james test

December 4, 2016 We had a big hunk of pumpkin leftover from our veggie box and Cindy decided that a big batch of pumpkin flatbreads was the way to go. To accompany it we turned to Mridula Baljekar's Indian Vegetarian Cookbook for ideas, settling on this potato and chickpea curry with sun-dried mango. There's not too much work involved - you pre-boil the spuds, but otherwise everything just goes in one big pot. We had some sun-dried mango powder (amchoor) on hand from ages ago. I'd really recommend tracking it down for this dish, it really adds something interesting. Otherwise this is a pretty straight-up curry - it probably needs another dish on the side to round out the full meal (we chose a side of spiced coconut spinach ). It's good though - a great addition to our weeknight roster (although with the pumpkin bread as well, this was definitely a weekend job). Potato & chickpea curry (slightly adapted from Mridula Baljekar's The Low-Frat Indian Vegetarian Coo...

We decided to make the final round of our SBS inspired Bollywood meals a bit special, and invited a gang of people around to enjoy Dhoom , an unintentionally hilarious 'fast paced motorcycle-robbery drama'. The movie was a hit (particularly the boat chase) and fortunately the food we'd prepared measured up. As we were entertaining a few people, we needed to make sure we picked recipes that easily scaled up to feed 8 rather than 2 and were guaranteed to be delicious. Luckily, we have just the recipes: palak paneer and spiced chickpeas, both from our Mondo Organics Indian cooking class. We've made these trusty recipes many times, and they never disappoint. Cindy capped things off with a reprise of her Indian mango rice pudding , which cooled everyone down as Dhoom hotted up. Now we've just got to figure out what to cook when we hire out Dhoom 2 .

The Indian food is coming thick and fast at the moment with thematically appropriate meals for SBS's weekly Bollywood movies. This week the movie was Devdas , the most lavish and expensive Bollywood film of all time (full disclosure: it's also one of the longest and we're still getting through it on tape). To match, I went for a lavish meal: dal from our Oxfam calendar and a vegie dish from Mridula Baljekar's trusty low-fat Indian vegetarian cookbook. The dal was nice and simple and was meant to be sour, sweet and hot. To be honest it was mostly sour (tamarind puree) and tangy (ginger), but that's probably mostly due to my lax measurements. Despite not quite measuring up on the 'hot' front, this was one of the better dal recipes we've come across - maybe not quite up to these standards , but then there's no can of coconut milk in this one to fill us up with creamy, fatty goodness. Anyway, this was basically all about the ginger and tamarind fla...

It's that time of the year again. Nope, it's not Halloween I'm excited about, or even Vegetarian Awareness Month . I'm psyched for Nova Cinema 's Indian Film Festival ! I'm always keen for an over-long and overly obvious story of love and dancing in the Subcontinent, and to keep Michael interested there's usually plenty of Indian-style eating to go along with it. On Saturday night I booked tickets for Chak De! India and invited Tracy and Lee to join us for dinner beforehand. During our day-trip to Brunswick we stopped by the Indian grocery for a few supplies. I was very pleased to find there Lay's latest foray into potato chips for the Indian market: a packet of Masala Magic chips resplendent with Indian World Cup Cricket logos. Even better, it was bundled up with a bonus small sample of Mint Mischief chips. With Taj Mahal beers in the fridge, pre-dinner nibbles were all sorted out. For the main meal, we called on a few previously successful dis...

The last installment in SBS's Hooray for Bollywood movie series was the fabulous Kuch Naa Kaho . It's a fine example of a modern Bollywood romance and includes one of my favourite musical numbers, where a traditional engagement party in a lavish setting is transformed into a battle-of-the-sexes dance-off: how frustrating that subtitles for the lyrics disappear half-way through! To accompany the movie, we prepared tandoori veges and lemon rice. Since sampling the delicious tandoori cauliflower at Tandoori Times , I've been re-inspired by the marinade that is so often only seen on chicken. Michael noticed a pouch of tandoori spices at Spice Bazaar last weekend and immediately I had to own it, I had to try my own hand at tandoori veges! After looking at one or two recipes on the internet, it was Michael who adlibbed his own marinade and it turned out very well. The resulting veges didn't closely resemble their TT inspiration, but a lack of oil and fake colouring can ...

Mmmm-mmm, doesn't that sound delicious? Savoury vegetable loaf. Sounds like it's made of sawdust and old potatoes. Luckily, this wasn't from some 1950s Woman's Day cookbook, but from our beloved Low Fat Indian Vegetarian Cookbook by Mridula Baljekar, so we were guaranteed something with a little flavour. Tonight's meal was being prepared in honour of SBS's month-long 'Hooray for Bollywood' extravaganza (four Sunday night movies celebrating India's finest), but neither Cindy or I were particularly enthused about a regular saucy curry. Instead, we browsed through the book trying to find something interesting but still Indian-themed. We settled on this baked loaf, served up with roti bread, yoghurty sauce, greens and the spicy mango chutney that came in the Oxfam pack that Mum gave us for Christmas. The preparation was pretty time-consuming, with seemingly endless chopping and grating, some baking and a bit of frying at the end. Throw in the cons...

