Cherie felt like cooking up a meal a few days. We discussed available options, time and difficulty levels and came up with this very nice platter that would make for a nice meal as well as be quick to execute.
Ingredients:
Fish steaks:
Swordfish steaks
Seasoned flour
Oil for frying
Bean Mash
Boiled kidney beans/rajma, 500 gm
Lemon juice, 2 whole
Butter, 100 gm
Green chilies, de-seeded and chopped
Onions, 2 medium, chopped
Garlic, 10 cloves, chopped
Salt to taste
Peas
Egg, fried
Method:
Wash drain and dry steaks. Dust with seasoned flour and pan fry for a few minutes on each side until cooked. This fish doesn’t have a lot of fat – don’t overcook it or it’ll be too dry.
Mash the kidney beans/rajma with lemon juice butter and gently fried mixture of onions, green chillies and garlic, seasoning as required.
The egg was broken into a hot pan with a bit of oil, then quickly flipped over so the white would cook, and then slid onto each platter, after a total cooking time of about 1 minute. We like our eggs soft and yolks liquid.
Thaw the peas.
Serve up on a plate.
Notes:
Substitute with any other mash, though this one is somewhat healthier for most of us.
We visited Cherie’s school to pick up books for her 12th standard and found ourselves at the end of a very long line. I did what any caring parent would have done – asked her to stand in line and headed to the snacks counter while she probably glared ineffectually.
This school likely has the unhealthiest food I’ve ever seen in any place that serves food, and prepares it with the full knowledge that students don’t have any other place to buy from. This translates into shoddily prepared and stored food. Thankfully, I can count on my fingers the number of times she’s gone without a packed lunch and has been handed lunch money instead.
On the other hand, since we’re so careful at home, I do enjoy a few bites of this sort of food every now and then. It also helps somewhat in drowning out the trauma of PTMs. On this day, I bought a potato burger, the buns deep fried and literally (I mean, literally) saturated with oil. Each bite caused little spurts of oil to flood my palate and the deep fried potato patty in the centre was an oasis of health and wellness in comparison.
Afterwards, we headed home and I thought of making it up to her with a nice meal. On the way home, we stopped and picked up a lauki (bottle gourd), a bundle of pudina (mint), a few tomatoes and some spring onions.
When home, Cherie washed some rice and lobia (black eyed beans), and put it into a pressure cooker on the gas. I chopped the lauki and put it to boil in a pan with some water, prepared the dressing and sliced some tomatoes. When the rice was done, we fried a couple of eggs, grilled a few chunks of paneer (cottage cheese), plated the lot and it all came together beautifully.
The dressing of course was key, but so were the different textures from the ingredients. Admittedly the non-dressing ingredients don’t have a lot of flavour, but the dressing more than makes up for it.
Serves 2 – 3
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 10-12 minutes
Ingredients
Half a medium lauki, sliced thick (2 slices per portion)
1 Tomato, sliced thick (2 slices per portion)
1 cup Rice, washed
1/2 cup Lobia, washed
2 Eggs, fried sunny side up (3 if you want to make a third portion)
2/3 of a 200 gm packet of Paneer, grilled
Fresh ground peppercorns, for the egg
Dressing
3 Spring onions, chopped
10 Mint leaves, chopped
3 tbsp Soy sauce (light)
1 tsp Fish sauce
1 tbsp Chinese cooking wine
1 Lemon, juice
1/2 tsp Sesame oil
2 tsp Sesame seeds
1/2 tsp Sugar
Method
Cook the rice and lobia together.
Boil the lauki.
Grill the paneer
Fry the eggs
Assemble all the ingredients for the dressing
Plate.
Notes
Buy some good soy sauce – it makes all the difference.
Light soy sauce for flavour, dark soy sauce for colour
I didn’t add salt to anything. There’s enough in the dressing.
The eggs were ‘fried’ with a brushing of oil in a non-stick kadhai, covered.
For round fried eggs, consider frying them in a kadhai.
I don’t like lobia much and find it boring, except in such applications.
Experiment with the proportions in the dressing.
Fish sauce has a strong flavour that is an acquired taste.
