When you visit India after a long time away, people want to treat you to something special: I frequently get asked what my favorite dish is, what food I missed most while being away.

The answer is easy: panasa pottu kura - green jackfruit fry!

I guess it starts with my love of the pungency of mustard - not the American innocuous bright yellow liquid with vinegar and sugar, but the eye-watering, sinus-clearing heat of real mustard seeds. This is the reason I love the tartness and the heat of dosavakaya and also the reason why I couldn't resist Sandeepa's recipe - why I had to find a way to adapt it to a vegetarian dish (see Andhra Twist earlier).

But to get back to the recipe at hand: for a long time in the US the only option has been to use green jackfruit in cans; I hate the taste and texture of canned jackfruit though, and so I have never considered that to be a viable option. Then I found frozen green jackfruit, and suddenly panasa pottu kura became a real option again. Granted, the taste and texture can never be the same as the fresh version, but this bears a real resemblance to it.

Part of the chopped jackfruit, turmeric and salt

Now, trying to capture a recipe when you cook with the measurements by feel is not an easy task, so I found one on ammas that had the right proportions.

However, as you who are in the US no doubt know, most of the mustard seeds we get here seem to lack the required pungency, trading it in for bitterness instead. So, I add a smidgen of Chinese mustard powder to the mustard seed and lemon juice paste; you will need to try and see how much you would need.

This month's Microwave Easy Cooking event focuses on the basics. And you can't get much more basic than White Sauce, nor can you easily find something more versatile when you venture into the world of western cooking.

Update: You can see the other entries for the event in the round-up on Srivalli's Cooking 4 All Seasons.

From the standard "continental" or au gratin dishes in India that consists of some boiled vegetables with a bland white sauce poured over it and stuck under the grill, to your basic grown-up macaroni and cheese or greek moussaka, once you have mastered a white sauce, a world of options open up to you.

Now, I say "master" because many people are scared of trying to make a white sauce; they have been told how easily lumps form, how you have to watch it like a hawk and keep stirring madly all the time. But with a microwave it is easy to get a perfect white sauce every time, with very little effort.

Remember: each model of microwave is different; the times are given as a general guide, and will differ from model to model.

You start to get an inkling of how simple this is when you look at what you need: just 5 things.

Equipment:

Microwave proof dish holding at least 4 cups - I use my Pyrex measuring cup

Wire whisk - this is very important

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp butter

2-4 Tbsp flour

~2 cups milk

	Note: Click on the pictures to see (much) larger images. The first step is to place the butter into the vessel, and microwave on high for 30 seconds or until the butter is melted.
	Add two tablespoons of flour to the melted butter, and whisk it in until all the butter is absorbed. Now here you have a choice, depending on how thick you want the final product to be. If you stop adding flour now, your base (roux, pronounced roo) will look like the picture on the left. If you add two more tablespoons of flour, it will look like the picture on the right. Either way, you proceed the same from here on.
	You now need to add the milk; slowly. Start with roughly four tablespoons of milk, and start mixing slowly. Once all the liquid has been absorbed, add a little more this time. Keep whisking gently, and you should end up with a pliable mass. Now you can add more milk in a stream while whisking, until the volume in the vessel is about 1 cup, and everything is mixed thoroughly without lumps.
	Place the vessel back in the microwave and turn it on high for about 3 minutes. When the time is up, look at the contents: it should look as in the picture on the left i.e. there should be a semi-solid rim of slightly darker yellow, and some portion of more liquid, whiter sauce in the center. If it does not look like that yet, put it back in the microwave for another 90 seconds at a time. Keep checking and cooking for another 90 seconds until it starts to resemble the picture. Once it reaches that stage, whisk it, breaking up the semi-solid rim and mixing through the liquid part; the result will look like the picture on the right.
	Now add the rest of the milk, slowly as above, i.e. first a very small quantity, and once you've whisked that in, a bit more, and finally the whole lot. You will now have a liquid with some substance, about the consistency of good dosa batter. Place this back in the microwave, for 3 minutes on high. Check and stir, then return to the microwave for 3 minutes more; after this do 90 seconds at a time, until the sauce has thickened.

What did I use this particular white sauce for, I hear you ask? I made a quick supper dish of Spinach and Pasta Bake.

I sweated a chopped onion and a slit green chilli in oil in a kadhai after I had spluttered some mustard seeds, and when they became translucent, I added chopped spinach that had been thawed from frozen and squeezed dry. Once the spinach was heated through, and had picked up the flavors from the kadhai, I added some homemade tomato sauce. (You can use your favorite recipe, or just use some bottled pasta sauce. This is also the time to add your favorite veggie protein like "cooked" Nutrella chunks if you want to make the meal more substantial).

I mixed in two cups cooked macaroni, and after tossing it through, I scooped in the white sauce and mixed well. After checking and adjusting the seasoning, I stirred in a luscious amount of cheddar cheese, and let the ooey-gooey goodness melt in there. You can serve it at this point or (as I did) place it in an oven-proof dish (e.g. corningware), sprinkle some more cheese on top, followed by some breadcrumbs, and place it under the broiler to get a lovely crisp crust.

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.

Those of you living in the US would surely have encountered the standard American macaroni and cheese (or mac & cheese): the bright orange-colored gooey stuff only a kid would eat, coming either from a (blue) box with "cheese powder," or made with "processed cheese food" otherwise known as Velveeta.

Well, scrap everything you think you know about macaroni and cheese, and open wide for a helping of the real traditional version.

This is a dish with few ingredients, relying only on basic techniques, and yet it is guaranteed to become a firm family favorite on those cold winter evenings; truly a comfort food.

You start off with white sauce, which I had earlier shown you step by step with loads of pictures how to make easily and flawlessly using the microwave. (Just click on the link for the instructions).

• While waiting for the microwave to ping, bring a large pot of water to boil.
• Add salt and a teaspoon of oil to the boiling water, and then a cup of macaroni or other short pasta. Cook until tender and drain.
• When the white sauce is done, add salt to taste and half a teaspoon of black pepper powder and mix well.
  I also add a quarter teaspoon red chilli powder and a teaspoon of strong mustard powder.
• Add a cup of grated cheese to the white sauce (I prefer sharp cheddar) and stir until the cheese has melted and mixed in well.
• Now add the cooked macaroni and mix well.
• Spoon the mixture into an ovenproof dish (I use Corningware).
• Sprinkle more cheese over the top, and
• bake for 20 minutes at 350 F (180 C) until the cheese has melted and started to brown.

Note: You can use vegetarian cheese, eggless pasta and soy milk to make this completely vegan, or any combination of these to suit your requirements.

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!