Garlicky Baby Spinach Salad

I love Spinach. My nickname used to be popeye in college, because like that sailor, I can have spinach five days a week, in any one of a myriad dishes. I did a little bit of research on spinach for Weekend Herb Blogging, which was started by Kalyn, and is being hosted by Prof Kitty this week. It turns out Spinach belongs to the amaranth family, and is indigenous to India/ Nepal. It comes highly recommended for inclusion in a healthy diet because of its iron and folic acid content, not to mention tons of vitamins and essential minerals and is especially recommended during pregnancy when women need more folic acid. It also adds to one's fibre intake and is low cal. Health benefits include prevention of osteoporosis, heart disease, colon cancer, arthritis, and other diseases. And it's supposed to help the digestion and improve brain power. What more could one want?

India abounds in spinach recipes, from a simple palak paneer – mashed spinach gravy with roast cottage cheese – to an inclusion in Huli which is one of my favourite lentil dishes, palak pakodas - in which spinach leaves are dipped in a batter made of chickpea flour and deepfried crisp, to raita –steamed, ribboned spinach in a yoghurt sauce. One of my favourite recipes, though, is for Baby Spinach salad. In India, baby spinach is low on availability since Indian dishes call for fully ripe spinach, so usually I'm reduced to buying two large bunches of spinach and pawing through them to find the small leaves to make this salad. However, recently I planted some spinach in a pot in my backyard ( which now qualifies this post for GYO too - yippee!) and last week we could harvest two handfuls of baby spinach – just right for my favourite salad. Serve with crusty bread to mop up the sauce, and watch even kids enjoy this green goody.

Ingredients: (for 4 people)
2 handfuls baby spinach leaves, well washed and dried
½ cup plump garlic cloves with skin on
½ tbsp olive oil
Juice of ½ lemon ( or to taste)
Salt to taste
½ cup roast pine nuts
Pepper if you really want

Chop off the last 1 cm or so of spinach stem and put the leaves in a bowl or a flat dish. Heat the olive oil (not extra virgin, by the way, as that doesn't take well to heating) and pop in the garlic cloves. Take off the heat once the garlic cloves are lightly browned on both sides and pour the oil and garlic over the spinach leaves. Add the lemon juice, salt and pine nuts. If you want, add some freshly ground pepper and serve immediately. Let the family – or guests – enjoy squeezing the garlic skin to burst the sweet pods out and combine with the salad. Pair with a bean soup for a wonderful summer meal!

Veggie delights

I have mentioned before on my blog that one of the great joys of living in Delhi is the changes the different seasons ring in, in terms of what is available to eat. The summers bring in an abundance of fruit - lush mangoes, juicy plums, succulent peaches and the cool sweetness of watermelon and melon. Winter is when the vegetables come into their own and it's the joy of my life to go to the nearest sabzi mandi and shop for all kinds of veggies - sharply astringent amla or gooseberries, whacking big daikon (mooli), fresh green peas and crisp lettuce, red, yellow and orange bell peppers half the price they command in summer, pak choy and purple cabbage, red 'halwa' carrots and orange salad carrots and little plum tomatoes, green garlic shoots, spring onions, leeks and white onions. And of course all manner of green leafies, from plain old cabbage to savoy cabbage, haak, sarson ka saag, methi - one of my favourites and much missed in summer, popeye's favourite spinach, dantina soppu ( a red veiny leaf vegetable), bathua, Kalmi with with its beautifully serrated leaves, fresh dill and parsley...I always spend more and buy more than I plan to. Yesterday I went down to Munirka and came home laden with four large and bulging bags of veggies - for the princely sum of $ 13!

Naturally, then, we had to OD on veggies all weekend. By a peculiar coincidence, we ended up with a Kashmiri slant to much of the food. I only wish it had been a planned slant so I could have added kashmiri dum aloo, which I much prefer over its Punjabi cousin. We had Haak on one night and Khatte Baingan ( sour eggplant) on another.

Haak is also called kashmiri spinach. It looks similar, with rounded leaves and a thick, watery stem, but is a different vegetable, with a slightly soapy texture when cooked. Delhi's well-known Kashmiri restaurant, Chor bizarre, serves up a wonderfully simple dish with haak that I have always loved and we often have it in winter, served simply over hot rice. You can substitute it with Spinach if it's not easily found.

