Vegetarian Indian Supper

No matter what the fusion cuisine people may say, my trouble with Asian cooking is that I’m not good at incorporating an oriental recipe into an otherwise-occidental meal. Therefore, I always end up “doing Asian” much more elaborately than I intended.

To wit: The other day I was browsing Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking, by Julie Sahni, hoping for just one interesting little preparation. As usual, one thing led to another. Here’s what I made for dinner the next night:

Spicy Mushrooms with Ginger and Chilies
Bengali Green Beans and Potatoes Smothered in Mustard Oil
Tomato Pilaf
Fresh Corn Breads

That’s a lot of cooking. It all started with that mushroom recipe, which I had made before and liked a lot. The headnote recommended them wrapped in bread as an appetizer or accompanied by a tomato pilaf. The book’s breads section provided an intriguing flatbread recipe made with pureed fresh corn kernels and said it was lovely with the green bean preparation. Three new dishes there, and it’s the height of local corn season: I couldn’t resist.

The Mushrooms

For Khombi Tarkari, mushrooms are snuggled up in a sauté pan with onions, ginger, garlic, hot green chilies, turmeric, roasted cumin seeds, and lemon juice. Tom, my chili handler, was uncharacteristically intimidated by the fierceness of our newly purchased chilies when raw, so we used less of them than the recipe called for. But cooking tamed them mightily, and they didn’t overpower the mushrooms. Altogether, these ingredients indeed made a spicy dish, good warm or at room temperature.

The Green Beans and Potatoes

I probably wouldn’t have tried Bangla Aloo Sem on my own, since I don’t keep mustard oil in my pantry. But the recipe said vegetable oil and dry mustard powder would be OK, so I made it. Cut in similar-sized pieces, the beans and potato are first sautéed in oil flavored with black mustard seeds, turmeric, garlic, and dried red chilies. Then they get the dry mustard and a little water, are cooked covered until tender, and are uncovered briefly to evaporate excess liquid. They were delicious, though you had to be careful not to get a forkful with lurking pieces of the truly fierce Arbol peppers.

The Tomato Pilaf

Most of Sahni’s pilafs are made with previously cooked rice. That was new to me, but I’ve noted it for days when I’ve cooked too much rice for another purpose. Tamatar Bhat is a very simple pilaf, with the rice stirred into a puree of tomatoes sautéed with chopped onion and crushed coriander seeds. The cooking time seemed long for already-cooked rice, and indeed the dish came out rather porridgy looking. But it tasted fine, though mild.

The Corn Breads

Bhutte ki Roti was, of the four, the recipe I had been most intrigued by. The flatbreads are made with pureed fresh corn kernels, a little salt, a little oil, and enough whole wheat and white flour to hold it all together. They’re rolled very thin and cooked quickly on a very hot cast-iron griddle. Alas, mine needed a lot more flour than the recipe had suggested, and they came out looking rather sickly. Also, they didn’t taste much of corn, even though we (Tom is also the griddle cook of the family) had finished them by holding each one with tongs directly over a high flame, which was supposed to intensify the roasted corn flavor. By that point, they had a nicely rustic look, but not the intensity of flavor I’d hoped for.

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So, after making all this, we sat to supper with the four dishes on the table at once and amused ourselves by tasting them in different combinations.

They went amazingly well with each other and with the lovely Hugel Alsace Gewurztraminer we drank with them. The two mild-flavored dishes, the pilaf and the breads, were excellent foils for the two spicy dishes. The spicing of the mushrooms was different from the spicing of the beans and potatoes, but all the vegetables harmonized rather than competing.

For both Tom and me, the star was the Bengali green beans. They were both sufficiently familiar and sufficiently different from any way we’d ever cooked green beans. These, I could actually imagine fusing into an occidental menu. All in all, this was a rich and satisfying combination of flavors, even for normally dedicated meat eaters.