South Indian Vegetarian Recipes for Your Holiday Feast

A road map for a vegetarian Thanksgiving. The entire essay is up at The Aerogram, including a recipe for Cranberry Pickle. 

One of the best memories of all our years celebrating Thanksgiving is the year we realized that the holiday had less to do with exactly what form the dinner took and more with getting to spend time with family and friends. It seems like a simple idea, but it was counter-intuitive to imagine Thanksgiving without turkey or beans or cranberry sauce. The menu at our house that year read like one for an Indian festival with a vegetarian spread, complete with an array of condiments.

If you’re contemplating vegetarian dishes for upcoming holiday feasts and love South Indian food, this roundup of recipes offers suggestions for dishes to include in your plans. Go forth and try your hand at one or two! Or if you’re feeling adventurous, supplement every section of your holiday feast with the help of these dishes. While some Indian recipes can be complicated and take hours to make, that’s not the story with most Indian home cooking, particularly vegetarian cooking.

South Indian Recipe Series: What is Tamarind?

My new essay with two recipes, one for Tomato Dal, which uses tamarind, and the other for a delicious accompaniment to the Dal, a recipe for Baby Radish Raita.

The essay and recipes are available on The Aerogram.

Tomato Dal

Baby Radish Raita

The flavor of tamarind — a fruity sourness — is a cornerstone of South Indian cooking. It’s more often than not paired with jaggery, especially in the cuisines of the northern part of Karnataka. Tamarind makes an appearance in South Indian staples such as rasam (a thin lentil soup), sambhar or dal (lentil and vegetable gravy), gojju (a condiment in which tamarind is the central ingredient and jaggery the able sidekick; it is served as an accompaniment to rice and rotis), chutneys and chutney powders.

Whenever I think of the tamarind and its role in a meal, I am reminded of a guitarist or a pianist, who as they are playing pieces in the center of their instruments, suddenly swoop down to the edge, to the bottom of the neck in the guitar or the edge of the piano keys, and strike a note that reverberates long after their fingers have gone back to the center. The tamarind is that note at the end — sharp, high pitched, with a taste that stays long after you’ve gone back to the somber breads or rice.

Chapati and Rice served with Tomato Dal and Baby Radish Raita

Recipe: Flax Seed Chutney Powder

You will find many websites touting the health benefits of flax seed, the tiny, shiny seeds of the plant that gives us linen, but this post is a recipe for an Indian condiment called Chutney Powder (Chutney Pudi or Podi in the various South Indian languages, pudi/podi meaning powder).

Chutney Powder is served with a variety of Indian dishes such as Idlis (rice/lentil cakes), Dosa (rice/lentil crepes), and the various rotis. It can also be eaten with rice and ghee or with bread toast and butter. As the name suggests chutney powder is the dry version of a chutney.

The flax seed I used in this recipe are the golden ones, unroasted. Light brown, dark brown and roasted varieties are also available. They might have need to be cleaned of stray stones and dried stalks. Flax seeds have a limited shelf life, so it's best to buy small quantities and store leftovers in the fridge. You can tell they've gone rancid if they have a strong smell, and trust me on this, it stinks and doesn't make you feel good either if you eat anything made of it. Good flax seeds have a mild nutty aroma.

Flax Seed Chutney Powder
Original Recipe by Kalindi Jagirdar Bagal 

Use the pulse function and grind the ingredients in short bursts, taking time to move around the ingredients with a spoon so they are well blended and don't get too oily or pasty. The powder should be slightly coarse, not smooth. 

Ingredients:

½ cup flax seeds, cleaned

1½ tsp chili powder

1 tbsp tamarind, cleaned and deseeded

½ tbsp jaggery (if you have a sweet tooth, use more according to taste)

Salt to taste (about 1 tsp)

Method:

Grind together all the ingredients coarsely in a grinder. Pour into a plate and let cool. Store in an airtight jar.

South Indian Vegetarian Homestyle Cooking: A Guide to Essential Spices

My new essay on the basic spices used in South Indian vegetarian cuisine includes a recipe for Potato and Onion Curry. An excerpt is below. The entire essay is on The Aerogram.

Indian cuisine is vastly diverse, not only in terms of ingredients, traditions, and techniques, but also in terms of levels of complexity — ranging from simple curries and chutneys to the biryanis that demand multiple discrete steps and hours to cook.

Most Indian home cooking, however, particularly vegetarian home cooking, boasts of a repertoire of recipes that allow one to achieve sophisticated flavors with a few basic fresh and dry spices and herbs. Those recipes and a few slightly higher on the complexity spectrum — from the South Indian kitchens of my childhood and now my own — will be the focus of this essay and the ones that follow.

Semolina Porridge: How to Make Your Upma and Eat It Too

On AntiSerious, my essay on a childhood dish I learned to hate and then learned to love as an adult. The entire essay is here: The Pagan's Progress: How To Make Your Upma and Eat It Too

Then on one of my trips back to my parents’ home, I stumbled upon the problem with my Uppittu. Or the answer to the problem. As my mom stood over her stove, her die-hard cast-iron wok held firmly in one hand with tongs and the other gripping a steel ladle trying to scrape the roasted-on bottom layer of Uppittu, a flashback occurred in an instant. That used to be my favorite part of a not-so-favorite dish. Mom carefully transferred the crisp bits onto a plate and wordlessly handed it to me. She’d remembered.

New Recipes for Dips and Appetizers Inspired by Indian Condiments

My new food essay is up on The Aerogram with two recipes.

In my quest for dips that are a delicious departure from the ordinary, I decided to re-purpose a couple of types of condiments that play supporting roles in South Indian cooking — chutneys and bharthas. Bharthas are somewhat of an unknown quantity outside of desi circles, and while various types of chutneys are popular items on grocery store shelves, the many different South Indian cuisines boast of so many varieties that are still only found in home cooking.

The entire essay is here: Dips With a Twist: New Ideas for an Old Party Standby

The Evolution of an Immigrant's Thanksgiving

My essay on Thanksgivings past. 

We had left behind a culture that boasts of many festivals and rituals that bring families together. With extended families still living in close proximity, impromptu family gatherings are still the norm in our hometowns. Once we moved here we got busy with school and work calendars and we regularly lost track of those festivals (and still do), only a call from home prompting us to remember when it was too late.

The rest is at The Medium.

Easy Tomato Pickle Recipe

The recipe that accompanies the 'Food is the Tie That Binds' essay on preserving family recipes for future generations is also up on The Aerogram.

Pickling is usually a process that takes days if not weeks, but in less than a couple of hours, you could have on your hands this tomato pickle designed to delight your taste buds and impress your guests.

The entire recipe, with detailed notes, is here: http://theaerogram.com/tomato-pickle-recipe-food-tie-binds/

I hope you take a shot at it!

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What Makes Food Comfort Food?

The Aerogram published my essay on why a bowl of rice and some pickle is my comfort food.

On any other day, late night infomercials would give me company through a bedtime snack, but that day, with the occasional swish of a car whizzing past the house for company, I stood barefoot in the kitchen and polished off the entire bowl.

Not for the first time, I wondered what it was that drove me to seek this particular combination of foods in times of distress. I didn’t bother then to press for an answer, just content in the knowledge that for the moment all was right with the world.

Read the full essay on The Aerogram.

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