Indian Home Cooking Week kicked off yesterday with a recipe for chholar dal; here today is a recipe for a vegetable dish to eat with it: mishti kumro. “Mishti” means sweet in Bengali, and for those of you know Bengali food it may seem redundant for a Bengali dish to be qualified thus. My people have a renowned sweet tooth (though we can’t compare to most Gujaratis) and often add a bit of sugar to a lot of savoury dishes as well. The “mishti” in the name of this dish, however, is a qualifier of the second word “kumro”, which means pumpkin, and means only that the dish features sweet pumpkin—the dish itself is not particularly sweet. I’m not really sure which of the bewildering multiplicity of pumpkins and squashes available in the US is closest to the Bengali pumpkin. If I had to guess, I’d go with buttercup, but really I use whatever I have at hand: butternut, buttercup, kabocha, delicata, or in this case ambercup. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Vegetarian
Chholar Dal (Indian Home Cooking Week 1)
Here is the first of my recipes for my Indian Home Cooking Week and fittingly it’s for a dal.
It’s hard to imagine a meal in an Indian home that doesn’t feature dal of some kind, whether it is as the fulcrum of a meal—as the primary source of protein in vegetarian households, or as a cheap source of nutrition in poorer households—or as a preliminary “course” before you move on to fish or meat. It’s eaten with rice, with chapatis and parathas and other breads, and even by itself. As with all other aspects of Indian food, there’s a strong regional aspect to dal: some dals are more prominent in some regional cuisines than others, some are traditionally not eaten at all in some regions, and even the dals that cross regions in popularity are usually prepared very differently in them. And, of course, their names change with language—one region’s toor dal is another’s arhar dal etc.