An excellent use for loofah in the kitchen

November 11, 2013November 11, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Squashes and gourds Tags: food, indian food, indian recipes, toori, vegan, vegetarian 2 Comments

Loofahs are pretty useful little scratchy devices that one can use as scrubbies, usually in the bath on your pretty pink toesies. That’s great and all, but does my kitchen have any use of them? Yes.

Start with this:

Loofah

And go back in time several months at which time it looked like this:

Ridged luffa squash

At this point, loofah can be used to make an excellent meal. When these gourds are harvested green, the flesh is soft and delicious with a hint of sweetness. Leave it on the vine, and the flesh becomes fibrous and scratchy.

When young, I always knew this vegetable as ‘toori’. Its true name is luffa, which is where the more fancy appellation ‘loofah’ comes from. Now I love toori so much that if I was the farmer in whose job it was to grow a crop for loofahs, not many would make it that far.

Ridged luffa squash with garlic and tomatoes

Ingredients:

3 largish ridged luffa squash or equivalent amount
3-4 large cloves of garlic
1 large or 2 small tomatoes
3 fresh green chilies or to heat tolerance
6 or so curry leaves
Half a teaspoon mustard seeds
half a teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon coriander powder
salt to taste
2 tablespoons oil

Method:

Peel the squash with a vegetable peeler; for the first pass, center the peeler on the ridges; once the ridges are removed, the second pass will remove the rest of the peel.

The flesh inside is soft and pale. The seeds, at this stage, are not developed into being hard and can be eaten. Chop up the flesh into cubes. Mince garlic and the chilies. Chop up the tomato.

Heat oil in a thick-bottomed pan on medium-high heat. When it shimmers, put in the mustard seeds and wait till they start popping. Then put in the minced garlic and chilies, and the curry leaves (I didn’t have these so I left them out). When these start to shrivel, you can put in the chopped tomato.

Now the standard with this type of dish is to let the tomato liquid boil off. This intensifies the flavor of the tomato. So keep the heat on medium-high, and stir the tomatoes once in a while, helping it along by crushing it with the back of your spoon.

Once the tomatoes seem pretty dry, put in the turmeric and coriander powder. Stir. Now put in the squash cubes and give them a stir to coat with the spices. Add the salt, use your judgment about the amount. Cover with a lid, bring to a boil (no added liquid is necessary, the salt will draw out the high water content of the squash flesh itself). When it comes to a boil, leave it with the lid on at a simmer.

In another 15-20 minutes, the squash will be much reduced, and done. If you want, garnish with minced cilantro.

This goes very well with roti/chapati, or as a side with rice and dal.

Clay pot potatoes from Nepal

November 6, 2013January 1, 2016Aneela Mirchandani Nepali food, Roots and tubers Tags: dum aalu, Dum Aloo, dum alu, dum pakht, food, indian food, indian recipes, nepali food, nepali recipes, Raghavan Iyer, vegan, vegetarian Leave a comment

Dum Aloo Nepali

For all intents and purposes, Nepal is very much Indian. To keep things even-handed, I am also going to insist that India is very much Nepali. Other than the fact that Nepal had a king until very recently, while us Indians dispensed with our gaggle 60 years ago, our cultures are very close, we share a majority religion, and most of our food heritage.

Speaking of which, I recently discovered from this book — 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer — that Nepal has its own version of a Dum Aloo. How enticing!

‘Dum’ is a method of cooking that the Mughal emperors brought to India. It involves cooking in a deep pot of unglazed clay (called a handi), which is sealed with a flour paste; the food is cooked slowly over coals. The seal is only broken at the moment of serving; at which point the collected aroma is meant to make the guests keel over in delight.

‘Aloo’ of course means potato. This dish traditionally uses whole baby potatoes that have been first fried. The Kashmiri version of this dish is best known, but today we alter it slightly by going a little to the east, and a tiny bit south. To Nepal.

Dum Aloo Nepali

Ingredients:

About 15-20 tiny new red potatoes; each potato should form one or two bites. I couldn’t find any small enough, so I used 6 larger red potatoes, which I then quartered.
3-4 large cloves of garlic
fresh chilies according to heat tolerence, I used 3 cayenne
one bay leaf
half a teaspoon cumin seeds
half a teaspoon fennel seeds
half a teaspoon ajwain seeds
half a teaspoon turmeric
1.5 teaspoons salt total
2 tablespoons mustard oil; if you don’t have this, use any oil.
some lime juice sprinkles if you like
minced cilantro for garnish

Method:

Of course I am not going to use a clay pot nor seal it with flour; nor do coals make an appearance. We are going to ‘dum’ the 21st century way, in an oven.

