread or layer it on a baguette or toast,  or lavash, adding olives, lettuce or whatever you fancy.

Lady killer

In the days of yore, one of the pre-tests to tell an instinctive cook from a laboured one was to see how one handled okras (lady fingers in common parlance, bhindi in more endearing ones). If you were the kind of person who chopped them and then washed them, out you went, scoring zero on ten. If you, on the other hand, rinsed the bhindis, laid them out on newspaper sheets, and gently dried then, nudging collective contact with the paper, you scored 7 on 10. And if you, like the more fastidious but rare breed, dried them one at a time with a kitchen roll, you scored a perfect ten.

Whatever the case, the mucilage is the bane of the bhindi’s existence…or its redemption, depending on how you look at it. For instance, while volunteering at WSD, boiled bhindi was commonly added to dog food and mashed, for those canines suffering from constipation—it always worked, even closer home for my cats.

One of the things I like about bhindi (apart from the fact that it is one of two vegetables that the husband likes) is the fact that they remind me of real people—they are thin, fat, tall, short, fair, dark, happy, grumpy, and seem to have faces… and their hexagonal contours seem to have an attitude of their own. Remember how in the craft class, the closest resemblance to people in a vegetable skit was Mr. Ladyfinger?

They always talk to me. Depending on their shape or size, they seem to say, okay, I have gotten a little corpulent here, so make sure you camouflage me well. Or, I am so tender and green, so please do as little as you can to me.

Personally, I like them thin and wiry, as I like my men. Also, like I hate disfiguring a perfectly good lady finger, I also like to eat them as whole as I can. So the traditional bhindi subzi doesn’t quite work for me, although being the seasoned Tam bram that I am, Vendakkai Pachadi is something I wish I had inherited from the parents. All my mother handed me down was a quickie yoghurt variant of it, which works pretty well, although the tamarind version is to be inhaled to be believed.



Bhindi raita (courtesy the mother)



Ingredients

Bhindi: 200 gm

Ginger, a medium sized piece, julienned

Jeera powder

Hing

Rai

Green chillies; 2, juliennned





METHOD:

Wash and dry bhindis. Chop them really thin and set aside.

In a non-stick pan, heat a tablespoon of oil, add rai, allow to splutter, and then a pinch of hing, and then the ginger and chilly juliennes and mix well.

Add the bhindi to this, salt to taste, and fry well on a low flame will crisp. Cool. Set aside.

In a bowl, whisk 250 gm of dahi to smoothen lumps, and add the fried bhindi mixture to it. Serve immediately as an accompaniment to rice or rotis.





Bhindi aloo with garlic (courtesy Manish, my sindhi foodie colleague)



2 large potatoes, sliced vertically

Bhindi : 200 gm, cut into 2inch pieces and then slit vertically

Garlic : 6-7 cloves

Green chillies: 2-3

Salt to taste



Method:

Peel the garlic cloves and slice the chillies and crush them with a bit of salt using a mortar pestle

Heat some oil in a pan and add the chilly garlic mixture, and then add the bhindis and aloo, salt to taste, mix well

Cook on a slow flame, stirring occasionally till well done.

Serve hot with chapatis or dal-chaval

Bake, bhai, bake

My mother was a fastidious baker in the days of yore. Marble and sponge cake, coconut castles and macaroons, pineapple upside down, coconut cookies, coffee and walnut cake, nankhatais and what have you came our way every once in a while.

She took baking lessons on Saturday and would return home with her creations, which she repeated over the following weeks till she perfected it.

The actual cake making was somewhat of a NASA expedition. One of us was in charge of beating the eggs—this was the worst job, as she would strongly disapprove of any lingering pauses, or variable frequency of beating, claiming that the air bubbles that got in would hamper the rising of the cake. Once she was tipped off to beat the whites separately, and that’s when we went into hiding.

Another one would be summoned to sieve the flour, the baking powder, the cocoa, coffee, nutmeg or cinnamon powder (if any), or chop the candied peels, cherries or walnuts to the perfect sq mm. The lucky one got to grease-proof the cake tin (this was the most fun) or lick the remainder of the cake dough (if you haven’t done that, you haven’t lived)

And then the anticipation for the next 40 minutes. Will the cake rise? Or will it fall flat on its face? Will it be too hard? Or too soft to cut into slices? Will we be able to take it to school the next day? How long will it last? When will she bake again?

Anyway, after all that, I vowed never to bake in my life, and if I did, I would find a less ulcer-inducing way.

I did. Decades later. When I met Electra, my friend’s mom, who had just the nonchalance I needed for my baking plunge. “Cake is nothing men. Just butter, sugar, eggs and maida. Mix and shove it in the oven. Add whatever you want..”

She was right, even though I took the liberty of substituting the maida for whole wheat flour and butter for cream sometimes. Also, whenever I have to get rid of excess fruit, brownies, jam, marmalade, chocolate, nuts I just throw them into a cake, or layer them on. It always works.

I also have a little secret that I learnt from an ex-boyfriend. When you have run out of baking powder, don’t fret. Merely add a spoonful of milk to the baking mix and squeeze half a lemon into it just before you switch the oven on. The reaction within is enough to make any cake swell with pride.

Now I bake like a goddess, ala Nigella Lawson, effortlessly dunking things into the oven, unlike my mother who made it look really heavy duty. It’s come to a point when mom asks me, “How did you manage that?” I grin my famous grin. “Trade secret,” I say.


Banana and walnut loaf

1 cup butter (or cream)

1 cup sugar (brown or white)

1 cup flour (or maida)

2 eggs

2 overripe bananas, mashed into a pulp

½ spoon baking powder (sieved into the flour)

½ cup chopped walnuts



Method:

Mix butter and sugar. Add the eggs, mix well and then add the flour.

Now add the mashed banana puree and the chopped walnuts into the cake mix.

Bake at 180 degrees for 40 minutes



(note: this cake will not rise too much, and is best had within two days)





Electra's Chocolate cake

250 gms butter

250 gms sugar (brown, preferably)

250 gm flour (whole wheat or maida)

4 eggs

cocoa powder- 1 tbsp

instant coffee powder – 1 tsp

Milk (to mix)



Method:

Mix butter with sugar. Add eggs, beating into the mixture, one by one. Add flour, blend well.

Stir the cocoa powder into milk, and add the instant coffee powder, and just enough milk to mix it well.

Pour this mixture into the cake mix. Mix well. Bake at 180 degrees for 40 minutes.

(Tip: add a spoonful of curd or the juice of half a lemon to the cake dough just before baking. It makes the cake really fluffy)

Children of a lesser gourd

There are two ways to negotiate the karela (bitter gourd in more fashionable circles). One is to accept it at face value and take its bitterness in your stride. The other is to destroy every evidence of its personality, render it completely unrecognizable, and then pride at how you have camouflaged its bitterness.

Since I am a strong advocate of retaining as much of the aesthetic of a vegetable as is realistically possible (with an exception of baingan for bharta), I would brave the karela as it is, with no major alterations to its physical or chemical composition.

Perhaps the most extreme of torture would be to scrape it off its alligator scale-like appearance, rendering it almost bald, then drowning it in salt, squeezing it off all its bitterness, stuffing it with a million masalas, tying it up in threads and then slow-cooking it. Stuffed Karela in my world would qualify as exemplary cruelty to vegetables.

