I decided to return to this blog after nearly a year. I abandoned it because a) I kind of stopped trying out new stuff b) the blog template got really messed up c) I realised a lot of my cooking methods were completely unscientific and I didn't have the energy to re-write posts
A year down the line, I am more tech savvy, :P and with the encouragement of a good friend U decided to clean up this space. I am ALSO a quicker cook, and realised I didn't have to try exotic to get innovative. Just simple endless variations on the daily sabzis can lead to endlessly different tastes ( specially since I eyeball all my ingredients). I have ALSO resolved to try re-writing older posts. So here goes.
Of late I have ended up making a lot of dry sabzis (somewhat like stir fries) which require very little time to be spent in the kitchen.Just roast the seeds, add the vegetables, stir add masalas, stir, cover, go have bath, come back to find it almost/completely cooked. Set rice to boil in the meantime. Standard lunches comprise this one veggie dish, rice and chicken if I have happened to have cooked any over the weekend. While shamelessly parochial about hardcore Bengali cuisine being the best for daily consumption(though while living at home I would turn up my nose regularly at said cuisine) I have decided that most of it is way too laborious and finicky for the average lazy woman who likes cooking as the means to an end. So I looked at a wide variety of recipes and found a lot of North Indian stuff which sounded surprisingly easy ( I think everyday, home-style North Indian food is super-yummy as well)... and now my cooking is a mish mash of everything and I just throw together whatever I feel like eating at that particular point of time. I am NOT very fond of Veggie Curries except for standard stuff like Dahi Bhindi or Shorshe Begun or Kopir Dalna, so I keep them dry. That way ..if I don't feel like making rice I can turn them into sandwiches or better still get hot rotis from the office ( Rs 10 for 4 rotis) and eat them with some pickle on the side.
My MOST recent effort in this line was a rather pleasantly surprising brinjal dish
Now.. brinjal is without doubt my favourite vegetable, though cauliflower nearly ties with it. Due to it being an almost impossible task to find gobhi sans insects here (this is a part of India where I really think nobody even LOOKS at what is on their plate or dumps everything into some form of lentils) I have resigned myself to Gobhi-Deprivation for most of the year till I can shift to more congenial territory( I was MOST impressed by the vegetable stalls in Pune eg- LOVELY white cauliflower and ripe red ready to burst tomatoes, vivid purple brinjals- I should have taken a photo.:( )
So brinjals it is (and why do I keep getting a mis-spelling indicator?)
For this recent dish:
I chopped two mediumish brinjals into teeny pieces. Of late I am getting better at chopping things up teeny which I hated before. A decent assortment of knives goes a long way. Chopped into long strips with a big meat knife then into smaller ones with the thin onion slicing one. Then I heated oil and let cumin seeds splutter. I tossed in the brinjal and coated it nicely with oil and the cumin, keeping heat high all the while. Covered it and sliced onions again into small pieces( it kind of grows on you, I guess :P. Also a useful skill to advertise when one is no longer a bachelorette-can be used as a deterrent ).Stirred in the onions, stirred a while till I got bored, turned heat to medium, put in an OVERDOSE of cumin powder( I am a moody cook) having got some cumin pangs that day, some amount of coriander powder, some salt, mixed in the spices, covered it and went and had a bath and stuff. Came back to find it almost cooked. Put in some amchur and let it finish. I charred it a bit- having picked up this trick on another cooking blog, which I will try to trace. Eaten with rice, and the next day with bread. Brinjal when properly cooked should be nice and soft and this WAS.
A year down the line, I am more tech savvy, :P and with the encouragement of a good friend U decided to clean up this space. I am ALSO a quicker cook, and realised I didn't have to try exotic to get innovative. Just simple endless variations on the daily sabzis can lead to endlessly different tastes ( specially since I eyeball all my ingredients). I have ALSO resolved to try re-writing older posts. So here goes.
Of late I have ended up making a lot of dry sabzis (somewhat like stir fries) which require very little time to be spent in the kitchen.Just roast the seeds, add the vegetables, stir add masalas, stir, cover, go have bath, come back to find it almost/completely cooked. Set rice to boil in the meantime. Standard lunches comprise this one veggie dish, rice and chicken if I have happened to have cooked any over the weekend. While shamelessly parochial about hardcore Bengali cuisine being the best for daily consumption(though while living at home I would turn up my nose regularly at said cuisine) I have decided that most of it is way too laborious and finicky for the average lazy woman who likes cooking as the means to an end. So I looked at a wide variety of recipes and found a lot of North Indian stuff which sounded surprisingly easy ( I think everyday, home-style North Indian food is super-yummy as well)... and now my cooking is a mish mash of everything and I just throw together whatever I feel like eating at that particular point of time. I am NOT very fond of Veggie Curries except for standard stuff like Dahi Bhindi or Shorshe Begun or Kopir Dalna, so I keep them dry. That way ..if I don't feel like making rice I can turn them into sandwiches or better still get hot rotis from the office ( Rs 10 for 4 rotis) and eat them with some pickle on the side.
My MOST recent effort in this line was a rather pleasantly surprising brinjal dish
Now.. brinjal is without doubt my favourite vegetable, though cauliflower nearly ties with it. Due to it being an almost impossible task to find gobhi sans insects here (this is a part of India where I really think nobody even LOOKS at what is on their plate or dumps everything into some form of lentils) I have resigned myself to Gobhi-Deprivation for most of the year till I can shift to more congenial territory( I was MOST impressed by the vegetable stalls in Pune eg- LOVELY white cauliflower and ripe red ready to burst tomatoes, vivid purple brinjals- I should have taken a photo.:( )
So brinjals it is (and why do I keep getting a mis-spelling indicator?)
For this recent dish:
I chopped two mediumish brinjals into teeny pieces. Of late I am getting better at chopping things up teeny which I hated before. A decent assortment of knives goes a long way. Chopped into long strips with a big meat knife then into smaller ones with the thin onion slicing one. Then I heated oil and let cumin seeds splutter. I tossed in the brinjal and coated it nicely with oil and the cumin, keeping heat high all the while. Covered it and sliced onions again into small pieces( it kind of grows on you, I guess :P. Also a useful skill to advertise when one is no longer a bachelorette-can be used as a deterrent ).Stirred in the onions, stirred a while till I got bored, turned heat to medium, put in an OVERDOSE of cumin powder( I am a moody cook) having got some cumin pangs that day, some amount of coriander powder, some salt, mixed in the spices, covered it and went and had a bath and stuff. Came back to find it almost cooked. Put in some amchur and let it finish. I charred it a bit- having picked up this trick on another cooking blog, which I will try to trace. Eaten with rice, and the next day with bread. Brinjal when properly cooked should be nice and soft and this WAS.
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