Locomotoring

Shukto is a non-alcoholic aperitif made with a medley of seasonal vegetables that is eaten as the first course. The list of ingredients would do Tim Spector proud. Traditional meal starters in Bengali households in a bitter but fortunately, not a shot of campari! The bitter ingredient in shukto might have been bitter leaves such as neem or bitter gourd leaves in the past, but modern cuisine uses the bitter gourd. The complexity of cooking a mixed vegetable dish comes from the different cooking times of the individual vegetable. In a prior version of the dish that I had learned to cook from mom, I didn’t parboil the vegetables. But this time, I chose to do so. It takes the worry out of cooking them to perfection and Bengalis are a bit pernickety when it comes to cooking the ingredients perfectly.

For 2-3 servings, you are looking at approximately 4-6 cups of vegetables in appropriate balance, 2-3 Tbs mustard oil, 1-2 bay leaf, 2-3 red chilis, 1/2 tsp of mustard seeds, 1/2 tsp of radhuni (wild celery), 1/4-1/3 cup milk. Sometimes, turmeric is not used in order to preserve the milky white color. But turmeric is good for you and the color of gold is equally appealing.

I started with chopping the vegetables into bite size pieces. The raw banana oxidizes rapidly, so I submerged them in turmeric water upon chopping. Then I parboiled the vegetables with some salt and reserved the boiling liquid. I could have cooked them in batches or started with the hardier vegetables such as the green papaya. I was using a large flat frying pan to parboil, so chose to cook them together, each it its own partition and fished them out as they got done. I then fried the chopped bitter gourd in a wok and set it aside. One is allowed to reuse the frying oil, now bitter from having fried the bitter gourd, for the rest of the preparation. After frying bay leaves and dry chili. I added the seeds. Once the seeds were done sputtering, I add the parboiled vegetables and gently sautéed them. I added some of the parboiling liquid in batches. Once the vegetables were done, I added the fried bitter gourd and folded gently and finished the dish with a splash of milk and final adjustment of sauce. Mom had suggested that I could add some starch slurry to thicken the sauce if needed. Mine was thick enough that it didn’t need any.

It tasted great and the texture was perfect. I felt proud.

I have been making Bengali food this last year. Since moving to a plant based diet and following Tim Spector’s recommendation of eating variety of vegetables, Indian cuisine, albeit somewhat more complex, has appealed more and more. It is a bit hard to lay hands on organic unripe banana and papaya, but in both cases, the peel comes off and is therefore safe-ish. In US, I also struggle to lay hands on drumsticks. The old fat frozen ones are not edible and so, I forego. Note that the prior version used eggplant, and did not use drumsticks. This year, my vegetable patch yielded white bitter gourd! The green papaya in US are gigantic and here, one will use only a small proportion. I use other Bengali recipes to use the rest in two of my other favorites – “Moong daal with raw papaya” and “Green papaya stir fry” I also see no issues substituting butternut squash for pumpkin, although both are plentiful. Traditionally, root vegetables such as potato and sweet potato are also thrown in the mix, but I haven’t tried them yet.