When we were kids, my mother (or father, when he got a chance) would slip karelas into the lunch menu every odd Sunday (rather apologetically) and then steel themselves to incur our wrath. The effect was rather immediate. Me and the siblings would sulk, go on a mini hunger strike, postpone eating for as long as we could, and then grudgingly eat the karela in its various avatars. But except the crispy ones (a variant is available at the nearest Hot Chips), nothing got our vote.

Things have changed a lot since then, at least for me. I have explored this lesser gourd, seen it in a new light, and made some happy memories out of it in the process(see below)

One thing the karela teaches you for sure is patience. It cannot endure drastic measures, like say, the potato. So whether you are making a simple crispy karela or blending it with other members of the vegetable family, it needs to be handled with care, de-bittered, but not too much, cooked slowly, tossed often. And despite being the spurned one for many palates, it still puts up a brave front. I love it for its resilience.


Karela with potatoes

This is the simplest way to eat karela and one of my favourite recipes. The potatoes help absorb the bitterness of karela, making it a great marriage. It was given to me by my Bengali colleague. “Do nothing to it, add nothing,” is her mantra.

Method:

Wash, dry and chop karelas into small pieces. Do the same with the potatoes.

Heat one tablespoon oil in a non-stick man. Add the karela-potato mix, add salt, a pinch of sugar, haldi and mirchi powder.

Cook slowly. Do not cover (water from condensation brings out the bitterness)

Serve with chapatis or rice and dal.

Note: You can also substitute the potatoes with aubergines.




Karela with onions

One thinly sliced medium sized onion

2-3 karelas, slit vertically and then thinly sliced. Soak this in water with a teaspoon of salt and then squeeze dry, draining off the water

Two vertically slit green chillies

Amchur powder

Jeera powder

Salt, sugar to taste



Method:

Heat one tablespoon oil in a skillet. Add mustard and when it splutters, add the slit green chillies and the sliced onions and slowly sauté.

When the onions are near-brown, add the karelas, amchur powder, salt and mix well.

Cook slowly, uncovered, till the karelas brown.







Karela in tamarind sauce (paarikai pachadi)

Chop fine. Discard larger seeds, but keep the tender ones. Soak in salted water , squeeze out excess water.

Heat oil, add mustard seeds. When it sputters, add hing and two slit green chillies.

To this add the chopped karela and sautee…

To the juice of a lemon sized ball of tamarind, add a spoonful of besan and mix well.

Add the tamarind-besan mixture to the sautéed karelas.

Add sambar powder, salt, a small piece of jaggery, and bring to boil.

Serve with rice or chapatis.

Plaintain paradise

Recently, on a trip to Goa on our anniversary, at a seaside hilly resort called Aldeia de Goa, nesting in my friend Vasu’s house, I was struck by a nostalgia wave when I spotted what was a plaintain sapling in her garden. It stood there in all its glory, battling the sea breeze, displaying its miniature fruit already. Hmmm, I thought, you can take a south Indian to Goa, but you can never take the plaintain (used interchangeably with banana) out of a south Indian, I figured. Trust the banana to give you your daily dose of calcium and potassium, provide instant energy, and always be accessible to your wallet, recession or no recession. You can add it to milk-shakes, porridge, muesli, and start off your day on a energy-high. You can rely on it any time of the day to abate the sugar low—its form lends to the most hygienic consumption—no washing or chopping required, hence it suffers minimum damage by human hands.

Like all self-respecting Dravidians, I have done my fair share of the plaintain cuisine, and continue to do so when I visit the mother or she visits me (it’s a bit high maintenance for my patience levels currently, when my pregnancy-laden hunger pangs override the desire to work too hard to make a meal happen). But one childhood favourite which she often makes for me even now is the dry plaintain and aubergine in tamarind gravy. Yum!

It is true. Every part of the plant is consumed—the leaves are exotic receptacles for food (even though they might now be used to line silver thalis and whatnot). The fruit is eaten ripe and raw, the flowers (vazhapu) made into cutlets, pitlai, poduthuval and sambar, and the pseudo stem made into pachadi or a poduthuval.

Dad was the resident expert at growing them in our backyard when we were kids (he claimed we had nine varieties, although I couldn’t really tell the difference or the finer points of each). All we knew that each weekend, he spent hours in the backyard, figuring out innovative home-grown fertilizers to make his plaintain paradise thrive.

While raw, skinning, chopping, cooking of the plaintain is a bit elaborate and requires a certain knack and finesse. There are also certain anti-staining precautions to be taken, especially as the juices that exude are not particularly discerning about leaving a mark on your clothes or body parts. And if you are amongst the microscopic populace that can skin, detangle and chop the plaintain pseudostem to tiny bits, each a perfect cube, you are king.

“Give us this day our plaintain chips” was a regular childhood stunt when the stuff on offer at the dinner table didn’t have enough sex appeal, and had to be jazzed up with the regular, chilli or pepper laden variants. Nowadays I spot the ‘microwaved’ or ‘non-fried’ variants at super markets, and frankly, I think it’s a scam. What are plaintain chips if not fried in coconut oil? There’s a guy close to our office, next to the Sitladevi temple who used to make them every day for years, but on my last visit, I couldn’t spot him. Informants on his whereabouts will be suitably rewarded.




Banana pseudo stem (Vazhatandu) pachadi

Ingredients:

A foot-long banana pseudostem

One cup buttermilk, diluted

Juice of a small ball of tamarind (less than the size of a lemon)

Haldi, hing, jaggery, salt to taste



For the gravy:

Green chilli, rai, coconut, one teaspoonful of raw rice


Method:

Chop the pseudostem into fine bits. (This is the trickiest part, as it involves slicing into ½ inch thick rounds, detangling the threads that connect them to one another using a spiral action of your finger, and then piling up the sliced rounds and chopping them into tiny squares)

Soak the chopped pseudostem in a bowl of very dilute buttermilk to retain its whiteness (else it tends to darken)

Drain the pseudostem off the buttermilk and cook in small amount of water with haldi, salt and some tamarind juice.

Grind together one green chilli, one teaspoon mustard, one teaspoon washed rice and add the paste to the cooked mixture. Add a pinch of hing and a piece of jaggery. Bring to boil.

Temper with spluttered mustard seeds and a red chilli.

In a nutshell

Forget what everyone else says. I think nuts are a girl’s best friend. They can be packed in tiny containers and sit pretty inside the tiniest handbags, but when you need your nutrition fix, they are totally dependable. High in fibre, low on glycemic index and conservative on calories, they can provide the goodies without the ill-effects or the agony. Ask me. I have gone through most of my pregnancy armed with these potent energy sources— almonds, walnuts, peanuts, pine nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds— practically any nut or seed that can be eaten.

But there was still a void for that one life-giving energy snack when one felt a sugar low, and didn’t particularly want to work too hard to satiate it. Fruit did the job, but sometimes involved arduous processes like cleaning or slicing, unless you were eating a banana. Nariyalpaniwalas seem to have attained cult status and are not easy to come by. Junk is out, and so are processed juices or instant snacks. Granola bars are still contentious for their glycemic index. Enter the peanut butter.

I must admit, it was well into my adolescence that peanut butter came into my life, when dad would get prized, ‘imported’ bottles full of the stuff that seemed as precious as a rare whisky, as it was hard to come by, and had to be bought from bootleggers.

‘Have it with anything’ is an understatement…. I have spooned out and consumed straight from the jar, added it to porridge, used it as a bread spread, layered it on cake, added it to milkshakes, and of course made the most fulfilling sandwiches with it. A lot of my trekking memories are about how peanut butter saved my life.

