Cooking with Kurma S1-E03 Indian Entrees 3

I'm Cormer, welcome to the Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking Video Encyclopedia. This edition we're going to show you how to prepare all these delicious vegetable dishes. Spinach, eggplant, chickpeas and tomato stew, North Indian red bean curry, cauliflower sauteed with green peas and mixed vegetables in seasoned broth. So let's begin.

Sauteed cauliflower with green peas. Now here's a mildly seasoned, beautifully textured vegetable that's very simple to prepare. Let me show you how it's done. First of all, take one medium-sized cauliflower.

Now when you're buying cauliflower, it's best to make sure that the cauliflower is fresh, there's no brown spots on it, it's firm and hard, and the buds are tight. Now the way we're going to cut our vegetables is as follows. First of all, cut around the core like so. This core can be discarded.

Throw away any extraneous leaves. And each of these large florets can be trimmed into smaller pieces like this. I don't cut right through. Just cut it 3 quarters through and break it the rest of the way.

This makes the minimum amount of wastage, like so. And continue on until you have cut all the cauliflower into even sized pieces, like here. So here we have one already prepared cauliflower. And over here, we have one cup of fresh green peas.

Now here's some of the other ingredients that we're going to be using in this very simple dish. We've got half a tablespoonful of ginger, one and a half tablespoons of whole cumin seeds, eight or 10 curry leaves, one teaspoon of turmeric, a quarter of a teaspoon of chili powder, one teaspoon of salt, we've got four tablespoons of ghee, over here we've got a quarter of a cup of heavy cream, or you can use sour cream or yoghurt, and two tablespoons of minced parsley. So this is how it's done. In a heavy pan, first turn it on and sauté your spices by firstly pouring in your ghee.

Alternatively, you can use oil. And when the ghee becomes hot, stir in your fresh ginger root. Next, add your cumin seeds and saute them until they go brown. Now add the curry leaves.

When you start making a masala, put in the fresh or the dried leaves and cook them until they're crisp. Now add your cauliflowers along with the rest of the spices. Sauté your cauliflowers now until they're half cooked. In other words, they should be halfway between raw and tender.

Quite a strong aroma there as the cayenne pepper hits the wok. Now when the cauliflowers are half cooked, add the peas with about two tablespoons of water. Now when you've sautéed your cauliflowers and peas together about a minute turn the flame down to low place a lid on top and come back in about five minutes and they should be tender and ready to go now let's see if our cauliflowers are tender yes now we should just saute the vegetables to make sure now that there's no more moisture left in there until they're perfectly dry there are no moisture left let's add our cream fresh coriander fold everything in and there it is fresh cauliflower sauteed with green peas spinach eggplant chickpea and tomato stew a beautiful dish with a beautiful vegetable spinach but unfortunately I've seen many spinach dishes that have been ruined because of one reason even though it looks very beautiful you bite into it and you realize they've forgotten to wash the spinach so this is a golden rule when you're preparing spinach you have to wash it very very carefully at least two or three times if not more so here we have one bunch of spinach I'm going to dump it in a big bowl of water here I'm going to show you just how much sand and grit you can get out of a bunch of spinach the reason is because spinach is grown in a very sandy environment and it stays there between the stems and between the leaves.

So a great deal of effort must be put into getting all that sand out because any sand left in there will be there right at the end of the cooking process and you'll feel it there crunching between your teeth. Just see how much dirt's there. I'm going to show you just how much dirt's left in our bowl here. Just look at all that.

Now that would have ended up in your spinach dish. So you do this at least two or three times until the rinsed water is completely clear, and there's no more trace of sand. Now I'm going to show you how to prepare your spinach leaves. After you've washed them all, separate them all, and I'll show you a quick way of taking the stalks off from the leaves.

Now, all the flavor of the spinach is in the leaves, not in the stalks. So you don't really need the stalks. Hold the spinach leaf between your thumb and forefinger, and simply pull out the stalk, and you're left with a leaf. And now gather all the leaves that you've pulled the stalks out from in a little clump on your cutting board and with a nice sharp knife chopping your spinach is actually quite easy.

That's chopped spinach, quite simple. So it's okay to leave a few stems in but it's nice to pull most of them out, especially for this dish which is nice and creamy. Let's have a look at some of our other ingredients here. We've got one bunch of spinach that's been chopped up very fine.

We've got one medium sized eggplant that's been diced into little cubes. We've got four medium tomatoes that have been diced very small, quarter of a cup of ghee, one tablespoon of freshly minced ginger, one teaspoon of fresh green chillies that have been minced, one and a half teaspoons of cumin seeds whole, half a teaspoon of black mustard seeds, three tablespoons of fresh parsley, ten or twelve little curry leaves, by the way if you can't get curry leaves you can always use bay leaves, a quarter of a teaspoon of aspartita, one teaspoon of turmeric, one and a half teaspoons of honey, one and a half teaspoons of salt, and two-thirds of a cup of chickpeas that have been soaked to produce one and two-thirds cups of chickpeas. In other words, these have been soaked, they've been cooked and drained, and these are very soft as you can see.

So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take our ghee, place it in our heavy pan here. I like to use a wok for this. We've got to heat up the ghee and add our spices and make our spice masala. So when the ghee gets hot, add your mustard seeds.

Cook them until they crackle and pop, and then add your ginger, chillies and cumin seeds. Stir fry all the spices until they go a little brown, and then add your curry leaves and asafoetida. When the curry leaves go a little brown, toss in your eggplants. So now you have to stir fry your eggplants for about ten minutes.

