Leftover plain rice? Here's how to spruce them up

Rice is what I tend to reach out for when I don't have the time or patience to make chapatis. And then there is th leftover problem for the next meal.

Nobody wants to eat leftover plain rice.

Here are some ideas to spruce up your leftover plain rice.

1. Coriander (Dhaniya) Rice :

1 bunch of coriander(about 50 gram) for 2 cups of uncooked rice - Just get rid of the roots and keep the leaves and stems.

1 teaspoon of cumin

4 garlic cloves - chopped or minced

1 teaspoon cinnamon powder

1 bay leaf

4 green cardamoms or 1 teaspoon cardamom powder

1 tablespoon butter or ghee

1 teaspoon salt

Puree the fresh coriander in a food processor with 2 tablespoons of water. It can be chopped finely too.

Heat butter or ghee. Add cloves, cinnamon, cardamoms and bay leaf. When they start to sizzle, add garlic. Add cooked rice. Stir fry. Add some water if the rice looks dry.

If adding uncooked rice, stir fry for a minute and add 4 cups of water. Bring it to a boil.

Turn the heat down to medium and let it cook for 10-12 minutes until all of the water is absorbed. The rice is ready, delicious with any curry or simply yogurt.

Kuch Lassi-shassi ho jaye!!

Folks, I have to admit...Some days I would go to Indian restaurants just to have their mango lassi.

I was even ready to tolerate crappy food at restaurants where mango lassi was half-decent. This habit was getting pretty out of hand so I decided to try making mango lassi on my own.

After a lot of experimentation with ingredients and proportions, here is a hit recipe ( you know something is a hit when your guests ask for the recipe).

Here goes-

1 Cup Mango pulp- Kesar one works better but any will do really.

3 tsp Sugar

3/4 Cup Milk

1/2 Cup Yogurt

1/2 tsp Cardamom powder ( This one is optional but takes the lassi to the next level. Recommended for restaurant-like taste)

Mix everything up in a blender. Serve. Drink. Burp loudly, Punjabi style. You are excused!

Don't want to run to the grocery store for veggies for the curry?

When it's one of those days when you don't have raw material for dinner in your refrigerator, worry not. Most of us buy onions and tomatoes in bulk so we have those on most days as they go into almost every Indian curry.

So, assuming you have tomatoes and onions at your disposal, here is a quick, no-fuss recipe on something-is-better-than-nothing days.

1 medium sized onion- thinly sliced or chopped if you like it that way in your curries or blended if you have a food processor
1 medium sized tomato-ditto
1 teaspoon garam masala
1/2 teaspoon red chilli powder
1 teaspoon coriander powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 tablespoon oil
Coriander/cilantro leaves - a few

Heat oil in a pan for 2 minutes on high. Turn the heat down to medium and add onion. Stir fry for a minute or two, until they turn brownish.

Mix all the dry spices in 2 tablespoons of water in a bowl. Add this mixture to fried onion.

Add tomato. Cook on medium heat until the whole mixture reduces to a dry mass. Add salt. Turn he heat off. Garnish with coriander leaves.

Serve with chapati or paratha or on bread to make a sandwich.

You can hack this recipe by adding canned kidney beans or garbanzo beans or black beans for a Mexican twist. Roll it up in a wrap or tortilla to make a burrito. Add shredded cheese if you like.

Another hack- Before turning off the heat add 2 tablespoons of butter for a and even more delicious(and fattening, obviously, if its delicious, its going to be fattening) curry.

Spaghetti salad hacked by an Indian non-cook

Feel like having a spicy snack, without having to spend a lot of time in the kitchen?

Here's a hack.

Angel Hair Pasta/Chinese style noodles/flat noodles- half a box.

Mustard Seeds- 1 tablespoon- more if you fancy, go crazy.

Curry Leaves- a handful

Green chillies- 3-4 slit sideways if you prefer mild spices, chopped round if you like spicy hot.

salt, black pepper, red chilli powder- per your taste.
Cucumber one sliced and then chopped into pieces
Tomato sliced and then chopped into pieces

Break pasta strands in half. For those of you who have never broken anything but your mom's best China, pasta flies everywhere if you break it like you would break a carrot.

Pasta strands breaking hack- Take a wide bowl, whose width is greater than the length of the pasta strands and then softly break the strands in half.

Put the pasta in a pan. Pour enough water to cover the pasta completely and then some more. Add a spoonful of salt. Boil on high heat.