Having slacked off for the best part of a week, I made Thursday night's dinner my responsibility. Having spent a few days eating nothing but pizza , I decided to put together an Indian feast. This was particularly appropriate given Emma and Simon were among a tiny minority of our friends who hadn't sampled my favourite Indian recipe: spiced chickpeas . The recipe is from a cooking course Cindy and I did at Mondo Organics . I think I must have been respecting recipe copyright when that earlier post went up, something I will rectify later in the post. As much as I love the spiced chickpeas, it's become something of a rule in our house that dinner requires at least one vegetable (and tomato paste isn't quite good enough). Thus, we tend to dig up a fairly simple veg-heavy Indian dish to accompany the chickpeas and make us feel vaguely healthy. This time, it was stir-fried sweetcorn with peppers and spring onions from Mridula Baljekar's 'Low Fat Indian Vegeta...

On Sunday we had a pub lunch with Michael's mixed netball team lined up, so we wanted to be prepared with a not-too-oily dinner in the evening. We pulled out a dhal recipe that we received during an Indian cooking course at Mondo Organics last year, and then looked for an Indian-style salad to munch on the side. Along with a bit of home-made flat bread from the depths of the freezer, this was a thoroughly satisfying meal. The common ingredients of black mustard seeds, green chilli and coconut meant that the dhal and salad weren't fighting for flavour domination, and the crisp cool texture of the salad was a great contrast to the thick soft lentil soup. This is a low-fuss combination worth repeating! Green bean salad (from The Low-Fat Indian Vegetarian Cookbook by Mridula Baljekar) 1 tablespoon olive oil 1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds 1 cup green beans, trimmed and chopped into bite-size pieces 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup dessicated coconut 2/3 cup boiling water A bunch of...

To welcome our Bris-friend Doof to Melbourne's fair shores, a home-prepared Indian meal was necessary. With Krusty, Jason and Sharon included on the invite list, we had to upscale from 'meal' to 'feast'. Luckily, Cindy and I are well-practiced in the art of Indian feast-making and we called upon some previous successes: palak paneer and mango rice pudding . To make sure we had enough, we decided to add some roti bread (picked up ready-to-fry at IGA) and broccoli pilau to the menu. Broccoli Pilau (from Mridula Baljekar's low-fat Indian vegetarian cookbook) Wash about a cup of basmati rice and soak it in cold water for about 20 minutes. In a good sized saucepan, fry a teaspoon of fennel seeds, half a dozen cardamom pods, 1/2 a teaspoon of peppercorns, a bay leaf and a cinammon stick in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. After about 30 seconds, add a finely chopped onion and a couple of chopped green chillies and fry until the onions have browned slightly....

After a few days of surviving on very poor conference food and some tastier night-time outings in Cairns, Thursday found me back in Melbourne and raring to cook. Cindy and I had our usual indecisive conversation about exactly what it was I'd be cooking, before settling on the Eastern vegetarian burgers from Mridula Baljekar's excellent Low-Fat Indian Vegetarian Cookbook . Seeing as I had a free afternoon, I decided to add a baby spinach salad (also from the book) and a made-up raita to the mix. The burgers were a spicy treat - the patties were 'meaty' and tasty and combined well with the salad and raita. They probably could have used some further accompaniment (e.g. tomato, for those who like them), but I was pretty satisfied. Raita Seed a small cucumber and chop it into little pieces, combine with a small tub of plain yoghurt, a few tablespoons of chopped coriander and a couple of teaspoons of ground cumin. And that's it. Baby Spinach Salad Chop up about 200g ...

It isn't a themed evening without an appropriate dessert as far as I'm concerned, and I knew just the thing to make. I'd previously trialled this recipe for "Rose and saffron-scented rice dessert with mango" once while in Brisbane. I had had some agreeable creamy rice desserts served with thalis at various Indian restaurants, and I found my home-made batch to be an even more aromatic and satisfying end to a curry meal. The recipe comes from a fabulous and (in this house) well-thumbed cookbook instructively titled "The low-fat Indian vegetarian cookbook" , written by Mridula Baljekar. However this is by no means a low-fat dessert: it comes from the more permissive High Days and Holidays chapter at the end of the book. This dessert is quite simple to prepare and if you're planning to make a main meal on the same night, you can reduce the stress levels even further by doing the first half of the recipe a couple of hours or even a day earlier. Indi...