First, wash and boil the potatoes in about a cup and a half of water, lightly salted (put potatoes into cold water, bring to a boil, simmer for 10 minutes). The potatoes should be more or less cooked, which you can test by piercing with a knife.

Take the potatoes out and quarter while leaving the peel on. Also, do save the water, we will use it later.

Chop the chili and garlic and make a paste as I explain in ‘Rustic ginger-garlic paste with the optional chili‘. Of course leave the ginger out in this case.

Heat oil in a thick bottomed pan on medium-high heat. When it shimmers add the seeds and the bay leaf. When they sizzle add the garlic-chili paste. Let it cook for a minute, then add the turmeric and quartered potatoes. Saute them gently to cover with the spice paste; add salt. Remember that you have added some salt in the boiling water already and some presumably in the garlic-chili paste; so adjust the total amount or go by taste. After a couple minutes of this, put in the water saved from boiling the potatoes. Stir gently and bring to a boil.

At this point I do a dum facsimile. Transfer the potatoes into a deep pot with a tight lid. Cover with the lid, but you might also want to seal it with a layer of foil in between the pot and the lid. Put it into a 300 F oven for 20 minutes.

Open the lid just before serving; add some lime juice and some cilantro, stir gently and watch your guests keel over.

660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer is an excellent book by the way, and has many unusual recipes. It is a keeper despite my allergy to the word ‘curry’. On which more later.

A Sindhi breakfast Julia Child might approve of

November 4, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Breakfast, Flat breads, Sindhi food Tags: aalu kachori, aalu poori, food, indian breakfast, indian food, indian recipes, sindhi breakfast, sindhi food 1 Comment

If I name the following ingredients: flour, potatoes, salt and pepper, dairy — a very commonplace list, in the Western part of the world — what doesn’t come to mind is a morning in a Sindhi town 60 years ago. And yet, so it is. My grandmother made these very rustic kachoris for my mother’s breakfast decades ago, and it is such a simple idea, but so complex and satisfying, that I still crave it and make it in my 21st century Californian kitchen, and yes, have it for breakfast.

This amount makes enough for a simple breakfast for one.

Potato Kachoris

Ingredients:

1 medium red potato
1 cup whole wheat flour, I use King Arthur Premium
1.5 tablespoon plain yogurt
3/4 teaspoon salt
1.25 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Oil for frying

Method:

The traditional recipe asks you to boil the potato in lightly salted water until done. I have replaced that step with microwaving in nearly all such recipes that need a tuber to be cooked through before using. Not only is it quicker, but I feel like it avoids some of the nutrients leaching out into the water that one has to then throw away.

So go ahead, nuke the chap. Five minutes should put paid on a medium potato.

When it is no longer shooting steam lava at you when you touch it, cut it into cubes and roughly mash it, peel and all. It can be lumpy, I personally don’t mind that.

Add the flour, salt, and pepper.

Now. You may be alarmed at the amount of pepper I am having you put in. Don’t be! Remember, pepper drove world-traffic all the way to the South Indian coast for centuries. Pepper is the Helen of Troy of spices. You want to feel it.

Mix and squeeze the flour in with the potato mixture with your fingers, till it is a rough, shaggy mass. Now put in the plain yogurt and knead briefly to make it a rough dough.

This amount of dough will roll out to about 4 small circles of 5 – 6 inches each. So break golf-ball sized pieces, and roll each out. Now if you are used to rolling rotis you will find that these don’t roll out as smoothly or as thin. This, naturally, is because of the influx of the natural lumpiness of the potato (which I insisted a few lines ago that you don’t quell completely). That’s fine! It all adds to the rustic charm. The only thing you have to be aware of is, you may have to fry them a tad longer than normal, because they are thicker.

OK. So circles rolled out, heat about an inch of oil in a thick bottomed fry-pan. When the oil shimmers (but before it smokes! That is when the oil starts to break down and do Bad Things to us) put in a rolled out circle. Let it cook on one side for about half a minute, bobbing it up and down with your slotted spoon or tongs. Then flip it, and cook it for another half a minute. Take it out and drain it on paper towels.