Ingredients:

1 bunch Haak, roughly chopped

3-4 cloves

2-3 green chillies

Yellow mustard seeds

1 litre water

Pinch asafoetida ( heeng)

Salt to taste

2 tsp plain vegetable oil

1 tbsp mustard oil

Put the vegetable oil on to heat. Add the mustard seeds and wait for them to sputter.

Add the cloves and green chillies and stir for a few seconds.

Add the heeng.

Add the haak and the water and salt. Let it come to a boil and then simmer until the water reduces to half.

Add the mustard oil and turn off the heat. Serve hot with plain rice.

Kashmiri Khatte Baingan goes well with either chapattis or rice. I used to have a purely kashmiri recipe for this, but over the years, it has become a bit bastardized, added to by me or my mom. Either way, it tastes great.

Ingredients:

10 baby eggplants with stems attached, slit into quarters till the stem

1 lime sized ball of tamarind, soaked in 1 cup hot water

4-5 cloves

Kashmiri red chilli powder

1 tsp saunf (fennel/ ani seeds)

Small lump of jaggery ( lime sized)

Salt to taste

1 tbsp oil

1 tsp mustard seeds

1 tsp kalonji ( nigella) seeds

Put the oil on to heat in a wok. Add the mustard seeds and wait for them to sputter.

Add the saunf and nigella seeds and the cloves.

Put in the eggplants and cook them, stirring periodically, until more than half done.

Strain the tamarind water and add it to the wok. Add another large cup of water and the jaggery, salt and chilli powder.

Let it come to a boil and then simmer until the eggplants turn soft and are cooked all the way through.

What we do with the green vegetables, including the leaves of the mooli ( daikon) is to add them to whatever is being cooked - the daal, a soup or even lightly cooked and kneaded into the chapatti dough, even for phulkas. They add a nice flavour and of course, loads of nutrition.

Green goodness

I remember this small salad and soup place that used to exist in Vasant Vihar called Salad Chef. They used to have a salad dressing that always fascinated me, called green goddess. Being a huge fan of green leafies, I expected something that would thrill the tastebuds with the flavour of 'greenness'. Now i have no memory of how it even tasted, but I had that name in mind when, the day after our Eid Party, I decided to rustle up a simple, light but nutritious meal for us all.

I rootled around in the fridge and found a bundle of spinach - what could be better? I decided not to go with a set recipe but to just add and subtract things, and it turned out rather well - if i do say so myself, and easy to make too.

Ingredients:
1 bunch spinach, washed, chopped roughly
1 red onion, chopped into chunks
4-5 green garlic stalks ( you can substitute with garlic pods but you won't get the earthiness that this provided), chopped
750 ml water
250 ml milk
1/2 cup well beaten plain curds/ yoghurt
Olive oil
2 tsp mustard
salt and pepper to taste

Put in a good glug of good olive oil on to heat in a wok.
Add the onions and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally until translucent.
Add the spinach and cok, stirring occasionally, until wilted.
Cool and puree the vegetables finely, adding a little water if you need to.
Pour the pureed vegetables back into the pan with the 750 ml water, add the mustard and bring to a boil.
Turn the heat down to medium and add the milk (I prefer double toned but full cream would taste rather good!).
Cook for a few minutes more and turn off the heat.
Add the salt and pepper, and then pour in most of the yoghurt and whisk the soup so it gets nicely mixed in.
Garnish each bowl of soup with a swirl of the yoghurt that is left.

It would taste great with croutons or a baguette on the side.

Spinach Rice

I love green leafy vegetables, and am known to be unable to resist them. Every time I go to a sabzi mandi, my maid sighs because she knows I'll come back laden with all manner of greens, many of which neither she nor I recognise and which she has to find space for in our already overcrowded refrigerator. And, on top of that, she'll have to come up with ways to cook all of these before they perish, to critical acclaim.

