Tomato Saar or the Indian take on Tomato Soup

This is a really fragrant take on tomato soup, which I love to eat with thick slices of toast or chapattis.

3 tomatoes
2 chilies, slit vertically into 2-4 pieces
2 tsp jeera
1 tsp ghee or cooking oil
5-6 whole peppercorns
6-7 curry leaves
1 tsp asafoetida
around 1 cm of ginger cut into thin slices
salt to taste
sugar to taste
1 tbsp fresh finely chopped coriander

Make a cross shaped incision on the top of the tomatoes. Set enough water to boil so that when the tomatoes are immersed, the top of the tomatoes are covered. When the water boils, add the tomatoes. Let the water continue boiling till the top skin of the tomatoes peels off. Let the tomatoes cool a bit and then peel the skin off. Put the tomatoes in a blender and puree the mixture.

In a kadhai / wok, heat the ghee / oil . Add the asafoetida, the peppercorns,curry leaves and jeera seeds. After the jeera seeds sizzle, add the tomato puree. Add the ginger slices, chilies, salt and sugar. Wait till the tomato mixture boils and add around 2 cups of water. One can add a can of coconut milk instead of the water for a creamier tomato saar that can be eaten with rice. Turn the heat on low and let it cook till it boils once more.
Season with the finely chopped coriander before serving.

Spring Onion Bhaji

Winters started in Austin, or rather Fall. Its windy, chilly and such a huge relief from the scorching still heat of the Texas summer. I really appreciate this weather after 4 long months of summer. This is one of the vegetable preparations I look forward to eating after a long day at work. It takes around 20 minutes to cook and tastes really good with some rotis and raita or rice and dal.

Spring Onion Bhaji ( Kandyachya Patichi Bhaji)

3 bunched of spring onions, cut horizontally (around 2 cupfulls) including the white onion on top
1/2 cup of besan (gram flour)
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp asafoetida
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
1-2 tsp peanut / cooking oil
1/2 cup water
salt and red chilli powder to taste

Heat the oil in a kadhai / wok .Add the asafoetida, turmeric and mustard seeds. Wait till the mustard seeds burst and then add the 2 cups of spring onion. Add the salt and red chilli powder and mix thoroughly. Cook on medium heat for 5 minutes after covering the vessel. The spring onion will have released some water. Add the 1/2 cup of water. When this water boils, turn the heat on low and add the besan. Stir quickly to make sure it mixes in as a smooth paste.Let this cook till the raw smell of the besan is gone.

Red Pumpkin Raita

This is a recipe I learnt from my mother, I have not ever had this at anyone else's home, so have no idea how my mother got this recipe from, but I really like this raita and so does R, so its a common occurrence in our kitchen.

2.5 - 3 cups of pumpkin, cut into roughly square pieces, about an inch wide
1-2 chilies, cut horizontally, I like very fine pieces,
1 tsp jeera
1 tsp mustard seeds
2-3 tsps cooking oil
curry leaves
1/2 tsp asafoetida
1/2 tsp turmeric
salt to taste
1 lb / 16 oz yoghurt
1/2 cup coriander / cilantro leaves, roughly chopped


Boil the pumpkin pieces in a pressure cooker till mashable.
Mix the pumpkin, yoghurt, chilies and salt. Mash the mixture a little.
For the seasoning, heat the oil , add the asafoetida, the turmeric, the curry leaves, mustard and jeera till the jeera sizzles.
Pour the seasoning over the yoghurt - pumpkin mixture and mix gently but thoroughly.
Mix the coriander.

Stuffed Tomatoes

Recently I was making minestrone soup based on a Rachael Ray recipe. Can I say I adore Rachael Ray? True, I probably might not like all her recipes and will surely will never be able to make a meal in 30 minutes unless u count omlettes! But I just love her zest for cooking and lively presentation.. and yes her retro kitchen takes the cake! After making the soup, I ended up with huge chunks of cheese and a large quantity of basil. I rarely make Italian food, so I wanted to use them up before i forgot all about them and then saw them after a couple of weeks when the only thing I can do with them is put them into garbage.
I was still pondering this (I was in Costco) when I saw a box of cocktail tomatoes. They were the perfect size to be stuffed, large enough to take a decent amount of stuffing and small enough to be eaten whole! Since I am addicted to Food TV and coould vaguely remember a recipe for cheese stuffed tomatoes.. thats what I ended up making with the leftover cheese and basil. A pesto turkey lunch sandwich at the Moonshine Grill and Patio served as inspiration to make some pesto for the cheese stuffing.

Ingredients:
20-25 cocktail tomatoes
a cupful of basil leaves
a handful of walnuts
5-6 cloves of walnut
a cupful of Parmigiano Reggiano
a cupful of Pecorino Romano
some olive oil
black pepper
salt

So basically went about the process of stuffing the tomatoes by first chopping of the stem end of the tomatoes and then removing the pulp inside. I rubbed the tomatoes with some salt and pepper and placed them upside down on a sieve to drain. Like a good Indian girl I collected the pulp and the drained juices for use on some later day :-). Then proceeded to make pesto by grinding a cup of basil, 5-6 cloves of garlic, salt and some olive oil after adding the walnuts to the mixture midway.
Mixed the pesto with the grated Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano, some grated black pepper.
Rubbed the outer skins of the tomatoes with some olive oil and then filled each tomato a little over the brim. Preheated the oven to 400'f and when the oven was ready baked the tomatoes for 18 minutes, till the cheese melted and browned slightly.