Have it with some more plain yogurt on the side. Surprisingly heavenly. Julia Child, eat your heart out.

Jay, the Earl of the Bombay Sandwich

November 2, 2013April 25, 2014Aneela Mirchandani Street food and chaat Tags: bombay sandwich, bombay vegetable sandwich, chutney sandwich, food, how to make bombay sandwich, indian food, indian recipes, indian street food, mumbai sandwich, vegetable sandwich, vegetarian 12 Comments

Sada Bombay Sandwich

The ancestor of Bombay sandwich is the dainty cucumber sandwich that the British have served with their afternoon tea since the Victorian days. It even makes an appearance in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of being Earnest. It has no protein and not much nutrition. But a cucumber sandwich is cooling, and so is tea! Which is why, I can only imagine, the British colonialists brought this tradition over to my hot, hot country India, where they spent about two hundred years, overstaying their welcome by about…I don’t know, a hundred and fifty years or so?

Bombay Gymkhana, that dates from colonial times

The cucumber sandwich thrived in cricket clubs, gymkhanas and tea houses where Indian servers would thinly slice bread and cucumbers, lop the crust off the slices, and serve these elegant little squares to their British bosses. Then those bosses were gone. They left behind a bunch of expert cucumber slicers, who I guess decided to use their skill in a very Indian — and really, a very Bombay way — hawk this sandwich from the roadside and add some chutney.

Ah. That is what makes it. Two hundred years and the British didn’t learn to add chutney to the cucumber sandwich. They left it pallid. Tasty, but pallid. And rather limp. But here, add mint chutney, beef it up with some potato, throw some sev on top, panini press it, put samosa filling it it; my god, the streetside stalls in Bombay have come up with a hundred variations.

But today we focus on the sada (plain) Bombay vegetable sandwich.

Sandwichwallah

Sandwich stalls are found all over the sidewalks of Bombay. All of them can produce a killer sada sandwich. All one needs really is a stand about two feet square. There was a sandwichwallah on my street growing up — G Road. Around seven in the evening there would be a flock around him. His hands would be moving rapidly. There are very few choices for the customers to make — more chutney or less, and that’s about it. Everyone went away happy with six neat squares on a sheet of newspaper.

This is a far cry from the way I imagine cucumber sandwiches were served during the British days, on gold-inlaid bone china. But they do say newspaper makes street food taste better. I can vouch for that. Buzzing flies help too.

Jay Sandwich Menu

In college, by great good luck, I ended up in a streetside sandwichwallah’s personal empire. Yes, technically, the college is an official building, and Jay sandwichwallah just occupies the sidewalk outside it; but sometimes it felt like Jay Sandwich Stall is the main feature, and they built the college around him.

His two-feet square stall has expanded to occupy the entire sidewalk. It has a shade and a counter for customers. It even has a marquee. He has an extensive menu, all based on the original sada sandwich. He has a staff. The stall has killer aphorisms posted all over it, like ‘Please Use Dustbin’ and ‘Sandwich in One Hand Money in the Other’.

But it has no seating. You are not permitted to order from your car either. You stand in front, order, wait, take the sandwich and go.

He even has a fan club on Facebook. That is how you know he has arrived. And do you know how your humble blog, The Odd Pantry, has arrived? I have a field reporter! My intrepid reporter in the field, Lata Wadhwani, got the following recipe for me from the Man Himself.

Sada Vegetable Sandwich from Jay Sandwich Stall

Ingredients:

2 slices white bread, store bought or use this recipe for my very own Wondrous Bread
2 pats of butter, one for each slice
1 – 2 tablespoons green mint chutney (modify my soap chutney this way to make Jay’s green chutney: 1/2 cup fresh mint, 1/2 cup green chilies, 1 cup cilantro, salt to taste).
1 tablespoon tomato ketchup
About 10 slices thinly sliced cucumber
About 6 slices thinly sliced tomato
About 6 slices thinly sliced boiled potato
About 6 slices boiled and sliced beetroot (optional, I skipped this)
About 6 slices thinly sliced red onion (optional, I skipped this)
Salt
Pepper

Method:

In the grand tradition of cucumber sandwiches, lop off the crusts of the bread. I didn’t, but I tend to be iconoclastic.

