Left Over Wow - Layered Methi Biryani!!

A young mom’s biggest tension in life is to get rid of the huge amounts of leftover she gets left with. My child however so I wish, refuses to eat many things that are staple to his growth. But I ain’t one of those moms who is going to quietly make those left overs my own dinner. I spice and spruce it up and make it a bigger than life thing for the full family to enjoy. This post is an idea which pretty much stemmed out of this very emotion.

So I harvest these young fenugreek leaves, about which I wrote in my earlier post- 

Growing Your Greens- Fenugreek!!

My son is extremely happy to have parathas made with fenugreek the first day. The next day too he devoured these bitter microgreens with ease and I was beyond happy. So I sowed the seeds again and this time when I harvested, I decided to try a rice dish instead. I was in a mood to prepare a wow dish, but had a big bowl of left over rice in the fridge with some hard boiled eggs which was very rudely denied by my little guy the previous night. So to serve him something healthy yet fenugreek-y, I took some carrots and ripe pumpkin to make a curry where the spice used was just these fresh microgreens from my balcony. Then I transformed the curry into a layered biryani adding in some hidden flavours. If you are positively curious about the dish now, then you should definitely read on to the next page to get possibly the most amazing yet so very simple- Layered Methi and Subz Biryani. 

Ingredients for making the Fenugreek and Veggie Curry

2 medium carrots cut in ½ inch pieces

150 gms pumpkin cut in big ½ inch pieces

Harvested fenugreek microgreens. I didn’t really weigh or measure it, but it would be approximately 3 big handfuls.

2 tbsp of mustard oil      

½ tsp cumin seeds

1 bay leaf

1 dry red chilly

Salt to taste

A pinch of Turmeric

Sugar to taste

To be ground-

2 to 3 fat cloves of garlic

2 small onions or a big one

3 green chiliies

Handful of cilantro leaves

For layering-

Cooked Rice (stale or not, nothing for guessing what i must have used!)

A boiled egg sliced

A couple of spoonful of mango and chilly pickle with mustard oil (I used a homemade mango and chilly pickle. I had followed Alpana Habib’s method of pickling. She is a famous celebrity chef from Bangladesh, whose food is quintessentially Bengali. But for this recipe, any other hot and sour and sweet pickle would work as well. I love to use the oil mixed with juice of the pickle so it is a good idea if you are buying a pickle, buy the one which is preserved in mustard oil)

A dash of milk

Sliced onion fried- barista (optional)

Chopped cilantro

Now head on to SmartIndianWoman.in for the detailed recipe.

Cheers!!

Note-

I didn’t use fried onions because it’s extremely tedious to cut fry and drain it, just for a weekday lunch to be carried to the office. But if I was to serve it in a party, I would do these extra steps willingly.

To make it completely vegetarian, just omit the egg part and you are good to go.

Bhopal - Thoughts & Beyond!!!

Holding a pen to paper comes with a great responsibility. Maybe in this day and age, we are holding on to a laptop, furiously typing away; but that as well comes with a far greater responsibility. 6000+ hits every month means someone, somewhere is definitely reading what I write here. And that adds on a larger role, much larger than just creating recipes or reviewing restaurants. It is important to sometimes sit and try to create awareness on pertinent issues of life. I have always read and seen the arguments of ‘for’ and ‘against’ using organic food. But a movie was what I needed to come to a conclusion of sorts.

This week, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain opens up in a theatre near you. As you can guess very well, it’s a movie based on the infamous Bhopal gas tragedy, which took over 10,000 lives instantly, while many more victims are dying each day in the heart of India. Sevin, the fertilizer that was made cheaply in a plant situated in the middle of the town, has been banned all over the world now. Maybe, just maybe if it was done before, we might have saved so many lives!

The story is set in 1984, where an unskilled worker (Rajpal Yadav) faces a crunch of work, and struggles to make ends meet. Warren Anderson, comes as a god to him, to establish the factory- UNION CARBIDE; keeping everyone in dark about the negative impact it might have on health and wellbeing of the sleepy town of Bhopal. The Government connives, and health officers don’t have the time to research on the chemicals processing in the plant.  The callous management doesn’t care about the safety, and instead employs unskilled labour from the street to run important posts of the factory. 1 death sparks an interest in the local journalist, but no one has the time to read or react to his stories. And then the inevitable happens. Joyous occasion of a wedding is turned into a saddened storm of death and destruction, thanks to the gas leak.

The story is written quite thoughtfully, and each character delivers in the movie. The choppy camera movements could have been avoided in the first half, but the 2^nd half made perfect sense in every way. It’s surely a movie not to be missed, and surely a movie that would spark off quite some arguments about eating organic or not. But then again, I ended up asking myself, even if I choose to buy organic labelled fruits, veggies and groceries, am I 100 % sure it is fertilizer/pesticide/other chemicals free? The movie has chronicled how the Carbide’s foreign as well as Indian management spread lies and misinformation about chemicals inside the plant. How they chose to not take any measures of precautions, just to cut down on the cost of production. That scene obviously keeps a doubt in my head whether today as well, we have grown enough to deliver on our promise, or are immature enough to cheat for greedy gains. The arguments are endless and long. We are what we are, even if we are a nation of cribbing Indians. Greed does take the good out from all.  And hence, I have come to the conclusion of actually taking that much of time to peel my in/organic fruits, to cook my in/organic veggies till soft and to soak my in/organic grains to minimise the attack of chemicals in our everyday life!

Movie Cast- Rajpal Yadav,Tannishtha Chatterjee, Mischa Barton, Martin Sheen, Kal Penn, Fagun Thakrar