Browsing through some Indian cooking blogs, I came across a Bengali dish from Bong Mom's Cookbook that looked so delectable I could almost feel my eyes water as the pungent mustard rose to the back of my nose. There was a catch though: the dish was fish-based.

I couldn't pass up that fragrant sauce, so I started considering how to adapt this for vegetarian consumption. Sandeepa first fried the fish, and I thought that step an integral part of the recipe, creating the wonderful texture. In a flash of inspiration I had the answer - the typical Andhra dry fry potatoes (bangaladumpa vepudu) would be ideal for this dish. (Well, I am sure it exists in many of the other regional cuisines, but I know it as an Andhra dish of course.)

Once I figured out that bit, the rest was simply a case of following the remainder of Sandeepa's recipe.

Continuing the browsing through Bong Mom's Cookbook, I came across an intriguing recipe for "Tetor Dal" or Bitter Dhal. Sandeepa's recipe calls for bottle gourd and bitter gourd; none of us are over-fond of kakarakayi - especially not the six year-old. We do however love akakarakayi - kantola - which has a similar texture when prepared the right way, and has a hint of bitterness though nowhere near as much as kakarakayi proper.

In preparing the recipe, I made three further changes: first, we had some fresh ridge gourd, but no bottle gourd, so I substituted that; second,because we love the taste and texture of crispy fried akakarakayi I fried up an extra handful that we lightly salted and added to the pappu at the table; last, we found the recipe upon completion to be quite liquidy. Our pappu preparations are usually a bit thicker than that, so I put it in a kadhai and reduced it a little over heat.

When we make this recipe again (and believe me, this one is a keeper), I will not reduce it quite as much, trying for the happy mean.

We've had an unusually cool summer here (something for which I am very thankful); this meant that all the vegetables and other crops were behind in their growth cycles, and so harvest time came later than usual.

About a mile northeast from our house is a vegetable farm offering U-Pick i.e. you can pick your own vegetables from their fields, take it to their stall and have it weighed to pay by weight. No hothouse vegetables, no ripening in artificial conditions, just fresh, ripe vegetables on your plate that were still growing this morning.

With the nip of autumn in the air early mornings and at night, we decided to try a hearty soup with our freshly harvested bounty, and this recipe from 1000 Vegetarian Recipes From Around the World seemed just the ticket; for one thing, it looked as if their ingredients-list was written while checking off the items we brought home from the farm!

Of course, we take most recipes as merely a suggestion - I might be more guilty of that than my chellelu, which is why she is a better baker than I - so we adjusted the proportions toward more tomatoes and onions, but fewer capsicum and less garlic.

The general principle is this: roast the vegetables, then roughly chop them. Add them to vegetable stock, season and simmer until the flavors are blended. The recipe calls for a quarter cup of cream to be stirred into the soup when it is removed from the heat; our household was split on that however, so we placed a creamer on the table and let each person add to taste - if at all. Also on the table, a block of parmesan and a grater, and chilli flakes.

Onions, tomatoes, zucchini, bell pepper and brinjal starting to take on color
spread out on the roasting pan, drizzled with olive oil and herbs The magic part comes from a familiar quarter to us, but a new one to this kind of cuisine. Who says that tempering can only be applied to Indian food?

I use olive oil for this dish (since it used olive oil throughout). After heating the oil, I added a few black peppercorns that I have crushed, a broken red chilli and a pinch of the herbs mentioned earlier. I use fresh rosemary, so a little goes a long way because the fresh flavor is a lot more intense than the dried one. Adding this to the soup just before bringing it to the table intensifies the wonderful flavors.

Some notes and hints:

Do not crowd the vegetables on the baking sheet while roasting it; leave space around each piece so it can brown all around.

If you have a barbecue grill outside, feel free to roast any or all the vegetables out there; they have if anything an even more intense flavor.

This is my entry for the Weekend Breakfast Blogging event, No. 15.

I thought that this would be a good time to show how to read the tabular recipes at the same time as showing how to make these delectable bajjis using up some leftover rice and a standard can of cream style corn.

The full recipe card is at the bottom of the post. For clarity during the explanation, I have cut it in two, and brightly colored each block so that you can follow along. Refer to the full recipe card to see how everything fits together. (Also note that clicking on any image will bring up a larger image, so you can see things in greater detail.)