Winter is when green leafies really come into their own in Delhi. There is one seller at the mandi I frequent who specialises in them, laying out plain old spinach, sarson ka saag, methi leaves, bathua and a host of others in glistening, inviting bundles. I really miss this category of veggies in the monsoon, at which time it's not really wise to eat them due to the poor quality and the risk of them being worm-infested.

I had always looked for a good way to combine spinach with rice and invented this recipe when I was in France. It's a one dish meal, needing very little to go with it, apart from natural yoghurt and maybe some papad.

Ingredients:

1 bundle spinach, washed, dried and cut fine

2 red onions, chopped

3-4 cloves garlic, chopped

2 green chillies, chopped

5-6 cloves

2 inch piece of cinnamon

1 tsp cumin seeds

2 tsp coriander powder

1 cup uncooked basmati rice, washed and drained

1/2 cup milk

1.25 cups water (approx)

Salt to taste

2 tbsp oil

Put the oil into the pressure cooker and let it heat.

When hot, add the cumin seeds and let them brown a bit.

Add the cinnamon, cloves and dhania powder and stir till the spices give off a warm smell (about 30 seconds).

Add the onions, garlic and chillies and stir. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are translucent.

Add the rice and stir to mix. Let the rice get slightly roasted, for 2-3 minutes. then add the spinach and the milk.

Add the water and stir to mix everything.

Add the salt at this stage.

Put the lid on and cook for 2 whistles.

Serve hot with the aforementioned accompaniments. If you like, you can also add parboiled potatoes during the cooking process, or alternately, roast them well and top the dish with them before serving.

If you don't own a pressure cooker, you can easily cook this over an open pan as well, it will just take a bit longer for the rice to be well-cooked, and bear more watching during the process.

Greens

I probably sound seriously uncool to most people, but I have to admit to a fondness for leafy green vegetables. I love the entire lot of them, from lettuces of different kinds to spinach, mustard/ collard greens, fenugreek leaves, bathua leaves etc. I also love herbs to add interest to a variety of foods, and one of my favourite recipes in the winter is an herb pilaf/ pulao which is of Iranian origin, which I will blog about later.

Eggplant afghani style

I love eggplant/ aubergine/ baingan cooked most ways - grilled in olive oil, bhurta style, sweet and sour kashmiri style et al, but one of my favourites is a recipe that I read many years ago. It claimed to be an Afghani recipe, which tickled my fancy for exotic recipes, and it's been a summer family staple since. It's easy to make, tastes great on anything from bread to crackers to roti or even by itself and is easy on the eye too. It's also a great dish to serve when entertaining, because it looks more complicated than it is. I've even taught my maid to make it and she does a pretty good job though the presentation could be better.

For those of you following my blog, I have to admit it - I'm not a by-the-numbers anything, much less a cook. It bores me rigid to measure out ingredients and so on, except when I'm baking, in which case exactitute is of the essence. So make sure you adjust the measures as per your taste - I do!

Eggplant with yoghurt, afghani style

Ingredients:
1 big round purple aubergine or 4-5 long purple aubergines cut into 1 cm slices
1 big onion, grated
2 tomatoes, grated
1 tsp cumin powder
1 cup yoghurt, hung
2-3 cloves garlic, finely mashed (add less or more depending on your fondness for garlic. I love it)
salt to taste
2 tbsp oil
chopped coriander for garnish

1. Sprinkle salt on the eggplant and leave aside for some time



2. Add the garlic and salt to taste to the yoghurt and mix well



3. Pour some of the oil into a saucepan and heat till nicely hot.



4. Shallow fry the eggplant in the oil, turning the slices till nicely cooked and browned on both sides. If you're calorie conscious (and who isn't, these days), you can grill the aubergine in the oven which may take longer to do.



5. Set the eggplant aside to cool



6. Pour the rest of the oil into a wok and heat



7. Add the cumin powder, then the onion and cook, stirring frequently till almost brown



8. Add the tomatoes and stir to mix, then cook on a slow flame till well cooked.



9. Remove from the stove and cool



10. Get a shallow serving dish with a wide base and layer first the eggplant slices, then the onion-tomato mix and then the yoghurt



11. Top with coriander and pop into the refrigerator to chill until cool or cold - tastes good either way

Feel free to omit the cumin, it isn't essential.