Apply butter on one side of each slice. Apply green chutney on one slice and ketchup on the other; if you want it spicier, skip the ketchup and use green chutney on both slices. This is what I did.

I must mention — work rapidly with big, flat sharp knives to get into the spirit of it.

Lay the slices down. First layer the cucumber on, somewhat overlapping. Then salt that layer. Then lay down the tomato slices somewhat overlapping, and salt that layer as well. Then comes the potato. This time you should add salt and pepper as well, just because potatoes love pepper so much.

If you like, add layers of onion and beetroot.

Now cover with the other slice. Press down firmly to get the sandwich to meld into one. Give it one cut vertically with a super sharp knife, and two cuts horizontally to make 6 little squares. Slide the squares onto a sheet of newsprint (or what the heck, use foil) and serve.

Hand the customer the sandwich with one hand and take the money with the other.

A version of this recipe has earlier appeared in this book: The Lazy Gourmet, Magnificent Meals Made Easy, as ‘Bombay Sandwich’.

Solid citizen channa dal

October 26, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Chickpeas (channa) Tags: channa dal recipe, food, indian food, indian recipes, vegan, vegetarian 5 Comments

Channa dal is the dehusked, split version of the black chickpea or kala channa. Most people know chickpeas or garbanzo beans in their lighter, bigger form (and often from a can); this lighter chickpea (known as kabuli channa) is native to the middle east, and eaten all over India too.

The black chickpea on the other hand, looks like this:

Black chickpea

It is known as kala channa, and is a smaller, darker chickpea that is native to India (strongly resisting the urge to make a racial joke here). Kala channa is eaten whole often and someday The Odd Pantry will delve into that. But get its wrinkled brown husk off, and split it into its two cotyledons, and you have yellow channa dal.

Channa dal

Among the dals, it is a mighty stubborn one and resists softening. It takes the longest soaking, and the longest cooking. Still, once you get there, the results are hard to beat.

I believe each dish must showcase the main ingredient’s essence; and since channa dal likes to keep its integrity, we will help it. What I mean by that is that we don’t cook it down to mush (as is the case with most split dals) but allow the channa dal to keep its shape. An initial saute step helps seal in the grain’s shape, so let’s get to it.

Solid citizen channa dal

Ingredients:

3/4 cup channa dal, soaked for one to two hours
Half inch piece of ginger, minced
1 – 4 serrano or bird’s eye or jalapeno chilies
Half a teaspoon turmeric powder
One teaspoon cumin seeds
Half a teaspoon of asafetida
Half a teaspoon of red chili powder
Dry mango powder (aamchur)
2 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro
2 tablespoons oil
1 teaspoon salt or to taste

Method:

Once you have soaked the dal, its volume will have doubled. Drain it of the soaking water.

Heat half the oil in a thick-bottomed pot and when it shimmers, lightly saute the green chilies and ginger. Now put in the drained dal, and saute the grains on medium heat until the soaking water dries away; continue sauteing dal for another couple minutes or so. Now put in the turmeric and 2 cups water.

Bring to a boil with the lid off; once the water comes to a rolling boil and the foam subsides, lower the heat to a simmer, cover with a lid but leave a crack open for more foam to escape. The dal will take an hour and a half to soften.

Now add the salt and stir.

Heat the remaining oil in a small thick-bottomed pan. When it shimmers, add the asafetida and red chili powder. When they foam, add the cumin seeds. They will sizzle in a minute or two. Turn off the heat, add the oil and spices to the dal and stir once more. Also stir in the dry mango powder and the cilantro, leaving some for garnish.

Before serving, garnish with the dry mango powder and the cilantro to smarten it up. I like this dal with roti/chapati or pooris, with perhaps a dash of lime juice if you like.

Knock-your-socks-off Northern style coconut chutney

October 26, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Chutneys Tags: coconut chutney recipe, food, indian food, indian recipes, vegan, vegetarian 4 Comments

Coconuts

Coconut is a southern Indian ingredient, but adding some of it to this northern Indian style chutney is a fantastic idea.

It is a simple recipe that you can make by patching together a couple other recipes.

