Spicy vegetables

The other night I cooked up a tray of meat lasagne (another product of the pantry cleaning) and I was wondering about vegetables. I had potatoes and pumpkin on hand and a few other staples. So I remembered an old standby. I am sure that the recipe originated with one for peas in an old Indian cookbook but I have made it so often and with so many variations that I am not sure it bears any relation to the original. Maybe just the peas and onion and turmeric? It might be interesting to pull out the recipe and see if there are any remaining similarities.

Anyway, here's my Spicy vegetables. Again, I don't have quantities or times. Just do as much as you need for the number of people and cook it until it is cooked.

Spicy Vegetables

Ingredients

Oil
Onion
Mustard seed
Cumin seed
Tumeric
Pumpkin
Potatoes
Frozen baby peas
Water

Mode

Peel and slice the onion.
Cut the potatoes roughly into quarters, depending on the size of the potatoes.
Deseed the pumpkin and cut the pumpkin into manageable portions.
You can peel both the potates and pumpkin if you prefer but I don't usually.
Heat the oil in a saucepan large enough to contain all the vegetables
Add the onion and stir until softened.
Add mustard seed and stir.
Add other spices.
Add potatoes and pumpkin and stir so that coated in onion/spice mixture
Cook for a few minutes while stirring.
Add frozen baby peas and mix.
Add water and simmer until pumpkin and potatoes are tender and the flavours absorbed.

Note that I am taking the opportunity to take a photo using the nifty little yellow silicone trivet that Neville and Wayan gave me for my birthday. It's a great little tool.

Piperies Gemistes - again

With the rest of the rice, tomato and dill mixture I filled and cooked a couple more red peppers. This time rather than adding fetta I added a handful of raisins to the mixture. The reason was simply that I was engaged in cleaning out the pantry and found a container with that number of raisins in it and I wanted to use them ;>).

These peppers were also delicious, but a lot sweeter. I think that I could probably have done with fewer raisins as raisins are very sweet and plump up a lot. However, I enjoyed these as well as the previous batch. I'll be cooking piperies now that they are on my radar again. Maybe I'll try stuffing with couscous next time?