Its Diwali!!

Diwali, this year, came upon me before I knew it.. so had no time to meditate on what I would like to make. I did feel like making some Faral (Maharashtrian sweetmeats) , but after looking up some recipes and noting that all involved copious amounts of frying..which usually gives me an enormous headache, I gave up on that notion. But there were two Diwali potlucks over the weekend and I did not want to show up empty handed:-). So decided to make quick and easy stuffed chilies. Bought two pounds of jalapeno peppers from the local grocery, the Mexican blend of shredded cheese and I was all set to go.
Since I always keep a large bag of frozen corn in the freezer (being a huge corn freak !) and always have some garam masala at hand, the rest was simple and straightforward.
Cut the stem end of the chilies and slit them vertically I proceeded to deseed them, (note to self in the future: wearing gloves while doing this is a really good idea to avoid the burning sensation that deseeding chilies can leave).I rubbed the chilies with some olive oil very lightly. I microwaved a bowl of corn for 2 minutes and then mixed it with the shredded cheese, some garam masala, salt , turmeric for some color and some dhana-jeera powder. I set the oven to preheat to 400'F and stuffed the chilies while it got to that temperature.
Once the chilies were stuffed and the oven was preheated, I put the chilies in for 12 minutes. Let them sit in the oven for 2-3 minutes after the first 12 minutes were over and I had turned off the oven.
The smell of the melting cheese was a good indicator that the chilies were done. The chilies looked a little wilted and I could see they had been cooked well.

That was it.. I was happy to have prepared a spicy, cheesy appetizer in a short time, with no frying involved!

the almost there vegeterian

'almost there' vegeterian..... person who eats non vegeterian food in the absence of good vegeterian choices.
its funny cause when i was in India, I used to love, love non vegeterian food... in my case this means chicken , lamb and fish, did not have pork till i came to the US and beef is out of the question due to deep rooted religious reasons.
its kinda hypocrtical to eat chicken, lamb and fish and then frown on eating beef, but that never really came into question in India where the only beef i have ever seen was at Muslim weddings and those were rare occassions.But still my mind just hits a blank wall when it comes to eating beef.... i can see my ancestors frowning with displeasure every time i even contemplate the possibility.
with meat being eaten mightbe once in two months, i can say i was ' an almost vegeterian' quite safely!!
however after coming to the US, all this changed.R is an avid non vegeterian who can easily live with two meat meals a day... uh oh, i tried it and rapidly lost weight to regain it all within no time as soon as my body realised what was happening. so back to carb rich and bountiful vegeterian diet. these days i try and look for the spiciest veggie option on the menu. Naturally have to be creative and inventive while planning meals without meat for R. Thankfully R is a total maharashtrian varan bhat batata bhaji boy at heart. which is good for me in a way, but i get bored and listless eating same chapati, bhaji, amti bhat every day. dont get me wrong, i love the maharastrian food, but like it even more if i dont have to cook it every single day myself!
so scour the internet for recipes , pester my mom to send me recipes of half forgotten childhood treats and try and convert R to being an "almost there vegeterian".

the why???

I recently discovered the world of blogs, while searching for a recipe to make banana walnut cake.... people who know me for a considerable while might be a little taken aback... banana walnut cake is not what they would envision me doing with some spare time.... read yes, go for a long walk, watch a movie, go shopping,,,, perhaps even paint... but cooking is not an activity i used to indulge in unless absolutely forced.
But after coming to the US and being forced to live without Mummy's food and the nearest udipi and irani restaurant, made me resort to surviving on my non existent cooking skills. R still remembers occassions when he came home for lunch to a teary eyed me with burnt cabbage bhaji and rice.
thank heavens those days are over, well almost!!!

anyway this blog is a way for me to keep in touch with my old friends and family, people who I used to meet and chat with regularly , but now am seperated by atleast a few hundred kilometers.
Email and regular phone calls cannot compensate for the age-old institution of 'manapasun gappa' ( long conversations , for lack of better translation skills).
So heres to my family and PP in London, JB in Ithaca, AS in Pune, AK in Mumbai, VS in Florida, RK in Pune, MD in Mumbai , RB in Singapore / Pune, DL in Mumbai, AS in Dallas and JG in Austin.

Those cups of coffee and uttapams at Vaishali, the long walks on the tekdi - gazing at the pollution tinged horizons, short walks over Law College grounds, sharing the batata wada sambhar at the IMDR canteen behing Fergusson, the absolutely oil soaked but delicious bread pattice in the college canteen, window shopping on Main Street... all my favorite activities i can no longer indulge in.
Even with a longggg trip to India, however long, all of us are scattered too far and wide to ever relive those days again.

So hopefully this blog serves as a virtual gappa session and u guys hopefully respond to my updates!!! :-)