Break a coconut and collect about a sixth of the coconut’s white flesh. Chop it finely or grate it. This website has some really good tips for breaking coconuts and this website talks about how to pry out the flesh.

Make this cilantro chutney, using the following ingredients: cilantro, chilies, onion. Collect all those ingredients in a blender. To this, add 2 tablespoons of this tamarind chutney. To that, add the coconut. To that, add about a half teaspoon salt. Blend, blend, blend, push down with spatula, repeat until you have a chutney.

Coconut chutney northern style

I tried a spoon of this to taste; and I had to hold on to the counter it was so good.

It would make a great accompaniment to dosas/idlis, spread on bread, with samosas; or a myriad other ways.

Taro the terrible escapes again

October 25, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Roots and tubers, Sindhi food Tags: arbi chaat, arbi recipe, food, indian food, indian recipes, kachaalu chaat, kachaalu recipe, sindhi food, vegan, vegetarian 2 Comments

Taro chaat

…with some excellent results. I have before made note of taro root‘s scruffy appearance and its delectable nature. In this appetizer from my Sindhi childhood, taro shines with a few well-chosen accompaniments. This dish can go as a side with any Indian meal, or have it in the evening during a chaat and tea session.

Taro chaat

Ingredients:

2 or so medium-sized taro tubers
4 tablespoons tamarind chutney
1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
1 tablespoon minced cilantro leaves
Quarter teaspoon salt
Quarter teaspoon red chili powder
Half a teaspoon cumin seeds

Method

Rinse the taro and microwave it for about 5 minutes. Now it will be softened inside. When it cools, peel it to reveal the creamy white flesh. Cube it into quarter-inch wide cubes and save in a bowl.

Put in the cilantro and onion. And one is supposed to ‘layer the salt’ so go ahead, add enough salt for this amount of ingredients and stir. This will be about a quarter of a teaspoon but use your judgment.

Now put in the prepared tamarind chutney. Now. A slight digression about tamarind chutney is forthcoming.

You can make tamarind chutney the easy or hard way. The hard way uses the dried pods of tamarind, either peeled and made into a block, or the pods themselves. Either way this method requires a lot of soaking and squeezing with your fingers to get the pulp out. So I tend to use a shortcut method — tamarind paste is the one thing I do buy prepared from the store. I use tamarind paste, and this is a good recipe for tamarind chutney using the paste. If you want, you can add a couple dried dates, chopped fine.

Roast the cumin seeds in a hot, dry pan for a minute or two, till they turn a shade darker, and grind to a rough powder in a clean coffee grinder or a mortar and pestle.

Top the tamarind with the red chili powder, and the cumin powder, stir well, and you are done.

This makes enough for one person as a largish side, but is easily multiplied. Oh — and if you don’t possess tamarind or have a special hatred for it, you could substitute with a similar amount of lime juice.

The doofus

October 3, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Sindhi food, Squashes and gourds Tags: food, indian food, indian recipes, sindhi food, vegan, vegetarian Leave a comment

Somebody stop me I feel a thesis coming on. It is about this vegetable:

Kaddoo

This is not the kind of vegetable that one expects paens to be written about. It is found anywhere that vegetables are sold in India; and being India, that could be a basket at a railway platform or a sheet laid out on the sidewalk:

vegetable market selling kaddoo and other things

A vendor sorts vegetables next to a railway track as a train passes by, in Dhaka on September 10, 2012. (Andrew Biraj/Reuters)

Sidewalk vegetable seller from suvisworld.wordpress.com

It is known to me and other Sindhis as ‘kaddoo’. It is so devoid of glamour that if you call someone a ‘kaddoo’ you may as well call them a doofus. But don’t underestimate it, because the kaddoo has mystique. For one thing, it is one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world. Humans have been eating it for ten thousand years. Recently some stands of wild kaddoo were discovered in Zimbabwe, which is probably where it originated. News of the cultivated kaddoo seems to have spread like wildfire, from Africa to Asia to the Americas; the kaddoo discovered America before Columbus.

Check out its pretty flower:

Kaddoo flower

Like other plants from the Cucurbitacae family (squashes, melons and gourds), it is a vine and climbs by means of tendrils. Kaddoo flesh is pale, watery and very mild. Some would say boring. It cooks down to become squishy and somewhat gelatinous. The skin is thin and pale green, but one does have to peel it before cooking. The seeds of the young fruit are quite edible.

