Like everybody else, N and I love to eat this delicious, aromatic rice dish, made at home or at a restaurant. Though I make variations like Paneer Kofta Biryani and Nargisi Biryani, since I make them in a clay pot, it takes me time to put each and every layer if I am making it for a party. Most of the times, I take the responsibility of bringing a main dish to a potluck dinner and I look for dishes that taste good but takes little time to make.

This Cooker Biryani is one such recipe I came across at Srikar’s Kitchen and the method was so easy that off I went to the kitchen to try this biryani. Believe it or not, it takes only about 30 mins or so to put this dish together, so even if you are looking for a change in your Sunday Lunch, this could be it!

Ingredients:(serves-2)

Rice- 1.25 cups (I used ordinary ponni rice, did not use basmati)
Tomatoes -2
Onion-1
Ginger- 1″ piece
Garlic -1″ piece
Potato,Carrot,Peas,Beans,Cauliflower- all together 1 cup
Green chilies- 2
Red chili powder- 3/4 tsp
Biryani masala- 3/4 tsp (or use garam masala powder)
Turmeric powder- 1/4 tsp
Salt 1 tsp(approx)
Water- 3 to 3.5 cups
Ghee- 1 tbsp
Canola oil- 1 tbsp
Fennel Seeds- 1 tsp
Clove and Cardamom- 2 each
Bay Leaf- 1
Coriander leaves- to garnish
Lemon juice- 1 tsp

Method:

You can make this biryani directly in a cooker, or you can stir fry in a pan and then cook it like normal rice in the rice vessel of the cooker.

Soak rice in water for 10-15 minutes. Since this was a trial, I wanted to make it with plain rice, you can use basmati rice like we normally do for biryani’s.

In the mean time, finely chop the onions.

Blend tomatoes, ginger and garlic into a thick paste. No need to blanch the tomatoes.

Chop all other veggies into desired shape. Slit the green chilies in to two lengthwise.

Heat ghee and oil together in the frying pan, add fennel seeds,bay leaf, cardamom and clove, saute for a minute, then add the sliced onions, salt and fry really well till onions are golden brown in color.

Now add the tomato paste,green chilies and stir fry for 2-3 minutes.

Add the red chili powder, turmeric powder, biryani masala and stir fry well. Add the chopped veggies and coat the tomato-masala powder well on to them.

Keep stir frying for 5 minutes so that veggies will get cooked. But at any point, do not add water to these veggies.

Now drain the water from the rice, add it to the tava and fry the rice for 2 minutes. The trick is to stir fry the veggies well before adding the rice so that they all cook evenly. Transfer the contents to a cooker pan, add 3.5 cups of water and cook for 2 whistles in the cooker.

Garnish with cilantro and lemon juice and serve hot with any raitha! You can also add fried paneer or nuts to the biryani.

This delicious plate of Biryani goes to BB#6 Pot Luck hosted by Nupur.

This 30 minute Biryani is also my entry for Priya’s CWS-Cooking with Fennel Seeds event.

Bisebela bhath is a wholesome rice dish(bhath=rice dish) and it is a good one to hide the vegetables too as it will be a well mashed rice and it has lentils, rice and vegetables and makes a good one pot meal. I often make it in a slow cooker on a weekend and our brunch is ready without standing next to the stove for hours the next day.

I often wonder how to place Bisebela Bhath as a regional dish. It is famous in Karnataka as well as Kerala(Palakkad). Almost all the Palakkad men I have met know how to make BB-Bhath. N, makes excellent Bise Bela Bhath too, and often he takes over the task of making it. Point to note: His BB-Bhath will be served with dozens of dollop of ghee on top, mine will be without the ghee, hence the offer

It is a very common dish served in weddings as well, and one of the combinations for a typical south Indian dinner for guests will be Bise Bela Bath and stir fried potatoes(aloo curry) with onion raitha.

Now this is real incident that happened with Bisebela bhath to me. Much before our wedding, when N was in the East Coast,one of N’s uncles visited him. And N made his ghee dripping version of authentic Bise Bela bhath (made with MTR powder, if I can say so). After enjoying all the glorious varieties of food made by N for Uncle K for a week, uncle K decided to email me to say how lucky I should be to marry someone who can cook!

He addressed the email to N, copying me on the same and after praising N for a couple of paragraphs, he ended it exactly with this line, forgetting in the enthusiasm that I was also on the mailing list

” Dude, don’t cook like this when S asks you to, make something miserable and she will never ask you to cook again”.

Now by the time uncle K realized that he wrote that, it was already on our email group and poor N was caught and so he makes BBB the same way he made it for everyone else

Ingredients for Bise Bela Bhath:

Note:
The list for the spice powder is quite a long one, you can either use MTR Bise Bela Bhath powder or you can use some arachu vitta sambar powder to sprinkle on top, after flavoring the rice with usual sambar powder.