Okay, it is rich in dietary fibres, and two teaspoons of peanut butter has as much protein as 225 ml of milk. Also research has also proven that peanuts and peanut butter eaters have leaner bodies. And, it has been prescribed to fight protein deficiency and malnutrition.

That’s enough trivia to convince me at least. But I think the best part is the ease of use. No thawing, no defrosting or any such complications. Just open the jar and scoop out a dollop without feeling sinful or any such thing.

Planter’s Creamy Peanut butter and American foods were once upon a time our only peanut butter sources. Till Funfoods came along and more recently, Sundrop launched its peanut butter. Finally, you can have your peanut butter and eat it too. Or drink, if that’s the way you prefer it.

The next time someone pities you for being a vegetarian and wonders aloud where your protein would come from, tell them in defiance, “Mere paas peanut butter hai!”



High energy milkshake

Muesli

One tablespoon peanut butter

Fruit of your choice (bananas and papayas work best)

Milk

Ice cubes



Method:

In a blender, add a tablespoon of muesli (even a granola bar would work), a dollop of peanut butter, chopped fruit, milk and ice cubes and give it a whisk.

Serve chilled.



Peanut Porridge

Oatmeal

Peanut butter

Milk



Method:

To three heaped teaspoons of oatmeal in a bowl, add enough water to cover the oats.

Microwave for 30 seconds. Mix a dollop of peanut butter into the oats, and add milk as required.

Your high energy, high calcium breakfast is ready

Tomatoed!

Forget the whole debate about whether it is a fruit or a vegetable. Does it really matter? You like, you eat, that’s all that counts in the world of edibles. And so it goes with the cheery tomato.

Once upon a time, my mother, in her quest for making me a good south Indian girl, eligible for marriage to future Ramakrishnans or Balasubramaniams that came her way, engaged a Carnatic music teacher for me. She was good, the teacher, nothing wrong with her really, and we affectionately called her paatumami. Problem was, she always showed up just as I was back from school, ready to fling my satchel and run off to play. Instead, I had to dress demurely and exercise my vocal chords over a harmonium for an hour.

Now paatumami really knew her raagams and her taalams, and strictly went by the book. I enjoyed the whole process of finding my voice and my range.. till it began to get tedious, and distracting. I was more interested in ‘getting to the song’ while she felt I had to learn the discipline before I got on to ‘other things’. And therein lay the problem.

Anyway, my classical singer career was nipped in the bud, but paatumami left something behind that I cherish even today. A recipe for tomato chutney that I have named after her.

My mother was a great one for buying them by the tens of kilos and turning them into ketchup. “ Now mother, we don’t even have ketchup much. Why are you making so much of it?” I would ask, plaintively, knowing fully well that we would be assigned with filling bottles and bottles of the damn thing, holding a funnel at its mouth, taking care that nothing spills. And then, the various bottles would be dispatched to near and dear ones, making one feel even more annoyed. “Wait till the prices go up to Rs 60 a kilo, then you will know the value of this,” would be her retort.

She has finally stopped her ketchup jamboree, but has now graduated to tomato tokku (at least I am glad it is more versatile, unlike the blessed ketchup which required one to make grilled sandwiches or sabudana vadas just to mop up at least a tenth of a bottle). Each time she visits, she religiously brings over a bottle or two when they are in season, which I laboriously consume over the next few months. Don’t get me wrong, I like the stuff, just that I am not really into preserves–I just find them monotonous—which is why I like instant pickles instead of ones that are made for the year and stocked in bharnis.

I find a devious joy in roasting a whole tomato, peeling it and using it for whatever—pasta sauce, gravies, even soup or dal— the whole act of charring that precedes skinning lends it a taste and texture blanching will never manage. But, all things said and done, the tomato is one of those ‘always-the-bridesmaid-never-the bride’ kind of stories. Almost every thing you make can justify a tomato, but it can never star in a movie all by itself. Unless you count the tomato soup as a blockbuster, which I don’t, even if it’s made in Tuscany or wherever the best basil grows.




Pattumami chutney

Ingredients:

4-5 large tomatoes chopped

Rai, hing, haldi, jaggery

Oil for tempering (preferably sesame oil)

Salt to taste:



Method:

Heat the oil, add mustard seeds, and hing.

When they splutter, add the chopped tomatoes, haldi, red chilli powder, a piece of jaggery, and mix well.

Cook on a slow flame, till it becomes an even paste, adding salt to taste.

Serve with chapatis or rice, or even use as a bread spread.




Green tomato pachadi

Ingredients:

Green tomatoes (1/4 kg), cut into pieces

200 gm dahi

Grated coconut (one tablespoonful)

One green chilli

Oil, mustard for tempering



Method:

Heat oil in a pan, add rai, and allow to splutter.

Fry the chopped tomatoes lightly for just two minutes (they should still be crunchy)


For the masala: Grind the coconut, half teaspoon rai and one green chilli to a paste


When the tomatoes cool, add the above paste, dahi and salt to taste.

Garnish with curry leaves and serve chilled as an accompaniment

Orange county

All the Halloween hoopla in the city, thanks to an alarming population of expats has suddenly made the pumpkin look cool, unlike earlier when it was relegated to the status of an adulterant in tomato ketchup (remember those ads on telly that screamed that your ketchup is not real unless it has tomatoes in it, and for all you know, you might be getting pumpkin?)

I really felt sorry for the yellow pumpkin (kaddu) when they did that, even though I didn’t even like it much back then. Who would, when it was served up as a messy accompaniment with sambar, sweetened and garnished beyond your palate and generally didn’t appeal to the aesthete in you? Those were the days when you boycotted your vegetables and asked for chips. And your mother yielded, because she knew nothing else would work really.

Some days, it also made an appearance in your sambar, chatting up the lady fingers and the drumsticks, but that was largely okay. But on days that my father made a matthan pachadi, I would declare it my favourite vegetable in the whole world. I didn’t quite imagine its gargantuan proportions till one day, when I saw dad cutting a yellow pumpkin and realised it was actually such a monster, and took so much work cleaning. I still remember, he would carefully collect the slimy seeds from the surface, wash them clean, dry them, so we could skin the seeds and eat them later. But invariably, they would be poached by crows or other such species, and we never got our pumpkin seeds. But recently, I saw them packaged and sold at Foodland under the Conscious Foods label by Kavita Mukhi, and it made me happy.

He did relent into giving me the recipe for the pachadi, years later, but I am sure he is holding something back, because try as I might, it never tastes the same when I make it. But then dad’s like that.

The mother of course is the other extreme. Trust her to turn anything into a halwa or even a barfi and then play this ‘guess what vegetable it is?’ game with us. She did the same with pumpkin (it was something she didn’t even have to artificially colour) and many a pumpkin barfi or halwa has been consumed by us innocently while we were going through our phase of ‘I hate pumpkin’

I of course, made my peace with it years later, firstly when I discovered the joys of pumpkin soup and how versatile it was and how it could blend with almost any other vegetable that could be souped. Second, when I revisited olan, something that was a total comfort food in my adolescence, and made it for myself.





Pumpkin soup

Half kilo of yellow pumpkin, skinned, and cut into pieces

Two cloves garlic

Butter

Crushed black pepper

Chopped walnuts

Basil or celery for the garnish

(Tip: you can also add boiled and blended carrots, beetroot, tomato, potato or peas to make the broth more flavorful, but I prefer the minimal approach)



Method:

Clean and skin the pumpkin, cut into large pieces. Pressure cook for two whistles along with two cloves of garlic.

