food talk
Blend of tastes

Vegetable stew, a celebratory dish, is easy to prepare, healthy and refreshing, says Pushpesh Pant

CHEF’S delight

Ingredients

Green peas (shelled) 150 gm
French beans (trimmed and cut) 150 gm
Pickling onions 150 gm
Tomatoes (medium) three
Carrots (small) four
Cauliflower (optional) 150 gm
Baby potatoes 100 gm
Large potatoes two
Yam (Zimikand, optional) 100 gm
Sweet potato (medium, boiled
and cubed, optional) one
Onions (medium, sliced) two
Ginger (chopped) 2-inch piece
Garlic (chopped) 1 pod
Vinegar 2 tbsp
Sugar 2 tbsp
Salt to taste
Oil to shallow fry
Green chillies three-four
A large sprig of fresh coriander
A sprig of mint

Method

Heat oil in a large frying pan and shallow fry, individually, the prepared vegetables except the onions, ginger, garlic and tomatoes. Remove and keep aside. Heat two tbsp oil in the same pan and fry the sliced onions till light brown. Add ginger, garlic and tomatoes, simmer for about three-four minutes till tender. Add fried vegetables mix, well. Stir in the vinegar, sugar and salt and simmer for another five minutes or so.

WE Indians take great pride in our cuisines and never tire of pointing out their unique features. One claim often made is that our cooking is sensitive to all six basic tastes—shadras; ideally all should make their presence felt at meal times with the seasonally appropriate taste predominating the menu.

This is supposed to be the test of lavish hospitality; shadras bhojan is what an honoured guest deserves. Interestingly, seldom are different tastes blended or presented together in our recipes. True, the Gujarati love to put sugar in daal et al to sweeten all things and the Hyderabadi, too, have a penchant for khat-mittha zaika but there are few deshi recipes that play an impressive culinary duet in the manner of the Chinese.

Their repertoire is full of ‘sweet ‘n’ sour’—veggies, chicken or pork— basic everyday fare but extremely satisfying. This is the reason that we were thrilled to come across khattu meethu vegetable stew of Parsi lineage.

It is a celebratory dish, beautiful to look at, easy to prepare, healthy and refreshingly different. To prepare a non-veg stew, you may have to budget for a long time (after all the meats have to stew in their own juices). There is no such constraint in this case.

The recipe has many other user-friendly features to commend itself. You can easily replace a vegetable with another as long as the colours, textures and natural tastes are varied and balanced. Notice, in this ‘original’ version, sweet potatoes are used to bring in the natural sweetness and their soft texture contrasts strikingly with yam.

Two kinds of potatoes and onions contribute to the subtlety that is likely to be overlooked by most but the most discerning. Although, the delicacy is called a ‘stew’, you are welcome to keep the veggies a la dente— retaining their bite—and serve it in lieu of a salad. Nor can anyone fail to register how effortlessly the recipe balances nutritional requirements—starchies, and vitamin-rich vegetables are blended and served more than the daily quota of sugar and salt. (We have at times included stewed fruits—pear, peach, plums— in this dish and done away with refined sugar. If the peas are substituted with boiled kidney beans or chickpeas, you have an almost complete one-dish meal.)

We are indebted to that remarkable lady Bhicoo J. Maneckshaw, brilliant cook and great teacher, best-selling author, a constant source of inspiration and encouragement for the original recipe.

 

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