You'll notice that they'll shrink a little and they'll fully absorb all the spice-flavoured ghee. So the ten minutes is up, the eggplants have reduced, let's add our tomatoes, stir them in, turmeric and salt, and of course our spinach. Now, the amazing thing about spinach is how it reduces so much. When you first put in your spinach, it seems like a lot, but then after some time it starts to shrink and it becomes a creamy puree.

Let's put half of our parsley in, give it a little stir around. Let's put our lid on and we'll come back in five minutes. So, five minutes is up. Let's add our chickpeas.

Fold it all in. now it's beginning to look very exciting in fact now we have to cook this down till it's a almost like a puree because those eggplants are still not done so after we fold in the chickpeas we're going to reduce the flame to low and stirring every now and again we'll come back in about half an hour well it's been about half an hour and it's done succulent spinach chickpea eggplant and tomato stew. Bring on the rice. Rajma. Here's a classic North Indian red bean curry that's really exotic.

I'll show you how to make it. Over here we have red kidney beans. These are going to form the basis of our curry, but we're not going to use them raw like any other bean. They have to be soaked.

Here we have two cups of red kidney beans that have been soaked and cooked in the juice they were soaked in until they were butter soft. In the water also we place one tablespoon of turmeric and one bay leaf. Notice how butter soft they are. Now along with these beans which form the basis of our curry, we have the following ingredients.

We have four tomatoes which have been diced, two cups of diced fried curd, two teaspoons of cayenne, one and a half teaspoons of mango powder, two teaspoons of turmeric, and one teaspoon of gram masala, as well as five tablespoons of ghee, half a cup of water, one cup of minced coriander leaves, two tablespoons of salt, one and a half teaspoons of fennel seeds, one and a half tablespoons of cumin seeds, a third of a teaspoon of ajwain, two and a half tablespoons of coriander, and three teaspoons of fresh ginger now so that's all the ingredients so the first thing you have to do is take your beans and drain them but don't throw away the juice because we're going to use that a little later on not only is that juice very nourishing it's also going to form the basis of the liquid portion of our curry so while those beans are draining we're going to prepare our paste masala I'll show you you how to do that. Take one blender and place all these whole spices in it.

That's fennel seeds, cumin seeds, ajwain seeds and coriander. Blend them to a powder. Ah, now they're done. Now what we're going to do, we're going to add our ginger and our water and we're going to blend it up some more.

Right, now in a bowl place your cayenne, mango powder, tumeric and gram masala like so and on top of that pour the contents of the blender making sure don't leave anything behind and mix it up to a smooth paste. This is called your your paste masala. This spice paste is going to be fried in ghee and is the basic spice ingredients for our curry. Now take your ghee, place it in a pan, a good heavy pan, heat it up and fry your spice masala in it.

You should fry your paste masala for about one or two minutes. Now add your tomatoes and you should fry those in the paste masala till they're soft and they begin to break down for about five or eight minutes. Well these tomatoes have been about five minutes, oh yes, definitely ready to add the rest of the ingredients. So we've got our red kidney beans for a start we're going to fold those in and the curd the salt and don't forget we have our gravy now if you want a dry curry then just add a little if you want a wet curry you can add more now let's not forget our coriander leaves these These are a must, and there it is, rajma, exotic, north Indian bean curry, a real feast.

Here's a classic Bengali recipe which is over 500 years old. This is called laffa bianjana, it's a beautiful dish which is more akin to a soup than a vegetable. It's very easy to digest. Let me show you some of the ingredients.

We've got six cups of assorted vegetables here. notice that they've been chosen for their colour appeal. We've got pumpkin, green beans, carrot, beets, zucchinis and potatoes. We've also got two or three medium-sized tomatoes that have been diced. And we've got one tablespoon of ghee, one teaspoon of honey, one teaspoon of coriander powder, half a teaspoon of turmeric, half a teaspoon of fresh ginger root, one teaspoon of green chillies, minced, one and two-thirds teaspoon of salt, three tablespoons of minced fresh coriander.

Now let's place all these ingredients in a heavy pan. Spinach, all the vegetables, this is a beautifully coloured dish, some ghee, got our honey, all our spices and herbs and salt, and one other thing, three cups of water. Turn the flame on to full, bring it to a boil, then turn it down to a simmer and cook it for about 10 or 15 minutes or until the vegetables are nicely soft. It's been about 10 minutes now.

Let's have a look at our lapia brangiana. It's looking very beautiful. And let's just check some of our vegetables to see whether they're done. That's the pumpkin.

It's butter soft. Same with the zucchinis. And we've got one final seasoning here. We've got one tablespoon of ghee, one and a quarter teaspoons of cumin seeds, half a teaspoon of black cumin seed, one eighth of a teaspoon of ground black pepper, one bay leaf, one teaspoon of lemon juice, and half a teaspoon of black mustard seeds.

And now we take one heavy pan, place it on a high flame. We're going to fry up our spices in the ghee and make this fried masala. Let's add our mustard seeds. And when the mustard seeds start to crackle, add your cumin seeds, black mustard seeds, bay leaf and black pepper.

Now we add these to the finished product. Now we just simply simmer the spices and vegetables together so that the flavour of the spices and the vegetables combine for a minute or two. Add your lemon juice, stir it in, and there we have it. Let the spices and the vegetables simmer together for a few minutes so the flavours mix, and then serve it with hot rice for a beautifully textured, colourful dish.

So there we have it, another beautiful selection of dishes that can be prepared using vegetables. Happy eating.