They all cooked in their Indian pressure cooker and it didn’t blow up their face!

I asked and you delivered. You are the best bunch that a blogger could ask to support an event to refute an opinion stated as a fact by a slow cooker cookbook author (now say that fast!). You cooked in your Indian pressure cookers, clicked pictures of them and narrated stories and adventures you have had with them. Thank you for validating and proving that Indian pressure cookers are indeed safe and easy to use. Here is the roundup in the order I received them. If I missed any of your entrees, do let me know and I will add you promptly with my sincerest apologies.

 

When Soma moved to America with her husband, she couldn’t bring her pressure cooker with her. It was fortuitous too because she made friends with another girl and borrowed her pressure cooker whenever she needed to use. The lending and borrowing of pressure cooker blossomed into a lifelong friendship. And yes, she did eventually buy her own pressure cooker and recently, a spanking new Futura in which she cooked this delicious lahsuni dal.

During her courting days, Anita would visit her in-laws and help out with the Sunday morning ritual of cleaning the weekly vegetables and preparing a simple lunch that included sada varan bhaat. After marriage, she learnt that overcooking toor dal to make sada varan bhaat wasn’t frowned on South of the Vindhyas. The girl from North of the Vindhyas now overcooks her toor dal without any qualms and feeds her family this comforting meal every Sunday.

 After getting hitched, Priya’s techie man brought a 3 ltr Contura based on her specifications and she has never needed another cooker since. She says it “serves all her purposes”. She makes this Kerala potato curry in her pressure cooker all the time and so far the cooker hasn’t blown up in her face.

Siri grew up watching her mom cook in not one but sometimes two pressure cookers simultaneously. It is now an integral part of her household as well. So much so that she “literally wakes up every single morning with the sound of the whistle whooshing across the kitchen till our bedroom”. In case you are wondering, it is her mother-in-law who is using the pressure cooker in the mornings. She made a filling one-pot achari chana pulao in her 3 ltr pressure cooker.

Princy calls her prized Hawkins pressure cooker her “best pal” in the kitchen. She uses it every day, sometimes twice a day. She cooks this scrumptious and filling egg biryani when she is feeling lazy but still wants to eat something spicy and yummy.

Lata remembers her mother and grandmother using the pressure cooker since the appliance was first introduced in the market. She remembers them cooking dal for rassam and sambhar and steaming idlis and vegetables in it. She made a delicious dhal kalbeliya, a blend of three lentils pressure cooked and then sautéed with tempered onions, garlic and tomatoes.

Preeti talks about her first taste of momos (steamed dumplings) she had in Bhutan as an air force base kid. She hadn’t liked the look of them but when she tried one she couldn’t have enough. She decided to relive that memorable trip with her friends and family by steaming some momos of her own in her pressure cooker.

Growing up, Sandeepa never cared for her grandma’s famous and much in demand Gota Sheddho. A traditional meal in Bengali families the day after Saraswati Pujo, she usually swallowed a morsel of the cold dish and called it a day. Now all grown up with kids of her own, she revived the tradition with a few changes of her own. A one pot dish, she cooked the Sheddho in her pressure cooker and ate it hot with a squeeze of lime.

Manisha learnt to use the pressure cooker when she was 9 years old. She now lives in a high altitude area of 5320ft and values her two pressure cookers ever more. They are indispensable tools in her kitchen. She not only cooked a delicious whole red lentil curry (massorichiamti) in her pressure cooker but wrote an excellent post to demystify urban legends about pressure cookers not blowing up in people’s faces.

Pavani owns half a dozen pressure cookers that serve different purposes in her kitchen. She uses them to cook rice, lentils, veggies and curries. She showed her love and appreciation for her pressure cookers by making this tasty Goan Mixed Vegetable curry and jeera rice in her two Prestiges.

Shri wrote an almost poetic odeto the workhorse of the Indian kitchen and wrote down detailed directions on how to cook chickpeas and lentils using the separator pans in the pressure cookers. Check out her beautiful photographs and her post here.

Mandira owns three pressure cooker and all of them are put to good use including the small Hawkins which she uses to cook lunch for her kids. She made a nutritious moong dal with peas and carrots in her pressure cooker.

The girl who hosts A Mad Tea Party recently posted her dad's tomato-beetroot soup recipe that is strikingly similar to my mom's tomato-beetroot soup recipe. As if that was not enough, both of them pressure cook the vegetables and then puree them to make an amazingly delicious, nutritious soup that is ready with the rest of the meal. The next time you are craving some soup, make this in your pressure cooker and you will be glad you did.

This brings us to the end of the roundup which was a little shorter than I expected. My contribution in defense of the Indian pressure cooker is here and here.