Ingredients: (serves-2)

List 1:

Vegetables and Rice:

Pearl onions- about a dozen
Mixed vegetables( Carrot, Beans, peas, Potato, Drumstick, Suran, Taro root, Cauliflower, White Pumpkin, Gourds, Long beans)- any combination- 1 cup
Rice- 1 cup
Cooked toor dal- 1/2 cup

List 2:
Seasonings:
Sesame oil- 1 tbsp
Mustard seeds- 1 tbsp
Turmeric powder- 1/2 tsp
Curry leaves- few springs
Salt to taste
Asafoetida- 1/4 tsp
Tamarind – one Lemon size ball or paste 1/2 tsp
Sambar powder- 1 tsp

List 3:
Special Spice Powder for BBB:

Chana Dal- 1 tbsp
Coriander seeds- 2 tbsp
Cinnamon stick- 1″ piece
Cloves-2 each
Fenugreek seeds- less then 1/4 tsp
Dried red Chilies-6
Dried coconut- 3 tbsp

Method:

Toast the ingredients given under List 3 to a golden brown color (toast them one by one). Let them cool and grind it to a fine powder.

Finely chop the pearl onions. Chop other vegetables into any desired shape. Soak tamarind in a cup of warm water and extract the juice, discarding the pulp. Add another one cup of plain water to the tamarind juice. Keep aside.

Wash the rice under running water once.

Heat oil in a pan and add mustard seeds. When they splutter, add asafoetida and curry leaves. Once that sizzles, add chopped onions and stir fry well. Add salt and turmeric powder and when onions turn transparent, add all other vegetables, sambar powder and stir fry well.

Using a slow cooker:

In the slowest setting, slow cooker takes 8 hours to cook and on the fast setting, rice will be cooked in 3 hours.

In the slow cooker pan, add the cooked vegetables, cooked toor dal, rice, tamarind water and the spice powder. Slow cooker also needs more water than regular pressure cookers, and so if you use 1:3 ratio for rice: water, add almost double the quantity of water (here, I added about 6 cups including the water used for tamarind extract).

Cover the slow cooker with some kitchen paper towels,make sure that the paper towels will not fall in, but it extends to the rim of the cooker. Place the glass lid on top of this kitchen towel (so that the extra water- the steam from the cooking will not make the rice soggy). Switch on the slow cooker according to your desired time level.

If needed, you can mix them once while cooking. Do remember that every time you open the lid of the slow cooker, it adds 20 minutes more to the set cooking time.

Once the rice is cooked, turn the setting to keep warm. Lightly mash and mix the rice with vegetables. At this stage, just before serving, you can also saute some whole pearl onions in ghee and add it to the rice.

If you are planning to add onions at the end, skip the step where vegetables are stir fried in a pan, add all veggies, tamarind water, powders,rice and dal to the slow cooker directly and cook. Then, do the tempering with mustard seeds, onions(list 2) and pour it over the bhath before serving.

Serve the rice with a dollop of ghee on top, with potato chips, onion or cucumber raitha.

If you are using a pressure cooker, you can simply stir fry the vegetables in the cooker pan, add rice to it and cook like normal rice for 3 whistles.

Adding roasted peanuts and cashew nuts as a garnish is also another way to serve BBB.

This wholesome rice with lentils is my entry for My Legume Love Affair edition 22, guest hosted here this month, brain child of Susan.

Though I make rice dishes often on a weekend, if there is one recipe I keep trying, it is pulao made entirely with coconut milk. I like the restaurant style white pulao with colorful veggies but the secret of making a fragrant white pulao remained a secret for me, till I found this pulao recipe at Malar’s. The recipe was so simple and full of aromatic spices that I wanted to try it. I used to add tomatoes like in a biryani, but after trying this I realized that was my mistake in making this coconut milk pulao.

Ingredients:(Serves-2)

Basmati Rice-1 cup
Mixed Vegetables (I used beans, carrot, peas and potato) – 1 cup
Red onion- 1 small size
Green chilies-4
Thick coconut milk (I used canned)- 3 cups
Cumin seeds- 2 tbsp
Garlic- 4 large cloves
Ginger- 1 ” piece

Cinnamon- 1″ Piece
Bay leaf- 3
Cardamom pods-4
Cloves-4
Salt- to taste

Sunflower oil- 1 tbsp

Method:

I usually slightly steam the veggies before making a pulao as they cook faster and the rice:water measurement is also perfect. Sometimes, if the vegetables are not cooked and the rice is cooked through in a stove top method, adding more water will only make the rice mushy.

Chop the red onion finely. Cut other vegetables into desired shapes. Slit the green chilies till the top, but do not separate it. Finely chop the ginger and garlic (do not use ginger garlic paste).

Wash the rice once and soak it in water for 10 minutes(till the prep is done).

Heat oil in a pan , add cumin seeds, bayleaf, cinnamon stick, cloves, cardamom and stir fry well. Once that is fragrant, add ginger and garlic and stir fry well, but do not brown the garlic(as that will be bitter). Add onions, green chilis and salt and stir fry well. Add the steamed veggies and stir fry for another 2-3 minutes.