Starting at the top left, the blue block tells us our first step: take the ingredients to its left (i.e. two cups of cold cooked leftover rice) and spread it out on a plate; this is to make sure that it is dry, not clammy, and to separate out the grains.

Moving to the right, we see that the yellow block spans the lavender block below the blue one as well, so we know we have to complete the stuff in the lavender block before we can move on to the yellow block. The lavender block contains the maida and other dry ingredients, including some spices. These have to be mixed together well.

Now we can move on to the yellow block, which mixes the rice and the flour mixture (blue and lavender blocks) together. This is a very important step, because the flour mixture coats each grain of rice to keep them separate; if you first mixed the wet and dry ingredients together, and then tried to add the rice you would end up with a rice mush, and if you first added the rice to the wet ingredients, and then tried to mix that with the dry, you would have a terrible time trying to get rid of the lumps.

Moving on to the next block, we see that the rose block extends beyond the yellow, so we go back to the next block below the lavender, i.e. the peach block, before moving on to the burnt orange block to its right. The peach block has some preparation instructions for the vegetables, and then everything should be mixed all together with the contents of the can of cream style corn.

The white block below just contains milk, and now finally we have all the parts that are needed to proceed with the rose block, which requires us to mix everything thoroughly. Now we can move on to the next section below.

Glancing through the steps, it becomes obvious that we are making a tempering, a tadka or a popu or a talimpu. Soaking the dhals for a few minutes in water (lavender block) before adding to the tempering ensures that they will fry up to a crispy crunch under the teeth; slicing the curry leaves (blue block) will help them disperse their flavor evenly through the batter.

So, we follow the familiar path in creating the tempering: heat the oil in a small pan, add the seeds (rose block), wait for them to splutter, then add the dhal (burnt orange block), and when these start to brown, we add the curry leaves (green block)

What remains now - if we look at the full recipe card below - is to combine tempering with the flour-rice-sweetcorn-milk mixture, and then to start shallow frying spoonsful of the batter. We've found the best heat to be somewhere between medium and medium high, but each stove differs, so play around with it a little. You want the outsides to become golden brown and crispy, while the insides should be cooked through and creamy when you taste it.

We served it with homemade ginger chutney, but it would go well with most other chutneys as well.

I felt in the mood for something with a Persian taste. A colleague of mine brings these wonderful stuffed vegetables - hollowed out potatoes and zucchini etc. - that his wife has made to potlucks at work, and I started looking for a recipe online. The only recipes I could find though were non-veg, stuffed with meat and egg, while my colleague's wife makes it with a pure veg stuffing.

Playing around on the Persian cooking sites, I did find a couple of other interesting recipes though. One of them was very appealing because I could almost taste the flavors on my tongue just from reading it. The problem was that it asked for something found only in Middle Eastern stores, and I had no idea where to start looking. So, I decided to adapt the recipe into its current form as something we can easily make at home.

I found it very difficult to make this soup; now don't misunderstand me - physically everything is supremely easy, but I needed to enter into a different mindset to make this. As I cooked, I kept wanting to add coriander or cumin, a chilli or two, some lemon juice. I had to keep fighting myself to stick only to the flavors in the recipe. Every time I would taste it, thinking that I might need to add something that I am more used to cooking with, and every time the taste would be so wonderful that I would leave it as it is. In the end, the only thing I did add was some more mint, and salt.

The recipe is quick, easy to make, delicious and full of protein; it is just the ticket for the evening when the family is asking for "something different."

Note: The recipe calls for dried mint. The flavor is more intense than that of fresh mint, and it has another intriguing fragrance in the dried form. If you only have fresh, you will need about a cup to replace the dried herb.

Back when Angel Face was two years old (she just turned seven on Saturday!), she was in tears one day when picked up from daycare. One of the kids there had white-gold hair that shone in the light, and some truly remarkable large bright blue eyes. After some probing, it turned out that several people had come to visit the daycare that day, and every single one of them had made a big fuss about this boy's beautiful blue eyes. And Angel Face was crying her heart out because she only had "ugly brown eyes."

With a lot of gentle discussion, she was made to see that she was extra-special, because she had "chocolate eyes," and chocolate is the yummiest thing on earth; she ended up being thoroughly consoled by this. To this day, if you ask her what color her eyes are, she would say "chocolate" or perhaps "chocolate brown."