Cool, puree, add salt, pepper and bring to a boil.

Add a dollop of butter or cream, chopped walnuts and garnish with a stalk of celery or basil and serve with garlic bread or baguettes.




Olan

¼ kilo yellow pumpkin

A small bunch of green chowli beans, cut into two inch pieces

Two green chillies

Coconut milk (half a tetrapack)

Salt to taste



Method:

Skin the yellow pumpkin, taking care to remove all the green parts, and then slice thinly into 2”X2” pieces.

In a vessel, transfer the pumpkin, add salt, a cup of water, one or two slit and mashed green chillies, the chowli and bring to boil on a slow flame, after mixing well.

When the pumpkin and the chowli are nearly done add a tablespoon of coconut milk, mixing gently.

When it comes to a boil, switch off the gas.

Serve hot with chapatis or sambar rice

Mooli Rouge

I never grew up hating mooli, unlike many I know. To me it was one of those aberrations, something that you found floating in your sambar one fine day, and stared at suspiciously, surprised by its crunch on your palate, while the mother explained, “I didn’t have time to go to the market, and there was nothing at home.” But you wondered why she was being so apologetic, as it tasted quite good anyway.

So this is not going to be one of those radish rants. I honestly don’t find its odour pungent or putrid whatever they claim it to be. At least I never had to hold my breath while negotiating a mooli.

There was a time when Samovar beckoned every once in a while with its mooli parathas and pudina raita served with an assortment of chutneys. Nowadays I go to Guru da Dhaba in Lokhandwala for my mooli cravings. I am not the type who will labour over parathas, and my cleaning lady-turned-cook has just about managed to get three recipes right so far, so it’s a bit early to get her to graduate to mooli parathas. And all my Panju friends have vanished into thin air, so I’m not getting fed at their homes any more.

Unlike many, the mooli’s sharpness in taste is something I can deal with—nothing that a dash of lemon can’t beat though—I think lemon is the best antidote to all things that are still making up their mind whether to be nice or nasty to you.

Coming to think of it, there’s plenty you can do with mooli. You could cut it into strips, rub some lemon and pepper onto it, leave it be for 20 minutes and then stir-fry in mustard oil, adding salt, red chillies and amchoor, till all the water dries. Makes for a great starter. Alternatively, you could make khatte lachhee, ala Punjabi style—a tangy side of grated mooli and its leaves, green chillies, salt, and a garnish of the sweet-sour date and tamarind chutney (ala bhel). If there’s no chutney, tamarind pulp, slightly sweetened will also do the job.

And of course, the ubiquitous mooli raita—Grated mooli, mixed with dahi and chaat masala- very cooling, and not smelly at all. I often make a mooli salad with pomegranates, where I chop the leaves and the tuber really fine, add lots of lemon juice, a dash of chaat masala and salt, and throw in the pomegranates. The latter offsets the residual sharpness (if any, after all that lemon) of the mooli and also gives makes for an aesthetic blend of colours (okay, I art-direct my food, but what’s wrong with that?)

Recently, I stumbled into a Gujju recipe (courtesy my friend Dipti) that got my taste-buds into a frenzy. It looks like a lot of work, but believe me, it’s not.




Mooli muthiyas

Ingredients

Wheat flour - 1 cup

Besan - ½ cup

Oil - ¼ cup

Mooli (grated) + leaves (chopped) - ½ cup

Red chilli powder - 1 tsp

Lime juice - 1 tsp

Sugar - 1 tsp

Mustard seeds - ½ tsp

Salt, hing



To garnish:

Chopped coriander leaves and grated coconut.



Method:

Grate the mooli. Chop its leaves. Mix both.

Mix both flours, grated mooli and leaves, chilli powder, salt, haldi, sugar and lime juice.

Add half the oil & knead to a soft dough, adding water, little by little.

Make balls and shape into 1” diameter rolls.

Steam the rolls for 10 minutes

Cool, cut the rolls into desired size

Heat the remaining oil, temper mustard seeds, add the muthiyas, saute well for a few minutes

Garnish with chopped coriander leaves and grated coconut.

All’s not Greek here

There was a time when I thought my mother was into some insider trading as far as methi (fenugreek) seeds went. Whenever I called her with an ailment, she would ask me to consume methi. She later told me that universally, there were only two classic disorders of the intestine—one that couldn’t hold anything, and the other that couldn’t release anything. In both cases, methi came to the rescue.

In her books, the only difference was in the way they were consumed. For releasing powers, it's methi soaked in water and then swallowed, and for retaining powers, it was methi seeds ground, mixed in buttermilk and swallowed. I can’t remember which one was less disgusting, but it would suffice to say that I was repelled by methi for a long time. Though I never realised that it was often hidden in my curd rice tadka or the ubiquitous sambar powder or assorted powder chutneys that my mother made-and-kept, for you never know. I also saw my mother throwing in a pinch of the seeds into a dosa batter. “It makes them really soft,” she would assure, when she saw me rolling my eyes in disbelief at the nefarious ways I was being made to consume this condiment. The only thing I could bear was the aloo-methi subzi, which got made every once in a while for our tiffin lunches with chapatis.

Till I entered the magical world of theplas and khakras during my trekking phase, I never realised methi could be a object of deliberate comsumption and did have addictive powers. “Ah!” I thought. “The leaf is less notorious than the seed.” And thus methi began to occupy a happy place in my life. Another revelation was that methi could happily blend with palak and other greens in sai bhaji, which to my mind is the greatest gift of the sindhis to vegetarians.

At a recent brunch, I had this long conversation with a lactating mother, and she held forth on the powers of the methi that aid in lacatation, and try as I might, I couldn’t fathom chomping on truckloads of the stuff, even though it would make me a better food-provider for the forthcoming baby. She also gave me a recipe that I am a bit scared to try, as it involves throwing in a tempering of garlic onto a bed of fresh methi leaves, adding salt, and then eating it (yes!). I asked her if there was something missing, like sautéing perhaps, or adding lemon juice, something? She said no, this was it. Someone please validate it for me (as I will feel like a cow in more ways than one otherwise)

But the day I realised methi was cool was when I tasted this salad at a friend’s Christmas lunch. Since I was the only vegetarian (which I usually am at such dos), the salad was dedicated to me, and it had baby methi happily mingling with pomegranate and other greens in a honey-lemon dressing. I fell in love all over again.


Baby fenugreek and pomegranate salad with lettuce


One or two bunches of baby fenugreek leaves, mildly broken (keep the roots intact)

Half a head of iceberg lettuce, shredded

One cup shelled pomegranate

Juice of one lemon

One tablespoon honey

A dash of olive oil

Salt to taste


Method:

In a large bowl, mix all the above. Chill. Eat.

To beet or not to beet

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the beetroot is also its downfall—its colour, which leaves a trail, and literally so. Memories of stained faces, dresses, especially when they are white, loom large and the beetroot has often been pointed out as the guilty party.

Back in my childhood, my dad usually stayed a mile away from it (the beetroot didn’t awaken the restless chef in him, nor his tastebuds), but my mother often rustled up a quick sabzi, sautéing it with onions and tempering with mustard and green chillies, and we were usually delighted to mix it with curd rice and watch it turn all pink (though today, that sight might be a tad offensive to me). She also grated some into a salad with carrots or cabbage and no one really complained.