Drain the water from the rice, add it to the pan and stir fry along with the veggies.  Transfer the contents of the pan to a pressure cooker vessel,pour the coconut milk (1 part rice: 3 parts coconut milk) to this pot and cook like normal rice. Once the rice is done, slightly fluff it with a  fork. Serve with any spicy gravy as the rice is not spicy.

Since my pressure cooker doubles and triples as idli cooker and pressure cooker, Sago vadam maker, Kali Kinder (what a name), I do not directly cook in the pressure cooker, but transfer it to the cooking vessel and keep it inside the cooker once the frying is done. You can directly cook it on the pressure cooker too!

This Coconut Milk Pulao is going to Nupur’s Blog Patrol

We had the pulao with Plain Tomato Korma.

Ingredients for Tomato Korma:

This is my version of korma given with Biryanis at the restaurants. If you want it plain, just grind the ingredients and simmer it till the raw smell disappears. If not, you can add tomato and onions as veggies in the korma.

Ripe Tomato-1
Chopped onion- 1/4 cup
Salt- to taste
Turmeric Powder- 1/4 tsp
OIl- 1 tsp
Cilantro- to garnish

To grind:
Poppy seeds- 1/2 tsp
Coriander seeds- 2 tbsp
Ginger Garlic Paste- 1 tsp
Chopped onion- couple of chunks (4-5 slices)
Red chilies- 4
Cardamom-1
Cloves-2
Cinnamon-1″ piece
Cashew nuts- 1 tsp
Coconut- 1 tsp

Method:

Blend the ingredients to a powder first and then add some water and grind it to a smooth paste with 1/4 cup of water. Heat oil in a pan and stir fry onions and tomatoes. Add salt and turmeric powder. Add about 1/4 cup of water and let the veggies simmer for 5 minutes.

Pour the paste into the pan and let it simmer for 10 minutes, till the raw smell disappears. Garnish with cilantro.
Serve with rice or dosas or rotis.

This tomato korma is going to CWS-Coriander Seeds Event at RV’s, an event Started by Priya.

Last week I wanted to make some channa masala and soaked the beans overnight. But the next day we were invited for dinner at a friend’s place and I forgot that I had to transfer the beans to the fridge. Though I have made moong sprouts I wanted to check if I can make something out of garbanzo beans too. I let the beans sit for one more day at room temperature(after draining all the water) and it gave off cute sprouts.

Instead of making the usual gravy to go with chapatis, I tried a masala rice.

Ingredients( Serves-2)

Sprouted Channa(Garbanzo beans)- 1 cup
Red onion- Medium size-1
Tomatoes-2
Slit green chili-2
Potato- 1 (optional)
Channa Masala powder- 1 tsp
Red chili powder- 1/2 tsp
Ginger Garlic Paste- 1 tsp
Salt to taste
Basmati rice- 1 cup
Bay Leaf-1
Cumin seeds- 1 tsp
Oil- 1 tbsp

To grind to a smooth paste (Green Paste):
Green Chili- 2
Mint Leaves- a handful
Cilantro- handful

Method:

Making Sprouts:

Soak the garbanzo beans overnight in water(12 hours). The next day, drain all the water and tie the beans in a cheese cloth and keep it covered in a bowl. By 1-2 days you can see the sprouts.

Instead of using sprouts, you can use plain garbanzo beans also.

Steam the garbanzo sprouts for 10-15 minutes, as they need to cook slightly before adding it to the rice.

Roughly chop the onions and blend it to a smooth paste. Roughly chop the tomatoes and make a smooth paste. Peel the skin of potato and finely chop it.

Heat oil in a pan and add cumin seeds and bay leaf. When the seeds sizzle, add slit green chilies, ginger garlic paste and stir for a minute. When the raw smell of the paste disappears, add the onion paste and potato and stir fry for 3-4 minutes till the paste turns slight brown in color.

Add the tomato paste, salt, red chili powder, chana masala powder,garam masala powder and stir fry for 3-4 minutes. Add the garbanzo beans and a cup of water and let it simmer for 10 minutes.

In the mean time, wash the basmati rice once and drain the water from it. Blend green chilies, mint and cilantro to a smooth paste with just enough water.

Cooking on Stove top:

Once the gravy has thickened, add the rice, the green paste and an additional 1.5 cups of water and let the rice cook. Check for salt. Fluff it with a fork.

Rice cooker: If you are using a rice cooker, after the gravy has thickened, transfer the gravy, rice, green paste and water to a rice cooker and let it cook.

Once the rice is cooked, separate the grains with a fork, garnish with chopped cilantro and serve with raitha and lemon wedges.

I am sending this Sprouted Channa Masala Rice to My Legume Love Affair, hosted this month by Mirch Masala and started by Susan.