She also happens to be highly intrigued by black-eyed peas for the same reason, and so this recipe was prepared especially for her.

My husband selected the recipe while browsing through Jyothsna's wonderful blog, Curry Bazaar. It is a traditional Punjabi dish, and we played around a little with the cooking method for the pulses, and the spicing. Black-eyed peas are not a staple in our house, but it makes for a wonderful variation in the diet.

One thing that became clear is that the recipe scales really well; we used one cup to feed four people, serving it with rice, a bottle gourd curry, plain curds and some avakayi.

My husband has an eye for a bargain; at least that is his story.

He has been known in the past to buy things from these direct marketing TV ads; you know the type: "But that's not all. If you call in the next 17 minutes, we will give you another one, absolutely free - you just pay shipping and handling; that is a ****-dollar value for just three easy payments of $39.95!" When they arrive, he opens them once, and then store them away, never to be touched again.

Now when one of these ads come on the TV, I just change the channel very quickly!

A little while ago he came home lugging a 25 lb bag of onions. Twenty-fi-i-ive pounds! And since then we have been trying our best to find ways to use up these onions.

Everybody in the house have pretty hectic lives - there are some days when the only time we are all together under the same roof is when we are sleeping. On days like these, it is important to have an easy meal that is quick to prepare and filling. Now that the weather has turned colder, we often turn to thick and hearty soups to fit the bill.

This particular soup again comes from 1000 Vegetarian Recipes From Around the World - I have previously referred to it when I made the Roasted Vegetable Soup. The more I use this book, the more I like it; the recipes tend to be straightforward and well-illustrated, and more importantly, they work.

We've made a few minor changes, mainly in the spicing and the cheese biscuits. Yes, this meal includes a recipe for really quick and delicious cheese biscuits - totally delicious.

Note: The parmesan cheese can be replaced by sharp cheddar instead.

So there I was on Friday night, thinking desperately what to serve the family for dinner at such a late stage, and the idea of Rajitha's Dhal Banjari presented itself (see previous post). That was a huge relief, but then the question of what to accompany it remained.

Now, ideally I would have rounded out the Rajasthani meal with makki ki roti, but coming home so late, I wasn't really looking forward to rolling roti. So I started free-associating, and ended up turning rava idli into corn idli.

I mean, why not?

The concept basically involved replacing some of the wheat rava with corn rava, and adding corn kernels to the mixture. The important thing to note here is that in the US, much of the corn rava (and corn flour) that is available is the so-called "hominy" kind. The adjective hominy is applied to corn when the bran and germ has been removed by soaking it in a lye solution. Many people (especially in the South) grow up eating it and loving the taste.

Personally, I cannot stand it, and when I buy any corn flour or corn rava, I check to make sure that it isn't hominy, or I just won't buy it.

For defrosting the corn (or any vegetables for that matter) I believe in placing it in a bowl and adding cold tap water to it (well, filtered water in India of course). After a few minutes, I might give it a little stir to encourage some of the clumps to break up and if it is a dense vegetable, I might change the water once.

But I never, never put hot water on the frozen vegetables - unless of course I intend to cook them that way. Counter-intuitively, cool water defrosts items much more quickly than hot (think of the inverse square law) and it doesn't spoil the texture of the food.

For this recipe you could replace the frozen corn with a can of whole corn kernels, well drained. Of course, if you are in the lucky position of having fresh corn on the cob to hand, slice off the kernels until you have a cup full, and then boil them quickly for three minutes and drain well.

Traditionally rava idli recipes call for baking soda (also known as bicarbonate of soda, soda bicarb etc.); this reacts with the acid in the curds and forms the leavening of the batter.

The problem with baking soda is that just a little too much (or a little unevenly mixed in) soda turns the mixture brown with a horrible brackish taste. So, I replace the baking soda with baking powder which is a much more stable and reliable mixture, needing only liquid as a catalyst since it has all the reagents in itself.

If you insist on using baking soda instead, and if you are better than I am in controlling it, this amount of rava and curds would usually take a quarter of a teaspoon of baking soda.

The amount in this mixture was enough to make four plates of idli.

Well, I promised I would post the recipe for the Orange Bundt Cake that played the supporting role in my AFAM Peaches entry, and the foodblogging community did not let me forget that.