Much has been said about the beetroot’s high glycemic index, something that most tubers are guilty of, but the beetroot takes the cake, so to speak, and even supercedes the often- guilty potato. Moreover, its iron-richness and resultant role in blood formation (the colour association is back again) has often rendered it to the status of anemia-alleviator, but that is far from what its real goodness is all about. Being rich in folic acid, fiber, manganese, potassium and phosphorus, beetroots are a healthy and a nutritious form of food, and one can also get creative with it, much against popular opinion.

Sadly, the views on the beetroot are often antipodal, the chief culprit being the fact that either it was served in too bland or regimented a format (“Eat this boiled beetroot, its good for you”) or too pickled (gross misuse of vinegar).

The most exotic it got for me was in Goa when, in this exotic French restaurant called Le Poisson Rouge in Baga. It was an Arugula Salad with parmesan served on a bed of beetroot carpaccio—thinly sliced raw beetroot with a herb vinaigrette—that too in a beetroot reduction, for those fascinated by molecular gastronomy. It was one of the best salads I have ever eaten.

In the meanwhile, these are a few of my favourite concoctions.

Beetroot soup

Ingredients:

2-3 beetroots, boiled and grated

Carrots (optional)

One large onion

2 teaspoonfuls of cornflour

Lemon juice

Black pepper

Salt to taste

Butter



Method:

1. Boil and grate the beetroots and keep them aside.

2. Dry roast the cornflour till golden brown and keep aside.

3. Sauté the chopped onions in oil till light brown.

4. To this, add water, beetroot, cornflour, and cook for 10-15 minutes.

5. Transfer this to a blender or liquidizer and churn well

6. Re-boil the mixture, turn off the gas, add lemon juice, black pepper to the soup and a dollop of yogurt or butter for added flavor.

7. Garnish with thyme or parsley



Beetroot raita

Ingredients:

2 cups beetroot, finely grated

1 cup Curds

Salt

Oil, mustard, green chillies and curry leaves for tempering

Method:

1. Heat oil in a pan, add mustard. When mustard splutters, add a green chilli, curry leaves and the grated beetroot.

2. Stir on low fire till lightly cooked.

3. Add salt, remove from fire and let it cool.

4. Beat the curds, mix with beetroot and serve.

Message in a bottle

Till my homeopath enlightened me on the powers of doodhi (aka lauki aka bottle gourd), I was one of those people who ate it ungrudgingly whenever my mother threw it into a dal, or turned it into a halwa if she felt particularly generous. I always thought it was one of those poor, innocuous, bland vegetables one cooked when one didn’t want to get particularly creative, or had a choice, or was just looking for comfort food.

And then I met Dr Padam, my homeopath who couldn’t stop extolling the virtues of doodhi, and how it could reverse my near-anemia at that point. Today, I am hooked onto doodhi, and so are my cats (apparently it’s great for animals too) and I religiously have it at least twice a week, and the cat of course gets it in her broth everyday, along with rice, masoor dal, pieces of carrots, chicken or fish (do email me for a pet food recipe)

I am told that the doodhi (which is allegedly 96% water) is a star in the Indian Ayurvedic medical system and has tremendous healing powers. Consider its benefits (carnivores, move on): It’s cooling, and calming—makes you relax after eating. It’s an alkanine diuretic: a glass of fresh lauki juice mixed with limejuice combats the burning sensation caused by the high acidity of urine. Lauki juice is also an excellent remedy for excessive thirst caused by diarrhoea over consumption of fatty or fried foods. A glass of lauki juice with a little salt added to it prevents excessive loss of sodium, satiating thirst and keeping you refreshed in summer.

And for those size zero aspirants, here’s more news. Doodhi is almost zero on calories, so can give you that illusion of having eaten without adding up those inches. Also recommended for those suffering from digestive problems, are diabetic or convalescing.

But of course I still haven’t got to the point where I have doodhi juice first thing in the morning as my health shot. It’s just too much work, and besides, my nariyalpaniwala is highly dependable. But some of my friends have gone the morning cuppa doodhi route and continue to do so. Some have given up halfway, and resorted to adding doodhi as a filler in soups (along with tomato, carrots, beetroot, and what have you). Sounds good to me. The doodhi doesn’t seem to make much fuss about who it can get along with in the vegetable kingdom.

As for moi, I am still celebrating a yoghurt-based doodhi recipe I learnt from my friend Jennifer, the only carnivore I know who can do veggies well.


Jenny's Doodhi in yoghurt sauce

What you need:

Half a doodhi, chopped

Two tomatoes

One onion

One green chilli

Ginger garlic paste

Yoghurt 200 gm

Curry leaves

Salt to taste



Method:

Chop the doodhi into small pieces.

Heat oil in a pan and throw in some cumin seeds. When they splutter, add the green chilli and the curry leaves, fry well.

Now add the onions and sauté, adding the tomatoes and the ginger garlic paste as they turn soft.

Add water if required and cook till it all comes together.

Add the chopped doodhi, and mix well, adding salt and haldi.

Add a cup of water and pressure cook for two whistles.

When cool, beat a cup of yoghurt and add it to the doodhi gravy.

Serve with rice or rotis.

Cool and the gang

“The cucumber is the only vegetable that has zero anything—calories, sugar, vitamins, whatever,” proclaimed Radha, my ex boss and my partner in crime at Dr. Vijaya Venkat’s health awareness centre (she doesn’t like calling it a dabba). “It’s just water. You can have as much as you want, nothing will ever add up,” he (yes!) assured. I later found out that it did have Vitamin C and was high on fibre, so it wasn’t that it was a mascot for the unbearable lightness of being.

As a chief contender for the daily salad, that sure is a point in its favour, although unlike say carrots or spinach, what will you tell your child when you have to feed him/her cucumber? May be you can try this, “Eat this and you will stay cool,” and see if it cuts any ice. I still remember, when the doctor put my mother on a strict diabetic-cum-pro thrombin control diet, the only item that had a tick against it was the cucumber. My mother was aghast. “What is the use of living if this is the only vegetable I can eat?” he demanded to know.

Its high water content is adequate reason the phrase ‘as cool as a cucumber’ came up. And even though it is relegated to nothingness in its contribution to nutrients, I must still add that it is hugely underestimated. Like its power to soothe a parched throat on a highway in the peak of summer. Or its absolute conduciveness to eye packs. Or its magical chemistry with dill. Or even yoghurt. Or its enormous power to yield to carving (at those gauche buffet tables, but what the heck).

Some like it pickled, and I must admit I have a weakness for brine. Have it indigenously pickled in vinegar (those ceramic bowls laden with the stuff at Indian-Chinese or Chinese-Chinese restaurants, or pay a premium for the miniature pickled gherkins, the choice is yours.

A lesser ventured into, but more wholesome option is a refreshing cold gazpacho soup that takes five minutes or less to make: all you have to do is simply purée cucumbers, tomatoes, green peppers and onions, then add salt and pepper to taste. Voila! I had a really nice one years ago at Mezzo Mezzo.

For me the cucumber is a staple in my daily salad, where I allow it to freely date red and yellow peppers, sprouts, carrots, spring onions, grapefruit, pomegranates (I just have a thing for colour) and just about anything that will yield. On my not-so-lazy days, I grate them to make my mother’s trademark pachadi which is simply, out of this world.




Cucumber and dill salad

One small head of lettuce, shredded

Two cucumbers, cut into chunks

Dill, one small bunch

Olive oil

Lemon juice

Salt to taste



Method:

Shred the lettuce, add the cucumber chunks, dill, and mix well.

