Desi scrambled eggs – Egg Bhurji

A desi version of scrambled eggs, this is a really versatile dish.

It makes for an indulgent Sunday breakfast, with toast and butter or even baguette and cheese and I make it for dinner  too sometimes, to go with soup, in the winter.  And the leftover portion is always good for a sandwich filling the next day, with a little ketchup tossed in 🙂  Shri and the girls really enjoy this dish and I am glad about that as it is one of those things that is so easy to make .

With or without the peas or green bell pepper, this is a delicious way to eat eggs.

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Batata Vada

This is a Mumbai street food classic. Its is often sold stuffed in to a pav, and it is what I often ate for breakfast in the little tea and snack  shop on  our college campus  (the other stand out memory of that shop is the long string of fine but strong thread the Malayali owner kept hanging from a nail on the wall, which he would use to slice through boiled eggs every time someone ordered a plate of those !)

That canteen, and the memory of  the times it kept me going when I needed to get a cheap lunch, have given me a special fondness for this snack 🙂

The girls love it too, so some days ago when I could think of nothing else I made these vadas for their gouter.

Batata Vada

Luckily I had some green chutney  in the fridge and that goes really well with these vadas but ketchup is nice too, on the side.

Baked Sweet Potato Chips

I just love the color of these.

Sweet potato is a vegetable that always brings back memories of holidays in my grandparents’ village in Rajasthan. If I remember the process right – Biji, my maternal grandmother, would leave whole sweet potatoes (shakarkandi in Hindi) in the coal/wood-fired angeethi in her kitchen overnight, and the dying but still hot embers would cook it to perfection by the next morning. I remember we’d eat them straight out of the angeethi, without adding anything and I just loved that smoky, sweet taste.  Which is why I never did take to the chaat that many people, including my mother, make with this vegetable since it  involves adding lime juice to the cooked cubes of sweet potato. That spoils the natural sweetness of the vegetable, IMO.

But ever since I ate baked parsnip chips at a school mums’ lunch once, and baked sweet potato fingers at Jenny’s some months ago, I have been thinking I ought to try and bake sweet potato too, since I discovered that this way of cooking also brings out the vegetable’s wonderful taste and sweetness.

I had been forgetting to get around to it though so Shri – he loves those old-style roasted sweet potatoes too –  decided,I guess, to take matters in to his own hands and bagged a couple of sweet potatoes one day some weeks ago when he was shopping with me, saying  “these are for roasting/baking”

Well I am glad he did – these chips were yummy 🙂

Sweet Potato Chips

2 sweet potatoes

2 tablespoons of sunflower oil

some sea salt to taste

Peel the sweet potato and cut in to 5 cm thick slices. Sprinkle the salt on these and leave for 5 minutes. In the meanehile heat the oven to 22o degreesC. Now add the oil to the sweet potato slices, toss well, spread in a single layer on a baking tray and cook at the top of the oven till they are soft (they will cook quicker than regular potato chips). Turn over once, halfway through cooking.

Really nice, loads of natural flavor. We had them with steamed salmon and  olive bread.