Cooking Your Vegetables, the Pakistani Way
More than just tomatoes and onions
Hello, and welcome to my little corner on Substack!
I’m switching up the format of my monthly newsletters to make way for more writing – I hope you’ll stick around. If you unsubscribed earlier, and have found yourself here again, my apologies. You can unsubscribe using Substack’s button below.
Why am I switching to Substack?
You may have noticed that a lot of food blogs have begun to look the same - mine too! While this standardized blogging format helps fuel growth, it’s not great for facilitating critical thinking on what and how we cook, and the context surrounding it.
As for writing for external publications, I am shifting my focus to more food reporting. This has left me with little space to share more general cooking notes, and reflections on food and life (!) I’m hoping this monthly newsletter can help fill that gap for me, and that you will stick around for the journey.
What am I hoping to cover here?
I will play around with the themes in the first 3-6 months to see what works for readers. I’m hoping that I can do a roughly even split between cooking notes on South Asian food (like this monthly), and broader reflections on themes impacting food (for instance, I have been contemplating essays on cultural loss, context heaviness, expat guilt etc.)
Along the way, I will be highlighting new recipes on the “Pakistan Eats” website, recently published work, and plugging in work that I have enjoyed reading.
What’s new on “Pakistan Eats”?
This month, I wanted to talk about different Pakistani ways to cook your summer vegetables. But before I dive into it, I wanted to put in a plug for two new-ish recipes on the blog:
Sweet dalia: This is a simple recipe for a Punjabi style breakfast porridge. It’s made with cracked wheat, and paired with milk. A truly delightful way to start your day.
Masoor moong dal: My favorite dal recipe is back with updated instructions on how to make it in the Instant Pot.
If you enjoy either of these recipes, it would mean a lot if you leave a starred comment, and/or a little shoutout on Instagram, tagging @pakistaneats.
Now, on to vegetables…
Every time I call my mother to ask how to cook any vegetable, the answer is always the same: “Fry some onions, add ginger, garlic, dhania, zeera powder (coriander and cumin powder), lal mirch (chili powder), salt, tomatoes…fry, and add…(said vegetable).”
That’s how we had most of our vegetables at home, and it’s prominently featured on the blog. You can use it to prepare okra (bhindi masala), bitter melon (karela sabzi), potatoes (aloo sabzi), zucchini, so on and so forth. If you haven’t already learned to make this masala at home, you absolutely should! It’s a South Asian cooking hack that will serve you through the years.
My mother is not alone in her affinity for this masala base. The tomato-onion sauce has come to define South Asian globally, thanks to its widespread use in Indian and Pakistani restaurants across the world. In fact, it’s come to the point where people have a hard time dissociating South Asian food from it. What’s interesting about this is that tomatoes are not even indigenous to the sub-continent – they were brought in by the Portuguese in the 16th century!
In this excellent episode on Partition and food of Meher Varma’s Whetstone podcast, Bad Table Manners, Varma chats with culinary historian, Anoothi Vishal, who explains that this style of cooking actually changed the culinary culture in Delhi. She describes it as a kind of “fast food” that was brought in by migrants from Western Punjab, and that rapidly spread across India (and beyond) post-Partition.
While I love the bright flavors, the versatility, and the convenience of this base, I sometimes get a little depressed at home cooks’ over-reliance on it. Where is our imagination?
This is why I felt compelled to write this post. Here are some ideas on how you can switch it up:
Bharta: In order to switch up the texture of your vegetable dish, you can turn it into a ‘bharta’ by boiling or roasting a vegetable of your choice, and mashing it. This is very popular with eggplant and potatoes but you can also adopt this technique using a variety of root vegetables (such as turnips). A great starter dish is Izzah of Tea for Turmeric’s recipe for baingan bharta (broiled eggplant). For more ideas, do pick up a copy of Sameen Rushdie’s “Indian Cookery” (while labeled “Indian Cookery”, many recipes crossover in Pakistan but that discussion is for another time). I recently made Rushdie’s aloo (potato) bharta, and it was fantastic.
The term ‘bharta’ is expansive – you don’t always need a tomato-onion base to make it work. For instance, in Rushdie’s aloo bharta, all I had to do was fry onions in whole spices, layer it with mashed potatoes, and top it with a generous helping of diced cilantro. Delicious.
Achari masala: Recently I shared a recipe for boneless chicken achari. This recipe also incorporates tomatoes and onions but the flavor of this particular masala base is quite distinctive – sharper, and more aromatic - due to the incorporation of whole spices used to make South Asian style pickles (fenugreek, nigella and fennel seeds). The achari masala also makes a lovely base for vegetables. I recently tried Sarah Mir of Flour and Spice blog’s recipe for achari aloo (potatoes), and loved it. This masala base is also widely used for okra, and I have also seen it used for cauliflower, zucchini, and mixed vegetables.
Tadka of whole cumin and mustard seeds, dried red chilies, and kadi patta: I learned this trick from my aunt, Mariam who shared the recipe for these fantastic Gujarati style potatoes. This is a great technique if you don’t want to drown a vegetable in a thick masala base: you fry the cumin seeds, mustard seeds, dried red chilies, and kadi patta (curry leaves – if you can find them) in quick succession, and add a pre-cooked vegetable to the tadka (tempered spices). The tadka imparts a smoky, tart flavor to the vegetable. This style also works well with cabbage (similar to this patta gobi recipe), and your batch of summer tomatoes.
And if you are still looking for more ideas, deep frying vegetables and greens, and topping them with salt, lemon juice, coriander powder, ground garam masala or chaat masala (check out this okra recipe); or coating them in batter of gram flour, and frying them (spinach pakora) is always a good idea.
Happy cooking!
P.S. Did you like my first monthly? Hated it? Would love your feedback. Until next month xx