Add one tbsp olive oil, juice of one lemon and salt to taste.

Mix well. Serve chilled.



Cucumber pachadi

One or two cucumbers, grated

One green chilli

A small piece of ginger, julienned

Oil, mustard, hing for tempering

Salt to taste



Method:



Grate one large or two small cucumbers, drain the juice and set aside.

Add 200 gm of yoghurt to the cucumber, salt to taste, and mix well.

Heat oil in a kadai and add mustard seeds. When they splutter, add hing, chopped green chilli, and ginger and sautee well.

When cool, por the tempering over the cucumber in dahi.

Serve cold with rotis or rice based dish as a raita, or even eat by itself

Flower power

To be born a cauliflower is an elegant thing in itself—it’s like what can possibly go wrong with a Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie offspring? It will have the looks, the body, and of course the bite to go with it.

Having said that, the cauliflower’s natural beauty is perhaps one thing that gets in the way while trying to cook it. Mutilating it like the South Indians do in their poduthuvals is close to criminal, dousing it with coconut, chilli and garlic gravy like the Maharashtrians do is sacrilege. I for one always have issues about ‘deflowering’ this thing of beauty, rendering it leafless, almost bald. With such reservations, transforming it into an out-of-world experience is a daunting task. As Aamir Khan said in Dil Chahta hai, “Perfection ko kaun improve kar sakta hai?” (how can you improve perfection?)

I must say the north Indians have cracked this. Like they have totally figured out that only-ginger-no-garlic is the way to go for this flower. Or that less is more (so roasted and crushed jeera and a whole chilli are perhaps the only things that pass muster). They have also figured out the slow cooking is the only way to get your gobi right, even if takes close to an hour. And that there is a colour palette while frying onions that moves from white to pink to green to brown and that green is the shade we want. As someone with limited patience, exaggerated by the inability to stand over a flame and watch something cook for more than five minutes, I am definitely not the candidate.

I have had the most simple, yet most amazing aloo-gobis at my childhood friend Tina’s house, where her mother, Mrs Sahni, served them up for us with hot rotis wrapped in a towel, and released just before they reached your plate.

Recently, at a dinner table conversation with a Punjab-da-puttar, my interest in this species of vegetable was rekindled all over again. It’s been a while since I ate a good aloo-gobi and Tina has moved to San Francisco and evolved into a shockingly bad cook, while her mother is nestled somewhere in Greater Kailash II in Delhi. So right now, Navraj Lehl is my only hope and I do hope he reads this and invites me for a Punjabi meal soon.

I attempted doing it the Punjabi way, but my patience wore out, so now, I do the occasional cauliflower soup (which I am good at), throw it into a vegetable stew (it works) or make a quickie pulao with chunky pieces of it in a tomato and ginger-garlic gravy. But I still yearn for a good gobi-matter or aloo-gobi or just plain gobi-ki-sabzi.

And then, one fine day, I learnt this recipe from my buddy Deepa (an amazing cook and equally fun to be with) in which she just buttered a whole cauliflower, dunked it into an oven and garnished it with pepper. It was the most divine one-pot meal I had ever eaten.




Baked cauliflower with thyme and pepper


1 medium sized cauliflower

Salted butter

Crushed pepper

Dried thyme



Method:

1.Wash and clean cauliflower if necessary and wipe dry (avoid buying the slightly mottled ones)

2. Take a dollop of butter (as much as you are permitted to have or dare to) and slater it all over the cauliflower, making sure you smear enough in the grooves and hidden parts.

3. Now sprinkle some thyme and pepper (just pepper will also do if you don’t particularly fancy thyme) all over (don’t forget the parts between the florets) and dunk it into a microwave for 4-6 minutes (850W) or bake in a regular oven for 20 min at 180 degrees.

4. Mop up the excess butter in the dish with a baguette, and dig into the whole cauliflower with a fork and knife. Or just tear it to shreds if you give two hoots about elegance.

Bean there, done that

It must be hard to be innocuous.. and it must be harder to be innocuous, yet elegant. Being a vegetable is work enough, but one that is always the bridesmaid, never the bride perhaps deserves a special mention, or lets say, a critics’ award. So goes the tale of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common green beans, whose life is not half as exciting as its name threatens to be. The story of the string beans is kind of the story of the not-so-good-looking supporting actor, who has to meet very exacting standards if he ever has to stand on his own.

Not that it doesn’t happen. I have seen many a disaster south Indian meal—like a recent one at Banana Leaf (a south Indian restaurant on Juhu-Versova Link road desperate to please the north Indian) that is capable of being redeemed, just by getting their beans right. Many a sambar has been salvaged by the gentle intervention of the beans poriyal, and many a stir-fry has jumped a few notches higher just because the beans were at the right degree of crunchiness.

To me, a rasam rice with beans made the south Indian way together with papadaams rates very high in the list of soul food. So does a very English recipe where you just string them, simmer or steam them, and then toss with butter, salt and pepper.

The trick is to find them young, when they are tender and succulent, as you usually do this season. The test being, breaking them using your thumb and index finger—if they do so with zero resistance, they are a prize catch. If not, nothing can really uplift their existence. So bean it.


Mike's Tangy string beans

A quickie that even inept bachelor boys can whip up in no time—it's high on taste, low on performance pressure, and the perfect accompaniment to barbecues.


Ingredients:

Beans: 200 gm

Garlic: 3-4 cloves

Soya sauce

Salt to taste

Olive oil



Method:

String the beans, wash and drain. Keep them whole, unless very long, in which case you can break into two.

Now heat olive oil in a pan and sautee the chopped garlic.

Now add the beans and sautee on high flame for 2-3 minutes, and then on low for a minute. Add soya sauce and salt to taste, mix well.

Serve as a side and mop up the liquid with a baguette or good old pao.





Beans Soudi style

You can take a south Indian out of poriyal, but you can’t take poriyal out of a South Indian. Here is my dad’s recipe for not quite the poriyal, but a less elaborate version of it, which in my opinion ranks higher simply because of its coy quotient. Colour is of essence, so whatever you do, don’t mess with the green hue.



Ingredients:

Beans: 200 gm, chopped fine

Green chillies : two

Udid dal- one teaspoon

Mustard seeds – one teaspoon

Grated coconut (optional): one tablespoonful



Method

Heat oil in a kadai, add mustard seeds and when they splutter, add the udid dal, and fry till brown.

Now add the green chillies and the chopped beans, salt to taste, and toss.

Cook on slow fire, stirring occasionally, and preferably uncovered. You can add water if you feel the beans are sticking to the bottom of the pan.

The beans should still be a bit crunchy and very green when you are done, which should take 5-7 minutes. Switch off the gas, and garnish with grated coconut. Serve hot with sambar rice or rasam rice.

Carrot Confidential

In the pink


There is a reason why the carrot is not taken seriously as a vegetable. Maybe it doesn’t approve of being cooked—in fact it seems to question why, like it were a fruit or something and is affronted by thermal violence. Personally I have always noticed that carrots in subzis or gravies always looked like afterthoughts—or at best a filler. If you must cook it, try the recipe in the box, its soothing and total comfort food material.

The carrot is however, happy to be chomped, grated, chopped into rounds or turned into those weird florets you often see in salad decors at gauche buffets.

Then there is this whole divide between the slim, slender pink ones with the real juice, and the short, orange fatties who have the meat, and make great candidates for soups or even our indigenous gajar ka halwa. I prefer the former, even though they just finish before you even start on them. They just have more attitude, me thinks.