One of the weekly magazines in South Africa has a column where readers send in their favorite recipes. They run it through their test kitchen, and if it works, they publish it. After they have collected a good number of these, they publish them in a volume of "champion recipes." A few years ago they selected the best from those volumes, and published "the best of the champion recipes:" Die Beste van Huisgenoot se Wenresepte, edited by Annette Human.

The basis for this recipe comes from that book, but over the years we have adapted it to our tastes. It is basically a "never-fail" recipe, rich and moist without being too dense. Its appearance is rustic - which makes it beautiful to my eyes, just like the unevenness of kadhi is part of its appeal.

If you insist you can certainly ice it, but to me that is gilding the lily. Serve it as it is, or make a simple syrup to which you add the juice of an orange and a couple of drops of orange extract to pour over it, serve it with cream or ice cream, add some fruit or some fruit syrup - the options are many.

Note: The recipe scales really well. Our bundt pan is very large, so we double the recipe. After the first 30 minutes in the oven we check, and do 15 minutes more. That usually is enough, but if not, we add five minutes at a time.

Srivalli made these wonderful rice parathas for the WBB Breakfast from Leftovers roundup. We knew as soon as we saw it that this would be a recipe we would like to try; a week or so later, we did indeed try it. And we absolutely loved it.

We did have a few challenges in trying to make it, the chief one being that I don't have cast-iron fingers. This meant that I wanted a batter that could be spread with the back of a spoon onto the hot tava, instead of pressed with my fingers. This meant adding water bit by bit until I got the right consistency. But making the batter that thin meant that the parathas lacked body, so I added a little baking powder to give it body and lightness.

Now it is all very well to fiddle once with a recipe; the big challenge is to see whether you can now follow your altered recipe from scratch and end up with satisfactory results. (In other words, the family was clamoring to have me make these again).

So this past weekend I did. And we loved the result. Since I am confessing here, I will tell you that first, we didn't have leftover rice, we made "leftover" rice; i.e. on Saturday night we cooked some rice with the express intent to use it on Sunday for these parathas! Second, I tripled the recipe, and there was barely enough to everyone's satisfaction.

What would I change? When I tripled the recipe, I didn't quite triple the onion. That was a mistake - the onion plays an important role in the taste of this dish, and you could even add more. If you like heat, you could also add sliced rings of green chilli to the batter.

An astute reader - Laavanya - asked with what I served the rice parathas; this provided the perfect segue for my next entry: a Gujurati style potato and chickpea curry.

Once I had made the decision to make the rice parathas, the question was indeed to find a good kura to accompany it. I knew that the family would be perfectly capable of eating the parathas by themselves - especially Angel Face, the little monkey that she is - but that would hardly be a proper meal.

The thing that popped into my head was Gujarati style channa masala; a new Indian restaurant opened here about a month ago, serving thalis for lunch and this is always one of the katoris on the thali. I started looking for a recipe, but didn't get very far, until I decided I would use a recipe for Bateta nu Shaak as a starting point.

From that point I just "winged" it, and we were ecstatic with the results. It does not taste quite like the one in the restaurant, and I am not making any claims that this is authentically Gujurati, but the taste was delicious, and the serving dish came back empty from the table.

Note: For the cup of cooked chickpeas in the recipe, I used one can of cooked chickpeas/garbanzo beans.

Appeal: If anyone has an authentic Gujurati recipe for kabuli channa in a very liquid gravy, I would appreciate it if you could point me towards it.

I knew a guy whose name was Joshua, known to one and all simply as Josh. Online his nickname was Rogan. Just that. And it was only the desis (and to some extent the limeys) who got the wonderful pun: Rogan Josh! I still happen to think that's the smartest online name I have ever seen, but then I'm funny that way.

Sra from When my Soup came Alive posted a recipe she'd found in a cookbook for Vegetarian Rogan Josh. And so in honor of that pun, I decided to try it.

Now, this is one recipe where we just couldn't manage to follow the instructions - or even the ingredients. We tweaked it so much, I doubt it could even be called the same dish, so go on over to Sra's blog and check out the original recipe at the link above.

It starts with the fact that we didn't have red pumpkin on hand; we did however have bottle gourd, and given the fact that they are all part of the same extended family, we swapped that in.

