Gobi Tamatar

Today was a real first for me. I had an urge for a tomatoey dish, and I came up with a recipe for that, made it all, and it even turned out pretty decent. :D
So, here's what I did :
In one pan : put oil, fry kala jeera , add the gobi with some salt and haldi. Then I kept frying this for 20 mins or so, alternately keeping it covered so as to not lose too much moisture, and frying it hot and open, to make it crunchy. It turned out fairly decent in the end, though I would be hard pressed to reproduce it.
In another pan, in parallel : fry a bunch of tomatoes, with kala jeera (again), chole masala, and garam masala. Keep frying this, mostly covered, and mash everything into a paste. It was fairly thick at the end.

Doing these separately allows you to avoid boiling the gobi into a tasteless chunk.
When both are ready, just mix it all.
Enjoy.

Investment fundaes

The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett & George Soros by Mark Tier
This book, which I picked up from Santa Clara library, has a really trashy sound and look. But, in fact, it is a really well-thought-out and easy to read book. The main point of the book is that you can't look at investing as some kind of black magic and rely on random advice from others to decide what investments to buy / sell. Instead, you absolutely need to have a comprehensive theory of how the market is going to work, a clear criteria of why your investments make sense, and have a clear criteria on when to sell (when the criteria are no longer met). And you just need to put in a fair bit of time to get good returns.

This is a must read for all the legions of wannabe stock pickers out there, who are constantly spouting stock prophecies and advice.

Non-dysfunctional rajma

Finally, after many hopeless attempts at rajma, a rajma that worked.
Fry long-chopped onions with kalonji tadka and cloves for a while, then add ginger paste, haldi, dhaniya powder, and large quantities of yogurt on high heat. Add some chili powder after a while, and mix in the pre-boiled rajma. Add salt, sugar, my mom's garam masala, and chopped cilantro at the end.
Thank goodness it worked, I had sworn this was my last attempt :)

Eggplant Tofu

This is an attempt at cogging (or more politely, 'recreating', or 'reproducing') a dish I had liked in the office cafe a while back. I couldn't find a recipe, so I just tried to approximate it best as I could.
Happily, the approximation was pretty decent- according to Sam, it was 'really good on an absolute scale, and for a dish containing eggplant, just astounding' :D.

Here is how it all worked. Central to the proceedings was the newly purchased Pam cooking spray, which by virtue of being 0-calorie makes me feel very generous with it :D. First I fried the tofu in the 0-cal spray separately till it looked reasonably fried-tofu-ish. In the main pan, I sauteed onions and eggplant together for a long time, with some garlic paste and dried red-chili . Since nothing was smelling promising, I added some Thai red curry sauce (Trader Joe's yay), and another Oriental sauce (from TJs also). There still wasn't any action, so I decided to let all the ingredients get to know each other better, and after a while there was a nice eggplantish taste (the tofu had been added at some point prior, never mind when). Finally I added (lots of) basil, extra salt and sugar, and let it cook till it was good :)

This is the first time anything Asian (non-Indian) has ever turned out reasonably well- yay!

*.Soup

I am beginning to think that the following formula works reasonably well for soup.
Saute onions in olive oil. Add *, sufficiently preprocessed (which is a function of *), add boiled potato (or sweetpotato, depending on *) for thickening, cook it all bit, and then puree with milk.

This post is inspired by * = canned beet. Here preprocess = canned, thickener = potato, and I also added some fat-free half and half that I had.

I absolutely swear that most of the soups I make seem to fall into this category. They also seem to be fairly popular (at least with me :P), so (used with good sense and understanding) I think this is a fairly general solution to soup :D

Experimental black-eyed peas

The other day (many days ago- I'm very behind on blogging!) I decided to make an experimental version of black-eyed peas, based on the Search-Your-Feelings method of cooking.
According to the results of Searching-My-Feelings, I sauteed onions, roasted some coconut with it,
added some mild amounts of ginger (and garlic?) paste, then added the (nicely pressure-cooked) black-eyed peas, and finished it off with basil.
This is definitely quite different from the Indian way of cooking black-eyed peas (chawli), but it worked out really nice. There is something to the SYF style, I think :D