I like mine raw, washed, but not necessarily peeled. I think it is unnecessary and too much work. Just as I think juicing a carrot is. When we were growing up, there was this whole big deal on carrots and your eyes at some of my friend’s houses. My parents, I think, took their gene pool and our good vision for granted, so there was never any of that spiel. But mom would regularly grate them, and throw some lemon juice and a chilly or two into it with a hing and rai tadka and it worked great for us. Who gave a damn about beta carotene anyway. She also made this amazing carrot pickle in a lime-mustard and chilly marinade that was out-of-this-world. Must tell the mother to send me a consignment of the same pronto, as I suddenly have cravings and cannot seem to focus on anything else.

But more than anything, there is a visual aesthetic about carrots that perhaps soothes the eyes—the orange pink bodies, the green leaves, the barely-there to robust fibre on their bodies. I don’t think Pankaj Kapur would have looked good chomping on anything else other than a carrot. And I still think carrot cake (especially the one at Moshe’s and Theobroma) is the best thing to happen to desserts, at least for those (like me) who believe chocolate is seriously overrated.


Sautéed carrots in pepper


Ingredients:

Carrots: 4-5

Olive oil

Salt

Pepper



Method: Slice carrots into rounds. In a pan, heat some olive oil, and throw the carrots into it. Cook on high flame for a minute, uncovered, and then cover it and allow to cook for 3-4 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve as an accompaniment to anything.




Carrot kheer

Ingredients

Carrots – 200 gms

Milk – ½ litre

Sugar – 100 gms

Almonds – 8 -10

Cashews – 8- 10

Elaichi powder – ½ tsp



Method

Soak the almonds in hot water to peel the skin quickly.

Now grind the peeled almonds and cashews to a fine paste by adding little milk. Set aside.

Peel and chop carrots and pressure cook with little water. Cool and grind to a fine paste, adding sugar to it. Now cook the carrot paste for some time in the milk, stirring and adding more milk as required. To this, add the ground almond and cashew paste. Cook for a minute and switch off gas. Add elaichi powder, mix well, cool, refrigerate and have it chilled.

Pulse fiction

It is that time of the year when dried pulses (various) are making a comeback—amongst other things, vegetables have become so dear that it is currently inducing the fiscally wise like yours truly to adopt hi-protein legume diets, Atkins or no Atkins (the last I checked, it appeared that it was cheaper to be a fruitarian) Suddenly, the husband’s coldcuts were seeming cheaper than my tomatoes and cauliflower.

Since it breaks my heart to buy veggies by the quarter of a kilo and since potatoes and onions don’t exactly a wholesome meal make, I began to explore legumes, a produce hitherto neglected by me-with-a-fetish-for-everything-fresh.

For one week, I am going the pulse route, I decided. A world of low fat, high fibre, no cholesterol, low glycemic index, high protein, high nutrients option at a remarkably low cost.

Until recently, my pulse odyssey was limited to rajma and chholey, apart from that great south Indian contribution, adai (but more about that in another article). It took me a while and a lot of minimization to perfect the recipes for the former two, but I finally culled out a simple, but great one for rajma from CY Gopinath’s blog (courtesy Guru da Dhaba in Lokhanwala) and the one for chholey which does not involve a million masalas from my Futura cookbook, an acquisition with my Futura cooker, courtesy the m-in-law’s last visit.

In my week of living with the beans, I also tried a moong kadhi, an olan, hummus, a chickpea and aubergine stew, a rajma salad and various adai mixes.

Of course childhood memories of the mother doling out a regular dose of a chowli-yam-raw banana-eggplant-concoction in tamarind gravy (puli-kutthi-kuttu, she called it) come flashing back. I never really acquired a taste for it, but it was an existential yet wholesome meal, to say the least. I could never tell if it was a main course or an accompaniment—so overwhelming was the veggie to gravy ratio.

My favourite pulse starrer is still the olan (the one with white pumpkin and red beans). It is subtly flavoured, yet satiating, and easy on the palate. I can eat it by itself, although rasam rice goes every well with it.




Hummus


Chickpeas: 200 gms

Juice of two lemons

Olive oil – one tablespoon

Garlic – 6-7 cloves

Tahini paste (optional) one tbsp

Salt to taste



Method:

Soak chickpeas overnight, and remove loose skins if any. Pressure cook till soft. Cool. Drain cooking liquid and set aside.

Grind the chickpeas and the chopped garlic to the right level of coarseness, adding the cooking liquid for consistency.

Now, squeeze the juice of the lemons into the ground chickpeas and mix well. Add a dollop of tahini paste (available at gourmet food shops or supermarkets) and mix well, adding salt to taste. Add the olive oil and mix well.

Garnish with chilli flakes or chopped parsley and serve chilled. Can be stored for a week.

(Works well as a dip or a sandwich spread, with lavash, pita bread or even crackers for a quick hunger fix. )

Tip: If you want to make your hummus more exciting, try adding a few pickled jalapenos to the chickpeas while serving.




Moong kadhi

Whole moong: 1 small cup, soaked

Curd

Turmeric powder

Chilli powder

Salt

Sugar

Besan



For the tempering

3-4 cloves of crushed garlic



Method:

Soak the whole moong for half and hour and pressure cook well with a pinch of salt.

In a pan, whisk 250 gm of curd, two teaspoons of besan, a pinch of turmeric, a pinch of chilli powder, salt to taste and a pinch of sugar. Mix well, breaking lumps formed, if any.

Now add the boiled moong to it, and enough water to have a kadhi like consistency and bring to a boil. Switch off gas.

For the tempering: Heat one teaspoon oil and fry the crushed garlic till light brown and pour over the kadhi

Serve hot with rice and papad.









Olan

White pumpkin ¼ kg

Red chowli 100gms

Green chillies – 2

Salt to taste

Coconut oil for garnish



Method:

Skin the white pumpkin and cut into 2’ x 2’’ slices of 1 cm thickness. Wash well.



Now soak the red chowli for half an hour and pressure cook it with a pinch of salt till well done, but still whole and not mashed



In a kadhai, transfer the white pumpkin add some water, salt to taste and cook on a slow flame.



Crush two green chillies and add them to the pumpkin, mixing well.



When the pumpkin is nearly cooked, add the cooked chowli into it, stirring well.



Drizzle some fresh coconut oil over the olan for the authentic south Indian touch(optional)



Serve hot with rice, sambar or even chapatis. Or just eat it neat, like I do.

The color purple

Decidedly good-looking, elegant, and flamboyant, the aubergine ranks quite high in the vegetable hierarchy, not merely on account of its looks. Its association dates back to our show-and-tell years when we were taught that purple is the colour of brinjals (or aubergines if you went to ‘that kind of school’) and we made sure we used the right crayon while coloring it.

As north Indian as bharta, as Maharashtrian as bharit, as Bong as begun bhaja (which the Calcutta Club on Link Road Oshiwara makes the best of) as Dravidian as katrikai kozhambu, as European as ratatouille—the brinjal rules and blends. Mostly.

In its many avatars— the long skinny purple ones, the little round green and white ones, the massive shiny purple bharta ones, the slender leaf green, smooth-skinned ones, the short, stubby striated purple ones, or the miniature baby brinjals, one thing is certain about them—that they have personality and attitude.