I had a lot of fun visiting your blogs and reading about your experiences with the Indian pressure cooker. It is heartening to know that they are such an integral part of your kitchens. Pressure cook on.

An escaped fugitive, garage door malfunction and deadline extension

Yes, you read it right. This is what our week has been like so far. On Tuesday, a prisoner transfer went horribly wrong when the convict escaped from the parking lot of a Walmart about 30 miles from where we live. The police advised caution; the husband advised locked car doors and my yoga studio started locking the lobby door while we sweated in 105 degree heat and humidity inside. All the school campuses in the surrounding areas, including my kid’s, went into lockdown mode. Four days later the fugitive is still on the loose and the schools are still in lockdown.

With a fugitive running around who knows where the last thing I needed was a broken garage door but that is what happened the very next day. As I slowly backed out of my garage I heard a loud banging/ grating noise, a metal on metal crash of some kind. I had the presence of mind to brake and pull forward. I stopped the car and got out to see that top of my van had crashed into the bottom panel of the garage door which apparently had not rolled all the way back up as it is supposed to.

Being the calm and collected person that I am, I checked the rear of the car for damage. It seemed to be unharmed. Then I noticed that the garage door was off one of its rollers and bent into a V from the middle. Yeah, it was not good. At this point I called up a friend and asked her to pick me up since I was due for a seminar at the kid’s school. Then it dawned on me that I couldn’t leave the garage door open, all banged up and broken, especially with a fugitive who may or may not be looking for just such an opportunity to break into a house for food and shelter. So I told the friend to cancel the pick-up plan and instead ran over to my neighbor’s and banged on her door. At this point, I was panicking slightly. She greeted me in her bathrobe and I told her to come quick, I had an emergency.

The good neighbor that she is, she came, tightening her blue bathrobe around her, took a look at the garage door, climbed a chair to check for damage to my car roof (a couple of scratches) and declared I needed to call a repair man to get the door fixed. Which I did (thanks to Angie’slist) and two hours later a very efficient repair man parked his van in front of my house, assessed the situation and gave me a very reasonable estimate to fix the door. I agreed on the spot and he proceeded to mend the garage door. An hour later the door was fixed and I breathed easy.  

In the entire garage hullabaloo (yeah, I am using that word and sticking to it) I totally forgot to do my weekly blog post. Now that the drama around our house has cooled down, here I am with my sixth blog post of the year (I am running one blog post behind) announcing a two week extension of the “I cooked in my Indian pressure cooker and it didn’t blow up in my face”.

Vegetable pulao in my Prestige pressure pan

The reasons for the extension: One, I haven’t had a chance to write another pressure cooker post. Two, a few friends requested an extension. Three, I have received only a couple of entrees so far, mainly because I haven’t talked about the event much or maybe because the PC is blowing people’s faces more than I thought it did.

So for now, the deadline has been extended to Feb 28. Send in your entrees to jayawagle (at) gmail.com and don’t forget to end the post with “I cooked (insert the name of the dish you cooked) in my Indian pressure cooker and it didn’t blow up in my face!” Also, tell me what PC you use and why. Meanwhile, check these heart warming posts by Anita and Soma.  

Fugitive Update: Four days ago, the escaped fugitive was found and killed in a confrontation. I can keep my garage door open now, not that I would ever do it on purpose.
 

All things TJ

I resolved to try to write every day this year and talked about it in this post hoping if it is for the world to read I may actually stay with it. The next day after I blogged about my resolve, I promptly broke it. It had been a long day with a Sunday morning Bikram class followed by a trip to the children’s museum. The evening ended with our first visit to Trader Joe’s, the supposed mecca of foodies. I wasn’t as impressed as I had hoped to be. Maybe it was all the hype and my own expectations or maybe I was just tired after trailing the kid and his friend in the museum all day (the kid’s best friends was spending the day with us, giving his parents some time to themselves). The kids behaved well enough for a grocery store that did not have any toys for them to gawk at but it still got quite tiring by the time we were done exploring aisle 2. Think the two of them wanting to use the bathroom at the same time or wanting to play tag in the parking lot.

 

TJ’s did try to entice me by all the chocolate covered almonds, fruits and toffees but I am proud to say I successfully refrained from buying any of the temptations. I did buy two bags of candied ginger but I consider that more medicinal and less sweet-tooth-recreational. The husband on the other hand was like a kid in a candy store. While I supervised the kiddos, he explored the alternate food world of tofu sausages, tempeh, edamame and soy protein. We came home loaded with bags of goodies including one of my new favorites, lentil-potato curls, which taste suspiciously like ganthiya, those deep fried, fat twizzler like sticks, made with besan (chickpea flour).