Calabash

So where is the mystique? I knew that kaddoo is also known as lauki, bottle gourd, opo or dhoodhi, but I didn’t know that it also goes by the romantic name of Calabash. In India we mostly eat this as a young vegetable, when its peel and seeds are rather soft. But apparently when it ages, the peel hardens, the flesh dries up, leaving a sort of bottle behind; In this form, it is called a calabash. It has been used by old cultures as a vessel, or even as a musical instrument. Apparently the fact that the size of these gourds roughly matches the size of the human head gives it its resonant qualities.

Sitar parts

Musical instruments, hmm…what kind? Some tribal folksy thing no doubt, that street performers play and bystanders throw change at? Sure…but also, think Ravi Shankar and the sitar. The calabash is used for the shell of the deeply buzzy and resonant sitar…the main resonating chamber of which is called…wait for it…the kaddoo.

QED.

Kaddoo koftas in gravy.

kaddoo koftas

Ingredients:

One large kaddoo, peeled, quartered and seeded
Quarter cup besan
Half a teaspoon coriander powder
Some sprinkles red chili powder
One teaspoon aamchur
Salt to taste
4 – 5 tablespoons oil
One recipe of browned onion tomato gravy

Method

Grate the kaddoo quarters. Salt it with about a teaspoon of salt and mix it with your fingers. Leave the grated kaddoo aside for about half an hour; during this time the salt will draw out most of the moisture.

Now you can do the rather tedious task of squeezing out the water from fistfuls of kaddoo my means of your hands. Save the water, it has some kaddoo-ness and we will use it later.

Meanwhile start off the process of making the browned onion tomato gravy. When it calls for water (at the end) use the kaddoo water, would you please? Lets not waste it.

The volume of the grated kaddoo will have much reduced, and it will be dry. Put in the besan and the dry spices. You do not need more salt. Mix it with your oiled fingers; it should now be amenable to form patties. Form about 6 patties and leave them side by side on a plate.

Panfrying them is next. Heat a non-stick pan with oil about an eighth of an inch deep. When nice and hot, put in the patties with liberal gaps around, and sort of flatten them. Let them cook for 5 – 7 minutes or until they brown at the bottom; flip them, some more oil perhaps, and cook for another 5 minutes.

The patties are ready, all that is needed is to slip them into a nicely simmering pot of the browned onion gravy.

And you are done. This dish goes very well with rotis/chapatis.

Browned onion-tomato gravy — let’s get this over with

October 1, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Basic methods, Sindhi food, Vegetables Tags: food, indian food, indian recipes, vegan, vegetarian 2 Comments

Browned onion tomato gravy

Sindhi food has a ton of recipes that start with first making a browned onion-tomato gravy, then putting in whatever edible goodies you find in the fridge that day.

Browned onion gravy can make anything taste good. Those left over hard-boiled eggs from a week ago? Throw them in. The unidentifiable pulpy vegetable with the brown spots? Cut out the brown spots, throw it in, heat it through, and gloat. Lentils, beans of all descriptions, chicken, dumplings that are fried, dumplings that are boiled, in they go. Call them meatballs or call them koftas, throw them in. You could make a giant batch of the gravy, freeze it in meal-sized portions, thaw and add stuff to it — there you go, your main meal for dinner.

In fact this gravy is such a magician that it is a bit of a cop-out for an aspiring master chef, and makes me reluctant to use it too often. Think about it — if you are a doctor, how respected would you be if your advice for every ailment is — ‘take two aspirin and call me in the morning’? It might work but it is too easy. But this is still an indispensable skill to have in your Indian cooking repertoire, so let us take our two aspirin and learn to do this right.

Browned Onion-tomato gravy

Start with reading this recipe — how to caramelize onions. That is going to be our first step. This recipe makes enough for a base for the main meal for 2 – 4 people.

Ingredients:

One medium-large onion, chopped fine, or sliced thin.
One large or two small tomatoes, roughly chopped.
3 – 4 large cloves garlic, minced
Half inch piece of ginger, minced
1 – 4 serrano chilies to your heat tolerance, sliced
Half a teaspoon whole cumin seeds
Half a teaspoon coriander powder
Quarter teaspoon turmeric
Half a teaspoon salt
2 – 3 tablespoons oil

Method:

Heat oil in a wide thick-bottomed pan. When it shimmers put in the cumin seed; when that sizzles, the onion and caramelize it.