And even after you destroy their looks, like in the case of bharta, they still pack a mean punch. They can be equally divine in the just-smeared-with salt-and-turmeric-and deep-fried-in-mustard-oil begun bhaja way or in a complex yet subtle blend of flavours and herbs as in a ratatouille.

The Women’s India Trust (of the famous WIT preserves and produce) has gone ahead and innovated further—their brinjal pickle has to be had to be believed. I still haven’t figured out how they make it and would welcome suggestions, if any.

Intensely loved or hated, the baingan still invokes mixed reactions. If you love it, you can’t have enough if it, and if you don’t, too bad! Here are two of my favourite recipes.



Baingan raita

This is a recipe from Lata, my cook from yore. She insists on calling it a salad though. You decide.

One large brinjal (bharta variety)
Few cloves of garlic
One medium sized onion
Chaat masala
Jeera powder
Two green chillies
¼ kg curd

Method:
Rub some oil on the brinjal and grill/roast on an open flame till tender and the skin is seen flaking evenly.
Now, peel off the skin, mash the pulp with a spatula, cool and set aside.
Chop one onion, a few cloves of garlic and two green chillies finely.
Add to the brinjal pulp, and mix well. Now add the roasted jeera powder and chat masala, and finally the dahi, and mix well. Serve with rotis or as a side dish.


Chickpea and aubergine stew

One cup chickpeas, soaked overnight
One medium sized aubergine
One large onion
4-5 cloves of garlic
Pepper powder
Three medium sized tomatoes
Salt to taste


Method:

Pressure cook the chickpeas till soft. Drain the chickpea liquid. Set aside

Chop the aubergines and tomatoes into small cubes.

In a pan, heat some oil and roast the chopped garlic in it. Add the thinly sliced onions and mix well.

Add the tomatoes, and cook well to a pulp and then add the aubergines. Cook covered for five minutes.

Now add the precooked chickpeas, blend well, adding the chickpea liquid as necessary. Cook slowly for 5-10 minutes, add crushed pepper and salt. Serve hot with rice or garlic bread.

No room for mush

Lesser morsels


Growing up in a Tam-bram household can do strange things to you. It can, for instance, make you believe that mushrooms are not very vegetarian, or they are what a closet carnivore would eat in a vegetarian household. Little wonder then, that we never went down that road for several years.

My mother still doesn’t eat them, and my father sniffs at them like he were a puppy.

But when I had my own kitchen, I set the rules and began experimenting with produce that was hitherto not in my domain. Like mushrooms, broccoli, avocado, and other so-called exotica

The beauty of the mushroom is that it can be a follower, yet retain its individuality at the same time. So while it happily blends with bean sprouts, peppers, pakchoy and other members of the stir-fry family, it can also call the shots on its own, just with a dash of thyme (see recipe)

Café Mondegar in Colaba made the most divine garlic mushrooms at one time. These were mushrooms, dipped in a garlicky batter and then fried, almost like pakodas—they were a divine way to start a Sunday brunch with a mug of beer (those were the days when working on Sunday was against my religion)

I don’t know how sanitized the Mondy’s menu has got now, but if you are around, do ask if they still make it. Might give me an impetus to revisit and bask in nostalgia.

I do notice that most households still have mushroom reservations. May be it has to do with the fact that you are never sure you have washed all the slime and mud off. Or that they perspire a lot, and don’t take very well to heat, and hence have to be cooked real fast and on high flame. But the fact is that they actually blend with almost anything. For instance, Sardar at Kala Chowki makes a divine Mushroom masala, which might be scoffed at by purists, but is a hit nevertheless.

Of course, they look really good dressed up with arugula or grilled to perfection with Provolone cheese, like they are at Grand Hyatt’s current Mushroom Magic festival at Celini. But for most of us who don’t normally have access to Porcini, Cape, Chanterelle, Oyster, Portobello and Morel, the regular ones available at the local market will do for now.




Sautéed mushrooms with thyme

This is one of my therapy meals, with a glass of red wine when I am not about to give a damn, but still want to eat something nice, something classier then khichdi

One packet mushrooms

Dried Thyme

Butter



METHOD:

Chop mushrooms into quarters.

Melt some butter in a pan and add a teaspoon of thyme to it.

Toss the mushrooms in the butter on high flame for two minutes. Serve.




Mushroom pulao

Improvise your regular pulao by throwing in a few mushrooms, or try this recipe:



One packet of mushrooms

One medium onion

4-5 pods garlic

2 green chillies, slit vertically

Tomatoes

Basmati rice

Two or three cinnamon sticks

4-5 pepper corns



METHOD:

Fry the sliced onions in a tablespoonful of oil till golden brown. Add pepper corns, chillies, cinnamon, tomatoes and cook till the gravy comes together.

Toss the mushrooms in, and cook on high flame for two minutes. Add the chopped garlic.

Add one cup of basmati rice, previously soaked and drained into it. Toss the rice with the vegetable mix.

Add two cups water and cook well on slow flame, stirring occasionally, till all the water drains off.

Cabbage claim

I wonder if the humble cabbage knows what people think of him. Does he, for instance know that perceivably, he leads the most humdrum existence in their minds? He is the one mostly relegated to the role of ‘roughage” when someone is having a not so easy time on the pot. Worse, he represents all things prison-like and sickly, like cabbage soup in Dickensonian novels.

The cabbage is perhaps one vegetable that sits in the vegetable tray in every refrigerator, waiting his turn to be cooked, or at least blended with other vegetables in a sabzi, dal, salad, or act as carrier for coleslaw on his lucky day.

Unlike its distant cousin, the cauliflower which has ascended into a vegetable of great merit, a modicum of glamour and individuality, the cabbage remains characterless and insipid. It has no sex appeal whatsoever, and to top it all, it is always cheap and affordable. (I am not referring to the purple and red ones here that cost an arm)

In most households, a cabbage is a binder, either thrown it in with a few other veggies like potatoes, peas, capsicum, or cauliflower when there isn’t enough volume, or added an after thought in a salad. I find it intriguing that the cabbage has very few secrets despite having so many layers.

My dad had his way of balancing the tartiness of a sambar with the genteelness of cabbage. Except that he did it differently from anyone else I know. “It should be crunchy and green, so you have to cook it just right..” he would say. He did nothing to it except a tempering of mustard and udid dal, a few green chillies, slit vertically and gently crushed.” The garnish with coconut kind of nailed it, but is entirely optional.

By sheer accident, I too found ways in which the cabbage redeemed itself.. and even if you are not an aficionado, they are worth a try


Cabbage and carrot salad

Finely chopped cabbage: one cup

Grated carrots: half cup

Juice of one lemon

Green chillies, julienned

Salt, sugar



Method:

Finely chop the cabbage (julienne looks better) and grate the carrots.

Mix well in a bowl, add salt and a few grains of sugar, squeeze the juice of one lemon and set aside.



For the tempering:

Splutter mustard seeds in a kadhai, add a pinch of hing and the slit green chillies and pour the tempering over the salad mix. Mix well. Serve chilled, after half an hour, when the juices mix well.



Cabbage tikkis

Tur dal: one cup

Chana dal: one cup

Udid dal: half cup

Half a head of a small cabbage, chopped

Green chillies

Ginger: a small piece

Onion: one medium, chopped

Curry leaves

Salt to taste



Method:



Soak the dals for a few hours and grind to a coarse paste with chillies, curry leaves, ginger, adding just enough water.

Add the chopped cabbage and onions to this dal mixture, and then add salt, mix well.

Shape into small balls and deep fry.