Simple enough, quick enough, but nice

-

Lately, I have taken to dahlia or broken wheat.  It is quick and easy to cook and when you make it savoury, it can be quite a wholesome,  substantial meal. I, of course,  love it because it resembles rice in taste and texture so closely. If you have a late dinner like I do, rice tends to make you feel a little bloated and heavy. Roti makes me feel that there is more work ahead of me (I equate rotis with hard, unrewarding labour). Dahlia is a nice middle path.

Since I usually only cook for myself and that too after nearly 10 hours in office,  my preparation is very unfussy. I don't even chop vegetables, cooking them whole or maybe squaring them off in big chunks. Somehow I find it tastier that way.

Here's what I generally do: Take a cup of dahlia, two cups of a daal (I find moong and masoor works best, though), some water, a halved capsicum, a whole tomato, or large quarters of potatoes (you could take all these vegetables,  of course. I really relish the flavours of just one. I don't use onions because, well, who'll chop that much?). Then I add water, maybe 3 and a half cups or so, salt, turmeric, lots of chilli-coconut powder mix (the kind that's spread on a vada pav), some plain chilli powder,  and oil. Now, the weather's nice and crisp in Pune, so I use mustard oil. There really is nothing like it to give the sharp, hearty flavour to it. (Olive oil tastes nice too. But if you can, smoke it with some garlic for more flavour.  Corn oil, meh...it doesn't really taste like anything. Ghee is another awesome alternative. ) Mix up all this properly.

Then I pressure cook it a little longer than one pressure cooks rice - I do it for maybe 5 or 6 whistles. The vegetables are properly mashed and soft. The flavours have meshed with each other properly.

I usually have it with some Kashundi.

It's hot, very tasty, and really wholesome. I feel the right kind of full.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more