Quinoa Vangibhath

I'm on a constant quest to add more protein to my diet, difficult since I'm vegetarian and allergic to dairy. Paneer works but there's only so much paneer I can eat before feeling that life is no longer worth it.

Quinoa with vegetables was recommended to me by the health practitioners I'm seeing. I've had quinoa salads quite often and like them but I like my spicy foods and honestly, it's difficult to make salad that spicy.

Being from Karnataka which has a variety of vegetable bhaths on offer, I decided to experiment with Quinoa Vangibhath and I'm delighted to say it was a hit - I've had it two days on the trot without getting bored.

Vangi Bhath is typically a rice dish made with white rice, brinjals and a special spice mix. My parents have begun using MTR vangi Bhath powder and it is absolutely delicious. Moreover it uses byadgi chillies for that fresh red colour which makes the dish look appetizing as well. Other vangi Bhath powders don't make the cut as they don't appeal to my palate so for this dish I've switched to buying the branded masala instead of making it at home.

Recipe:

1 cup cooked quinoa ( I do the presoak before cooking to get rid of any bitterness)

1 cup mixed cubed vegetables ( carrots, beans, capsicum, a little potato if you like, peas). You can also add long brinjals, cut into long, thin slices.

1.5 tsp oil (I use cold pressed groundnut oil for everyday cooking)

1/2 tsp cumin seeds1/

1/2 tsp turmeric powder

Handful curry leaves

Salt to taste (I use powdered rock salt)

Chili powder if desired

1 tbsp MTR vangi Bhath powder

Heat the oil in a wok. Add the cumin seeds. When they start to crackle, add the turmeric powder and curry leaves. Once the leaves crisp up, add the veggies and saute until they are cooked but still a little crunchy. Add the cooked quinoa, the vangi Bhath powder and salt. Stir to mix and let sit for half an hour till the flavours are well absorbed.

Serve hot with a slice of lemon per serving, if anyone wants to add a dash on top. It makes a complete meal with a simple raita. 

Healthy workday salads

I have a fetish for salads and particularly towards winter, when the best of salad greens are available, it's a daily indulgence. Of late, I have been trying to reduce carbs in my diet and eat more protein, for health reasons, due to an auto immune condition I have - Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Quinoa, while expensive both in terms of cost and carbon consumption, is a great addition to the diet for its rich micronutrient profile, including magnesium and phosphorus. It also adds dietary fiber, so a win-win.

I find it easy to set a fixed menu for lunch at the office - helps my cook by shortcutting the decision making process, and the time consuming part of the prep can be done one time. So we made the quinoa at the beginning of the week and refrigerated it, similarly with the chickpeas and roasted pumpkin. To add variety, I just changed up the salad dressing through the week. So putting together the salad is, ironically, a piece of cake!

Ingredients for one serving:
1 cup quinoa, soaked and cooked
1/2 cup cooked chickpeas
1 cup pumpkin, oven roasted with a little olive oil
1 apple, sliced chunkily
1 spring onion
1 carrot, grated thick
1/2 cup pomegranate
1 cucumber, deseeded and chopped into chunks
Handful of coriander leaves
1/2 cup halved walnuts

Dressing:
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp honey ( depending on your sweet tooth, you can add a little more)
1.5 tsp kasundi (Bengali grainy mustard which I love)
Juice of 1 small lime
Himalayan rock salt to taste

Whip together the olive oil and mustard into an emulsion, with a fork. Add the honey and lime juice until it combines well.

For an office lunch, you can pack the dressing separately and add it just before eating.

Changes you can ring:
Ingredients:
I'm on a detox from various Hashimoto's triggers so avoiding tomatoes, capsicum, baingan, dairy etc. If you don't have any such dietary restrictions, feel free to add those veggies. A few lettuce or rocket leaves wouldn't go amiss either.

Feta, or blue cheese if you like, it are great additions

I had planned to add sunflower seeds but the pack I had bought turned out to have worms - blech! Flax seeds are also a good addition, but add them just before eating. Pine nuts also taste great




















Dressing:
Apart from the dressing above, a simple pounded garlic, lime juice and rock salt combination also tastes very fresh. If you're using kala chana, you can add chaat masala and lime juice.