Next came the fact of the proportions of the spices: we had to lessen the chilli powder or Angel Face won't eat it, reduce the percentage of aniseed powder since the flavor is pretty dominant, and substitute powdered asafoetida for asafoetida water. And as a final deviation, we substantially increased the amount of yoghurt.

What can I say? Sometimes the inner tweaker just takes over. And it was delicious. The yoghurt really separates with the oil rimming the edges. Depending on your preference you can stir it back into the dish before serving, or try and serve the pieces while catching as little oil as possible. Remember though that the oil serves as a vehicle to disperse the spices, so a lot of the flavor of the dish is in there.

The accompaniment for this is obvious: Kashmiri pulao of course. What was that? You don't have a recipe for that? Oh my goodness, I just might have to scratch around a bit and see if I can dig up mine again...

Food bloggers are wonderful people; everyone always seem so willing to help. I was looking for more Gujurati chana-bateta recipes after posting a modified concoction I made a while ago. And people very helpfully suggested that I look at the recipe posted by Trupti from The Spice Who Loved Me.

Now, for those of you with young children at home, this will be a familiar scene. Sitting down at dinner table, Angel Face usually will not eat much of the "proper" food, but instead will load up on the rice, or the bread or pasta or potatoes... you get the idea. To counteract this, we had instituted the "one-bite/one-bite" policy, which says she can have a bite of carbs only after she's had a mouthful of "real food." Sound familiar?

Well, it turns out she loves senagalu and what's more, she lo-o-o-oves them Gujurati style. Well, when you find something that the kid will eat without complaint that happens actually to be good for her with lots of protein (always a concern for us vegies), and that the adults also happen to like, you go for it!

So I tried Trupti's recipe, and it was another winner; I will keep it with the previous recipe, and we will probably alternate them, making one this time, and the other one the next time. As for Angel Face? Like last time, she took a spoon to the katori with the chana-bateta nu shaak in it and finished it off that way before even touching the bhatura. For her second helping, I filled it only halfway, thinking she won't finish it, but she did and asked for more even after that. Now what better endorsement than that do you want for a recipe?

Note: I've made only a few small changes to Trupti's recipe: left out the besan because we like it liquidy and when some of the potato is broken up a little bit it thickens the gravy quite well, and didn't put the jaggery.

My husband has strong opinions about okra (lady's fingers): it should never have the slightest hint of sliminess. I can understand that, and I agree, but he is ever so slightly fanatic about it. He is very - shall we say "careful" - about eating any dishes with this in it. His favorite way (read "just about the only way he likes it") is sliced thinly and dry fried.

So, when about ten years ago I decided to try this recipe from Premila Lal's "Indian Cooking" he was really hesitant, but he wanted to be supportive of my early cooking experiments. Then, about halfway through this recipe it looks as if it is never going to work, and you start wondering whether you should order pizza delivery instead.

But then, all of a sudden, everything just comes together, and you realize that you have an exceptional dish here. Here's the basic concept: you make a rich gravy from ground onions and yogurt, to which you add fried whole young lady's fingers. If you follow the steps carefully in the right sequence, you will end with a delectable meal that will have everyone asking you for the recipe!

Ours is a Telugu household; in short, that means that you cannot speak of a "proper" meal if there is not some rice and some kandi pappu (toor dhal) on the table. There's more to it than that, of course, but those two are a staple requirement.

This version is a very common one, a firm favorite with us, and fortunately extremely easy to make. The short version of the recipe is: Put the dhal and the vegetables in the pressure cooker. Make a tempering. Combine and eat.

There, that wasn't so difficult, was it? As always though there is some art in the composition of the tempering, the detail of the method. That is the piece that is so hard to capture when you are trying to write down the recipe that an experienced cook is demonstrating for you.

I think the biggest tip I can give here is to assemble the bits and pieces for the tempering first, before you even start heating the ghee. I measure out the seeds and the dhals together in a small bowl, and in another I put the broken red chilli and the stripped curry leaves. Then, when I turn on the heat for the ghee, I measure the methi and stand with it in a spoon, waiting for the ghee to reach the right temperature.

Once I start making the tempering, it is only a life-threatening situation that would interrupt me, and then only after I had placed the whole vessel in the sink; I would rather start over than burn the house down!