Tomato

Here is an easy everyday yogurt relish. I like to use a good whole-milk yogurt here, but if you prefer a low-fat variety it would work well too. My cherry tomatoes were on the larger side so I cut each into eight portions. Use more if they are smaller and just quarter them. Serve with most Indian meals or eat by itself as a snack.

This yogurt relish comes from the Tamil communities of Sri Lanka and is called Curd Sambol. It may be served with most South Asian meals. It may also be eaten at lunch as a salad.

At Bengali banquets, this chutney, along with deep-fried, puffed white-flour breads (loochis) and pappadoms, is served as the penultimate course, just before the dessert. Here in the Western world, I tend to serve it with the main meal: I layer it thickly on hamburgers, serve dollops with fried chicken and roast lamb, use it as a spread for cheese sandwiches, and, at Indian meals, offer it as a relish with my kebabs and curries.

My North Indian family called this salaad, or salad, but similar salads with varying seasonings are known in some parts of India as cachumbar. These salads generally contain onions (our Indian red onions), cucumbers, and tomatoes but, according to the seasons, we in Delhi could find radishes or kohlrabi in them as well. In some parts of India, barely sprouted mung beans and peanuts could be added. This fresh salad was always at our table at every meal in some form, with the simplest of dressings added at the last minute. There was never any oil in this dressing. Instead, there was fresh lime juice, salt, pepper, chili powder, and ground roasted cumin seeds. We just put a generous dollop on our plates (or side plates) and ate it with everything.

There are hundreds of versions of this salad-like dish that are eaten throughout South India and parts of western India as well. At its base is rice, the local starch and staple. (Think of the bread soups of Italy and the bread salads of the Middle East.) The rice is cooked so it is quite soft. Then yogurt, and sometimes a little milk as well, is added as well as any fruit (apple, grapes, pomegranate), raw vegetables (diced tomatoes, cucumbers), or lightly blanched vegetables (green beans, zucchini, peas) that one likes. The final step is what makes the salad completely Indian. A tiny amount of oil is heated and spices such as mustard seeds, curry leaves, and red chilies are thrown into it. Then the seasoned oil is poured over the rice salad to give it its pungency and reason for being. This cooling, soothing dish, somewhat like a risotto, makes a wonderful lunch. It is best served at room temperature, without being refrigerated. Other salads may be added to the meal.

Bulgar, a wheat that has been cooked, cracked, and dried, is used in parts of the Punjab (northwestern India) to make a variety of nutritious pilafs. The coarser-grained bulgar is ideal here. Serve as you would a rice pilaf.

A delicious pilaf that may be served with most Indian meals.

There was a time when the easy-to-use canned chickpeas came in such a tin-tasting liquid that they needed not only draining but rinsing as well. The liquid was unusable. Lately, I have found canned organic chickpeas that are in a lovely natural liquid, quite similar to what I get when I boil my own. This is a giant leap, indeed. Look for them. The chickpeas may be served with Indian flatbreads or rice. Eggplants, greens, and relishes would complete the meal. Meats may always be added.

Here is an everyday dish with a fair number of ingredients. Once you have them all prepared and assembled, the rest is fairly easy. Remember that you can chop the onions in a food processor. I have used two 15-ounce cans of organic chickpeas, draining them to separate the liquid so I can measure it. If you are not using organic canned chickpeas, use water instead of the can liquid. If the can liquid is not enough, add water to get the correct amount. Serve with Indian or Middle Eastern breads (you can even roll up the chickpeas inside them) with Yogurt Sambol with Tomato and Shallot, page 249, on the side. At a dinner, add meat and a vegetable.

Sometimes when I am in a rush and still longing for an Indian dal, I take the simple way out and use canned beans—black, great northern, cannellini, or any other beans I like. Today we can get organic canned beans of excellent quality, and it barely takes 15 minutes to cook them. Even the liquid in the can tastes good, so I do not have to throw it away. Serve these with rice or Indian flatbreads.

Here is a dish that takes about 10 minutes to prepare. It is ideally made when tomatoes are in season, but even second-rate, out-of-season tomatoes are given a new life by this very Gujarati mixture of seasonings. It may be served at a meal with rice, a bean or split-pea dish, vegetables, and relishes. I also love a meal of this curry, Shrimp Biryani, and Spinach with Garlic and Cumin. If you are cooking Western-style grilled pork chops or chicken pieces, just slather this over the top. The combination is marvelous.

I make this curry through the summer, whenever tomatoes overrun the vegetable garden, and then freeze some to last me through the winter. This may be served as a vegetarian curry at an Indian meal or as a gloppy, spicy sauce to ladle over hamburgers, grilled fish, and baked or boiled potatoes.

Here is how my family in India prepared our everyday summer squash. It was utterly simple and utterly good. The squash itself was different, shaped liked a bowling pin and slightly curled up, but the taste and texture were similar. I like to use yellow squash and zucchini together, but you could use just one or the other. This dish may be served hot at most Indian meals, and cold as a salad.

I like to use cremini mushrooms, as they have a firmer texture, but if you cannot get them, ordinary, medium-sized white mushrooms will do. Remember that a relatively firm tomato can be peeled with a paring knife like an apple. A great curry for vegetarians and meat eaters alike. Serve with rice or Indian bread and some relishes.

You need medium-sized egglants for this. I use the purple kind, 5 of them, each weighing about 5 ounces, and then cut them, unskinned, into 2” × 1” chunks, each chunk with skin on at least one side. Normally, eggplant chunks require frying first to give them their unctuous, satiny texture, after which they may be folded into a variety of sauces—here it is a tomato sauce. But I have found a less oily way around that; I broil them instead. You serve this dish hot with a lamb or chicken curry or cold, as a salad, with cold meats, Indian (such as Tandoori-Style Chicken with Mint) or Western.

You need the patties from the preceding recipe and the same pan used for browning them with its leftover oil. This is in fact a continuation of the last recipe and makes for a quick curry, good with rice, bread, and also with fried eggs and toast! So, make the preceding recipe, remove the patties from the frying pan with a slotted spatula, put them on a plate, and proceed immediately to make the curry sauce. For a simple meal, serve with a rice dish and Corn with Aromatic Seasonings.

South Asians love their quail, which is generally brought home by hunters. I know that when the men in our family returned from their winter shoots, what I most looked forward to eating were not the larger creatures, the deer and the geese, but the smaller ones, the duck, partridge, and quail. Here is a quick, stir-fried (bhuna implies stirring and browning) version of a dish I had in Lahore, Pakistan. This recipe may be easily doubled. Use a very large frying pan if you do so. When eating quail—and you have to use your fingers—it is hard to think of any other food, even though rice, vegetables, other meats, and legumes are nearly always part of the meal.

A gentle, family-style curry. If you leave out the cayenne pepper, this may even be served to small children, along with rice and perhaps Corn with Aromatic Seasonings.

This very home-style Indian dish may best be compared to a New Orleans gumbo. It is the okra and tomatoes that give it the gumbo feel, but the seasonings are very North Indian. Serve with rice or with Indian breads.

A dish from the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, this quick stir-fry has all the wonderful spices used in the cooking of the Chettiyars, a trading community—lots of black pepper, fennel seeds, mustard seeds, cinnamon, and the split pea, urad dal. (Yellow split peas may be substituted for the urad dal. They will be used here in a very southern way, as a seasoning.) This dish has a 30-minute marinating period, but it cooks in about 7 minutes. It is a good idea to have all the spices measured out and ready, as the stir-frying is done quickly. I like this chicken with Basmati Rice with Lentils and a green vegetable.