My favourite is Tahini dressing:
1/2 cup hung curd
1 tbsp tahini
1 green chilli
1 tsp sugar
Salt to taste
Small handful of coriander leaves

Fling everything into a blender and blend until smooth. Top your salad with this just before eating. Ps. If you're tempted to skip the sugar - don't. It adds an interesting complexity to the flavour. You can add garlic and cumin if you like, but it tastes just as good without.

Chickpea salad with tahini dressing

I've been looking to add more protein to my vegetarian diet, without resorting to paneer or tofu. Beans and lentils are a good option, so I made myself a chickpea salad for lunch at the office. But I was tired of the regular olive oil dressing and decided to try out tahini sauce which I love, and which adds to the protein content anyway. Turns out it's a marriage made in heaven!

Chickpea salad:
Half cup boiled chick peas
Half cup cherry tomatoes, halved
Handful of lettuce leaves, washed and torn
Capsicum - quarter each of green, red and yellow, diced
Spring onion - 1, along with the greens, chopped fine
1 Kakdi, cut into half vertically and sliced

Tahini dressing:
Half cup hung curd
Half cup regular curd
1 tablespoon tahini
1-2 green chillies
Pinch of salt
1 tsp sugar/ honey

Grind together all the ingredients - except the regular curd. Taste to ensure a balance between salt and sweet. Just before serving, mix the regular curd with the rest of the dressing and pour over the salad. Mix well and enjoy with a virtuous halo of wellness!

All Veggie Dinner

Last week, I decided to serve an all vegetable dinner - I was simply tired of carbs like rice and roti at every meal and needed a break. Luckily we had fabulous organic vegetables from the weekly farmer's market. Though there was dal and rice in case anyone was still hungry, it went untouched!

I'm not a big mushroom fan, I don't like their texture and watery taste. But one of the very few mushroom dishes I like is stuffed mushroom caps. It works best with large sized button mushrooms and is super easy to prepare. Plus well roasted, it avoids that watery taste that I abhor.

Leeks are a winter favourite and I always buy heaps. I love them simply roasted and slightly burnt at the ends, hot out of the oven, with nothing but a tiny pinch of salt. But for a more filling dish, a cheese, cream and leek bake hits the spot and tastes delicious to boot.

The salad portion was a simple Insalata Caprese, with cherry tomatoes. I think it could have used a touch of garlic or pesto and shall experiment with that next time.

Stuffed Mushrooms:

Ingredients
10 large button mushrooms
1 onion, chopped very fine
Handful of parsley leaves, chopped fine
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
2 slices of bread, turned into crumbs
2 glugs of oil

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees C.

Remove the stems of the mushrooms and chop the stems very fine. Pour 1 glug of oil into a pan and heat. Toss in the garlic and onions and cook until soft. Add the mushroom pieces and cook. Mix the parsley and add salt and pepper to taste. Mix with the bread crumbs.

Coat the top of the mushroom cap with what's left of the oil and place onto the roasting tray. Fill the hollow on the upper side ( from where you took out the stems) with the mixture of breadcrumbs, mushroom stems etc.

Roast for 25 minutes. Serve hot - serves 5.

Baked Leeks:

Ingredients:
5 leeks - fat ones! Chop off the extreme end of the leafy side and then split vertically down the middle, after washing them thoroughly
200 grams cream
100 grams cheddar cheese, grated
2 slices of bread, crumbed

Heat oven to 150 degrees C.

Heat salted water to a boil. Toss in the leeks and cook for about 5-7 minutes until just soft. Remove and drain. Layer the leeks in a shallow, lightly greased baking pan. Mix the cream and cheese and add salt and pepper to taste. Pour over the leeks. Cover with breadcrumbs. Bake for 35 minutes or till brown on top. Serves 5

Insalata caprese:

Ingredients:
Cherry mozzarella - 10 small balls
Firm, ripe tomatoes  - 5, sliced
Handful of basil leaves, chiffonaded
1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Arrange the cherry mozzarella on a plate. Sandwich between slices of tomatoes. Top with the basil leaves. pour over the olive oil, add salt and pepper. Leave for a couple of hours for the flavours to develop. Serve at room temperature. serves 5. You can add sliced olives, or dress with pesto sauce instead of plain olive oil, add a touch of garlic to the oil for a fancier touch.

