From my kitchen
Bottle Gourd: Did you know we eat the entire vegetable?
Did you know we eat the entire Bottle Gourd? Yes, we do. The main vegetable, the seeds, the peels, the shoots, and the leaves. Now bottle gourd is called Lau in Bengali and Ghia, dudhi, or Launki in Hindi. It’s popular all over India with various methods of cooking. Just like the pumpkin shell, the bottle gourd shell has various ornamental use too.
It’s a part of the pumpkin family and is one of those veggies which have helped me survive the lockdown. You will ask me why?
Well, the humble bottle gourd you will find growing on roofs of West Bengal countryside. The old and dried bottle gourd is used to make bori. It’s used as a dried condiment. Its fresh juice is popular due to its pharmacological properties.
It’s cooked as a delicious vegetable side dish. Bengalis cook it both as a vegetarian dish or with shrimps as a non-vegetarian dish.
The best part is this vegetable is versatile, it can be eaten with rice or phulka/roti. We use the vegetable peel as a delicious side dish with rice and even eat the greens and leaves of the bottle gourd plant. That’s the best ways to eat responsibly. Eat the whole vegetable.
Now I will tell you about Bottle gourd cooked as a vegetarian side dish.Its super easy,filling and nutritious requires very little oil ,spices and delicious too.
How to cook the bottle gourd?
Peel the bottle gourd. Keep the peels separately. Now you need to dice the bottle gourd.
Once its diced,get the spices ready.
Spices:
- Bay leaf,
- cumin whole,
- red chillies(optional)
- Ginger paste or grated
- Haldi/turmeric
- Cumin powder
- Salt to taste
Others ingredients:
Green chillies,tomatoes
Steps of cooking
- You need to heat oil in a big Kadai.
- Mustard oil or sunflower oil works.10ml oil was used for a 1.5Kg bottle gourd.
- Bay leaf and red chili or green chill, the whole jeera is used to temper the oil.
- You can add the ginger now.
- But I like the extra gingery taste and have added it a little later. Add the diced bottle gourd.
- For a one and a half kilo bottle gourd I use 5mg turmeric,5mg jeera, salt according to taste, ginger paste, tomatoes, green chilies.
The Dont’s
Don’t cover and cook.
Don’t add water .
Don’t cook in high flame .
The tomatoes and the bottle gourd both release a lot of water and it gets cooked slowly. When it’s cooked just right, the water will all be dried. The bottle gourd will be slightly firm but cooked all the way.It’s spicy from the green chilies, tangy because of the tomatoes with lovely ginger and jeera flavoring.
If bottle gourd is bitter after peeling and cutting,dont eat it. Don’t drink bitter bottle gourd juice.
In my next book coming up, I will be sharing bottle gourd cooked with milk, the nonvegetarian bottle gourd, and the vegetable peel recipe too. Can you guess what the book is about?
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Sharing is good Karma!
Baking Bread and Breaking Bread
Growing up, my mom insisted both of her daughters learn cooking. If not the fancy stuff but at least the regular everyday cooking. But my sister loved making all things exotic, delicious, and loved baking and cooking various dishes.
She baked cakes, cookies, brownies, and all sorts of deliciousness whose taste I enjoyed all through my teens and part of my tweens.
I had a discerning tongue when it came to food cooked with care.I was an expert taster.That was my main role in the kitchen ,back then.
Luckily, I picked up skills from both my mom and sister unaware. Though nowhere near their expertise and perfection levels, I can recreate recipes from food memories and bugging my mom over the phone.
That has kept me afloat since March. No cooking skills would have been traumatic for everyone concerned otherwise.
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But one thing I never tried making was bread with yeast. I can make roti/ phulka,luchi, paratha stuffed ones, naan, Gur ka paratha,lachha paratha. But never tried baking bread. After tasting a delicious loaf my sister baked last October, I even ordered some Active Instant dry yeast.
I didn’t dare use it. It was spoilt after sometime, and I threw it away. I thought that was the end of it.
Making roti everyday since March for breakfast and dinner was making me mentally tired. We never buy factory-made bread. In the small town we live in, that’s the only kind available. My daughter doesn’t like it, I get horrible acid reflux from it, and my husband would rather avoid it.
So, no store brought bread for eight years.
Now 2020 has seen all of us do a lot of crazy stuff, and this September, I broke my fear of baking bread and have already baked it four times. The last one was even whole wheat.
My sister told me it’s the bread bug. What can I say? My daughter liked it so much that after the first sweet milk loaf was baked, she was continually breaking off small pieces and eating them. It was challenging to make her eat tomatoes, and she made her own tomato and cucumber salad with two slices of fresh bread.I couldn’t believe my eyes.
What can I say, the best way to know whether you are cooking okay is when the people for whom you cook can’t stop eating it!
Sharing my bread activities for the last few days.
I never ever thought, this was something I wanted to do. But as they say, you never say never.
The things I changed
Bread baked in convection mode in a microwave oven (LG). I didn’t use butter, but olive oil. The honey and sugar were one-fourth of that recommended, and you can adjust according to your tastes.
I followed instructions from the manufacturer the second time around for the yeast’s proofing, and it rose better.
To sharing more bread stories.
Here’s the recipe for the bread I baked for the first time.