At this point add the ginger, garlic, chili, and let them cook on medium heat for a couple minutes. Now put in the tomato. Sprinkle some salt over. The thing about the tomato is that is has to liquefy, then mostly dry up. First, the combination of the heat and the salt will make it release its liquid. Then, cook some more on that wide-open pan of yours, and the liquid will evaporate. The remains of the tomato will combine with the caramelized onion to create a rough paste.

Browned onion tomato gravy

At this point the dry powders can go in. Give them a stir, and then put in some water; the amount depends on what you are trying to use the gravy for, anywhere from half a cup to a cup.

Bring the water to a boil, and let it simmer for about 5 – 7 minutes.

The gravy is basically done. But you can take it into multiple directions from here:

run it through a blender to get a smoother sauce
add some cream or milk to make it creamy
or add a cashew puree to make it creamy that way
add garam masala, extra chili in the form of red chili powder, cumin powder, or other spice mixture of your choice
or use it as is.

Soap chutney

September 24, 2013November 2, 2013Aneela Mirchandani Chutneys Tags: cilantro chutney, coriander chutney, food, hara dhaniya chutney, indian food, indian recipes, vegan, vegetarian 4 Comments

Green chutney

Only after I first came to these foreign lands as an adult did I realize that there existed people who hated cilantro. I could not conceive of this. In India this deeply cut leaf of the coriander plant tops each meal and many spice pastes are centered around it. It is so commonplace that you would have to stop eating to avoid it. It is commonplace as water. Perhaps not that much. It is as common as…ah, say, soap?

Soap.

Yes, soap. People who intensely dislike cilantro all agree that it reminds them of soap. This is incredible to me. I’m a reasonably clean person, people, and I have had many close encounters with soap. Daily, you might even say. I have eaten cilantro by the fistful. At no time have I had the urge to rub the leaves onto my hands, nor to bite into the bar in the shower.

Soap? What to make of this?

Just to be complete, let us first consider the possibility that there is a secret society of cilantro haters who have secret meetings where they collude on what smell they will all agree cilantro reminds them of. That is a definite possibility, but I’m missing what the motive might be here.

The other possibility is that yes, indeed, cilantro has a secret life where it dabbles in cosmetics. Because the few people who don’t mention soap, say that cilantro reminds them of lotion.

There is a scientific basis for this. There are fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes; the ones found in soap are same or similar to the ones found in cilantro. As this New York Times article by Harold McGee explains, people from cultures that are used to cilantro have learnt from an early age to tamp down the soapiness of cilantro in favor of the herbal and pungent smells.

Which brings us to cilantro chutney. I for one, adore the smell of cilantro so much that the question for me is: how much cilantro flavor can I pack into each cubic inch? The simplest way to do this is by making a paste.

Green Chutney

Green chutney was a staple in my household. There was always a steel tin of this condiment in the fridge. In earlier days our cook used a grinding stone, something like this:

Stone grinder

Then the Industrial Age dawned in our household and then we used a blender, the picture of which I do not need to show you.

This chutney is great as a spread on bread, or as a side to all kinds of Indian snacks.

Ingredients:

1 bunch of cilantro, rinsed and roughly chopped, including soft stems
Anywhere from 1 to 8 serrano chilies, depending on your heat tolerence
Half a teaspoon salt or to taste
For sourness, 2 teaspoons of lime juice or 1 teaspoon tamarind paste (optional)
Half a bunch fresh mint, leaves only (optional)
1 – 2 cloves garlic (optional)
Half an inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced (optional)
A cubic inch of onion (optional)
Half a teaspoon sugar (optional)

Method:

As you might have noticed there are a number of optional ingredients. Just the first three will give you a serviceable green chutney, but the addition of the others will enhance the flavor in their own unique ways. I particularly recommend adding onion, because onion has this unique characteristic (like salt) to bring out the flavor of the other ingredients, while not overstating its own. A good team player, is our onion.

Put everything into a blender with only the water that clings to the leaves from rinsing, and hit go. Maybe add a tablespoon more water but limit this. You might need to stop, stir, and go a few times, but eventually the blades will catch; and you will have your green chutney.