Wengers Paneer Rolls

Back when I worked at my first in in an office in Connaught Place, Wenger's was a regular haunt. Then boyfriend and I would walk after lunch or in the evening to CP, and indulge in gourmet delights from Wenger's at least once a week. I discovered French hearts there, Diplomat Pudding, the most incredible eclairs filled with cream, and their paneer rolls - a little too filling but delicious, for all that.

Wenger's has gotten farther off with a move to the suburbs, so a trip there is now barely an annual treat. I read somewhere that they still import many of the flours they use for their bakes goods, so replicating them may be beyond my repertoire. But paneer rolls? I figured those would be a breeze. I tried them put for the first time today, and whaddaya know? The taste was a pretty good match! It would make for a great tiffin box stuffer. or starter at a party too.

Ingredients:
Grated paneer - 500 grams
1 medium onion, chopped very fine
2-3 green chillies, chopped fine
Handful coriander, chopped fine
1 inch ginger, minced
2 tsp jeera powder
Salt to taste
Breadcrumbs made of 3 slices of bread

Mix the paneer with all the ingredients except the breadcrumbs, gently. Shape into oblongs about 2 inches long - the moisture in the paneer will help hold it together. Roll each oblong in the breadcrumbs to coat it thoroughly.

Deep fry in hot oil until golden. Serve with green chutney or ketchup.

Time for prep - 15 minutes. Time for cooking - 15 minutes. Makes 15-16

Parsi Mawa Cake

I was travelling the day before my husband's birthday this year, and at Mumbai airport, decided to pick up a Mawa cake from Theobroma as a birthday morning surprise. We had first come across Mawa cake at Sodabottleopenerwala which one year became our favourite restaurant - we went there 8 times in that year, a record for people who don't even eat out at restaurants that often! The warm Mawa cake was a real revelation - soft, moist and delicious without being super sweet.

It reminded me of the first time I had eaten pound cake, as a teenager back in Singapore. It was a Sara Lee frozen pound cake, eaten straight from the freezer, but managed to be so succulently soft and moist that I simply could not get enough. There was something so comfortably familiar and loving in the taste of it that I feel I've been looking at recreating that taste my whole life.

The Mawa cake at Sodabottle and at Theobroma are exactly like that taste of childhood nostalgia - moist, dense, familiar, sweet and untainted by any form of decorativeness that takes cake from being a comfortable friend to a formal acquaintance. It's quite like a pound cake, in its soft and moist taste - nothing sticks to the tongue or the palate in a claggy way, but just eases its way so smoothly down the gullet, you're left looking to the next bite and the next.

I was hit by a powerful urge to bake that from scratch today, having bought some mawa (khoya) from the neighbourhood market recently. I've got to say, I understand a phrase by one of my favourite authors - a cut-and-come-again-cake, after eating this one today. The kids piled on to it like they'd never had cake before, the elder ones putting away a cool three slices apiece. Having just baked it this evening, there is barely a fifth of it left! I'm not sure if I feel delighted everyone loved it or dismayed that it whooshed by so fast!!!

Oh well, at least it's not too complicated or time consuming to make!

Ingredients:
1 cup plain flour
1.5 cups sugar
1/3 cup softened unsalted butter
200 gms mawa
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs, room temperature
1 tsp baking powder

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees c.

Mix the dry ingredients and then all the wet, except the eggs. Beat together, then add the eggs one by one and beat to a smooth mixture. If it's clumpy, add a small portion of plain milk and beat until the mixture is smooth and dropping consistency.

Pour into an 8 inch greased and floured baking pan and bake for 45 minutes - if a knife comes out clean, it's done. It should have a lovely honey-gold colour.