Once the water comes to a boil, turn the heat down and keep it on medium for 10 minutes. Do not cover. Take a large stainless steel sieve or strainer. Drain the water.

Run cold water over hot pasta.

Take a pan. Heat 2 spoons of olive oil or the your regular cooking oil over high heat, although it does taste better in olive oil.

Turn down the heat to medium.

Put mustard seeds, fry them for a minute or until you can smell their aroma.

Fry curry leaves until they turn brownish.

Add green chillies, fry for half a minute. Add a little salt, a few dashes of black pepper and red chilli powder.

Turn off the heat.

Pour this fantastic smelling dressing over your cold pasta, toss in cucumber and tomato and serve in a rainy evening and enjoy.

Sandwiches Hacked

Its friday evening. You were in a meeting from 4 PM until 6:30 in which you were yawning constantly. You drag yourself from work to home feeling hungry and dreading the cooking realizing you ate the last of your leftovers for lunch. What do you cook? You don't.

Make a raw vegetable sandwich instead. It's a salad, it's a sandwich, it's both.

Fabulous raw vegetable sandwich- hack raw veggies.

2 slices of bread

1/2 medium tomato- sliced. What do you do with the other half of the tomato? Make another sandwich, of course.

3-4 Spinach Leaves

1 onion (optional, I personally like this sandwich without onion, but maybe that's just me)

2 slices of Indian Cottage cheese (Paneer)- you decide the thickness of slices, anything goes.

Salt and Black pepper- a dash or two

Red chilli pepper or paprika(optional)

Oregano flakes left over from that pizza you ordered last week- Optional

Just stack all the ingredients - bread, tomato slices, Cottage cheese slices, Spinach leaves, Onion together, dash whatever spices you fancy- salt, pepper, red chilli pepper and you have your dinner or your lunch or your midnight snack. Ta-da.

Why, oh why?

Here I am, attempting two of the many things that I don't know much about- Cooking and Blogging.

Some people are told to open restaurants, write recipe books and blogs, hold classes, for they are excellent cooks.

I have started this blog for the exact opposite reason- I am a terrible cook. But, I have always wanted to be better, and that is the reason I have embarked on this very journey. Come, join me for the ride as I attempt to hack the kitchen.

Whenever I saw my mother in the kitchen or celebrated chefs on cook shows adding mysterious ingredients to enticing potions, I would think it is some sort of dark magic. Why does a certain ingredient precede another when in the end they will all be indistinguishable?

As I started cooking, I realized, its not magic, its science.And Contrary to what I thought, you don't need to remember what to add in which recipe and in what order if you know some basic hacks. Yes, I am a Software Analyst by profession, and a wannabe chef in my mind. With this blog, I want to bridge the distance between my alter egos. And, unlike George from Seinfeld, I want my worlds to collide.

I will be attempting to hack recipes that, to me, are more complicated than writing a linked list program in C++ and try to make them as simple and enticing as checking your facebook profile.

We will keep it simple and real, folks. No fancy words, no fancy cuisines ( sorry France), no fancy kitchen gadgets ( sorry Billy Mayes, bless his soul). Just plain simple no-frills fare.

In my attempt to be a better cook, I have read a lot of recipe books, watched a lot of food channel, read far too many blogs by excellent cooks, have tried a lot of things in my own kitchen, but more often than not, the meal is a train wreck. Ok, maybe not that bad, but its not as great as the fare they show on TV either.

Cook books, blogs and shows are always visual. Still after still of fantastic mouth watering dishes that make us, lesser cooks very conscious of the sad state of our own creations. Their perfect pictures create a lot of pressure when I try to replicate what I read or see.

So, I have decided not to put up pictures of the finished product when I share a recipe here. ( I told you I am a terrible cook, half the time the finished product is too embarrassing to share, anyway).

I am a coaster. I find it hard sticking to a hobby. I need public accountability.Whenever I try to stick to something, I need to tell a lot of people about it jut to keep myself from giving it up. That's another reason behind this attempt. Having said that, I would be too embarrassed to tell my family about this blog(what with my history of bing a picky eater and a kitchen avoider all my life and all) but, here I am sharing my culinary adventures with the world at large, you see, I am weird like that.

All I needed to do was to tell my mom and she would call me up every now and then to ask how things were in the kitchen, but, no, I had to start a blog.

Well, I am here now, deal with it.