Chocolate orange sticks = crack!

 

It was dinner time by the time we were home and while I fed the kid his favorite, dosa and dal, he made good on some of TJ’s purchases. He made a delicious gyro with pita bread, TJ’s tzatziki sauce, some zucchini cakes (from Costco) and the tofu sausage. It was delicious and I was too hungry to take a photo. By the time I cleaned up, I was ready to hit the bed and not worry about breaking my resolution to write. I had succeeded in not eating any sweets, even though a delicious oatmeal chocolate chip cookie was handed in my palms by a TJ associate. I took a bite and handed the rest to my kid who claimed they were better than the ones we had at home. Take that Chips Ahoy!

The important thing with resolutions though is to not give up on them. So here I am, a few days later, writing my third blog post of the month and catching up on my resolution. Today, I have a simple aloo mattar rassa for you. Aloo is Hindi for potatoes, mattar (not a typo for ‘matter’) is Hindi and Marathi for green peas and rassa is gravy, usually thin and made by roasting a paste of ginger, garlic, onions and tomatoes. In our house, usually beans or legumes and sometimes vegetables are cooked in this simple gravy with little variations of the spices used.

He never finds the taste of peas to his liking (as in comparable to the “ones we get in India”). This time, we decided to try TJ’s frozen peas. He isn’t home yet and hasn’t tasted the rassa, so the jury is still out on the taste of the peas. I will let you know if these passed the muster. For me, peas are good any which way; in pohe, in sabzi, in usal or simply sautéed with some cumin and ghee. I love my peas.

I used my itty-bitty 3 liter Prestige pressure cooker to roast the ginger-garlic-onion-tomato paste, added the chopped potatoes and the frozen peas and cooked it for one whistle. Alternatively, you could roast the masala in a heavy bottom pan, add the potatoes and peas, enough water and boil till the potatoes are cooked through and peas are tender. It will taste a little different from the cooker version but it will still be delicious.

Aloo mattar, amaranth, pumpkin sabzi and a whole wheat tortilla

Coarsely grind:

3/4 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup tomatoes
3-4 garlic cloves
1 inch piece of ginger
4-5 sprigs of cilantro (optional)

Heat 1Tbs of oil in a 3ltr pressure cooker and add the following in the order listed:

1/2 tsp of fenugreek seeds (methidana)
1 tsp of turmeric

Add the coarsely ground onion-tomato paste. Sauté for a few minutes and add:

1 tsp of red chili powder
1 tsp of garam masala powder
1/2 tsp of cumin-coriander powder

Roast the masala with all the spices till the oil separates and the raw smell of onions and ginger-garlic turns into a fragrant aroma.

While the paste is cooking, chop 1 large potato into even pieces. Soak in a bowl of water for five minutes to get some of the starch out. Drain and keep aside.

At this point, check the frying onion-tomato paste. If you find the oil separating from the frying masala, add 1/2 cup of water and some salt.

Now, add the chopped potatoes and 1 cup of frozen peas. If you are lucky enough to get fresh ones, add those but don’t tell me about it. Add enough water or stock to cover the potatoes and peas and put the pressure cooker lid on. Set on medium heat and turn the gas off after one whistle.

Wait for the cooker to cool down before opening the lid. Serve with rotis or rice.

This is my entry for the theme 'Garnet' for the 52-week project

Oh, and by the way, I cooked the aloo mattar rassa in my Indian pressure cooker and it didn’t blow up in my face. If you are wondering what I am talking about, check out this post.   

A TJs Update: We went back to TJs last weekend, this time without the kid(s). It was a much better experience shopping at leisure, exploring all the wonderful goodies on display. I asked for suggestions on what to get at TJs on fb and was rewarded with some gems I would have missed otherwise. Manisha suggested the dried chili mango which is really good and my next favorite after the candied ginger.

Candied ginger and chili mango

She and some other friends also suggested the triple ginger cookies which the kid took a liking to. He has been eating 5-6 of them at a time but since they are really thin, I let him eat them in lieu of his two cookies allowance of Pepperidge Farm double chocolate cookies. I think it is a fair trade. I couldn’t find the rasmalai a cousin highly recommended. But the lentil potato curls were bought again and so was a ton of soy based food (not that we are turning vegan or anything. I tasted some roasted pork at Central Market yesterday and it was delicious). I was tempted to buy the chocolate biscotti but refrained from grabbing it. Overall, we realized that though small, TJs still had a lot of options to choose from and the ingredients and the quality of goods was overall superior to most of the name brand goods. We go back again in two weeks.