If you insist on tarting it up - and I wouldn't - you can dredge some icing sugar in nice patterns over the smooth honey gold top. I did get a hankering for a smidgen of salted caramel icecream on the side - not the oversweet kind, but the kind that's genuinely a little salty.

It would probably be a great coffee time treat as well.

Weekend Cooking

Since our cook/ housekeeper is away, I'm having to cook on a more regular basis, though my parents have been stars, supplying food unasked for weeks on end. Sunday morning we had an idli beakfast, idlis and coconut chutney by mom while I dished up my froend Monika's mother in law's peanut chutney recipe. I'm one of those people who finds peanuts totally addictive, especially in savoury form, so I have pretty much cleaned out what was left of the chutney, pairing is variously with butter-toasted pao at dinner last night, with crackers for a snack and then cold out of the fridge with hot idlis again this morning.Would highly recommend you make it a pantry staple!

Here's the recipe link: Kickass peanut chutney

For those too lazy to follow yet another link, here it is:

Ingredients:

1. 1 cup roasted peanuts ( I used packaged, pre-roasted and salted peanuts out of laziness)
2. 3-4 dry roasted dried red chillies
3. 2-3 cloves garlic
4. 1 small onion, chopped
5. 1 lime sized ball of tamarind, soaked in 1/2 cup warm water
6. 1/2 cup water

2 sprigs curry leaves
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp hing
1 tbsp oil ( peanut oil for choice)

In a little oil, cook the garlic till its dark brown but not burnt. Remove from the oil and fry the onion in the same oil till soft.
Grind together the first six ingredients to the required consistency - you decide if you like chutney runnier or thicker. Add salt to taste.
Heat the remaining oil in a tadka kadhai. Add the mustard seeds. When they pop, add the cumin, hing and lastly, washed curry leaves. Take off the heat and pour over the chutney. Bliss out!

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Then, for a late Sunday lunch as I just lost track of time, we had rajma by mom, with baked stuffed capsicum. The Capsicum could be a great meal by themselves, especially for anyone trying to go low-carb. I made the capsicum stuffings two ways. One was with a cabbage and potato stuffing from Monika's food blog. Another kind was a basic paneer bhurji, which actually worked out very well.

I love yellow and red capsicum but am not a big fan of the green ones, so this style of cooking actually made them delicious and the kids ate them up without a murmur. definitely going to repeat this...

Ingredients:
10 medium sized capsicums, cut into half each

Stuffing 1
1/2 small cabbage, cut into fine ribbons and soaked in water
2 potatoes, boiled and mashed
1 onion, julienned
2-3 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 inch ginger, crushed
2-3 green chillies, chopped fine
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp coriander powder
salt to taste
1/2 tbsp oil

Heat the oil. Add the garlic and ginger and cook over medium heat for 1-2 minutes. Add the spice powders and onion. Cook till the onion is translucent. Add the drained cabbage - the water clinging to the leaves will be enough to cook it, and stir to mix. Once the cabbage is cooked through, add the mashed potatoes and salt and mix well.

Stuffing 2
200 gms paneer, grated or crumbled
3 small tomatoes, chopped fine
1 medium onion, chopped fine
2-3 green chillies, chopped fine
Handful coriander leaves, cut into fine shreds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tbsp oil
Salt to taste
1/2 tsp turmeric if you like

Heat the oil in a pan. Add the cumin seeds and toast for a minute. Add the chillies and onion and cook till translucent. Add the tomatoes and cook until soft. Add the paneer and salt and cook for a couple more minutes. Turn off the heat, add the coriander leaves. If adding turmeric, add into the hot oil before putting in the cumin seeds.

For the Capsicum:
Prepare the capsicum by slicing each capsicum into half and clearing out the seeds. Pre-heat the oven at 180 degrees C. Rub the oven roasting pan with a thin slick of oil ( about half tbsp).
Fill half the capsicum halves with Stuffing 1 and the other half with Stuffing 2. Bake for 25 minutes and let rest for 5.

Enjoy with rice and a bean dish, and dahi, with rotis or just by themselves with a salad on the side!