Healthy Rice Flakes breakfast

Rice flakes, or Poha, as it is called in Hindi, is one of my husband’s favorite breakfast dishes. It is also my favorite dish, simply because it is very very quick and easy to put together on a busy morning and it can also be made healthy and fulfilling by throwing in some crunchy vegetables, as I am usually apt to do. This is also a favorite dish in Western India – my friends from Mumbai make this often for breakfast. The Maharashtrians usually add roasted peanuts for garnish and it tastes simply fantastic with that garnish too.

Here is the all time favorite Poha, made with very little oil. This dish takes just 10 minutes to whip up. Enjoy!

Here is what you need:

1 cup Rice Flakes or Poha
1/2 small chopped onion
4-5 green beans cut into 1″ pieces
1 jalapeno slit
1 habanero slit
1″ piece grated ginger
1/4 chopped green pepper
1/4 chopped red pepper
1 tsp black mustard seeds
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp turmeric powder
1 tsp lemon juice
water to moisten the rice flakes
3 tsp olive oil
Here’s how you make this:
Add about 2-3 tbsp water to the rice flakes until just moist (be careful to not add too much water – it will get soggy). Set aside for 5 minutes and chop the vegetables in the meantime.

Heat oil in a pan. When the oil is hot, add 1 tsp black mustard seeds. Wait until the seeds pop and add chopped jalapeno and habanero and the grated ginger. Roast for about 20 seconds and add chopped onions. Stir fry for a minute and add the green beans. Fry for another minute. Now add the chopped peppers. Stir fry for another 30 seconds. Now add the moistened rice flakes, salt and turmeric powder. Stir fry for another minute. Take off the fire and sprinkle lemon juice.

If you like it the Maharashtrian way, garnish with roasted and coarsely chopped peanuts. Serve hot.

Serves 2.

Universal Truth!

Tis a truth, universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in need of a wife! – so wrote Jane Austen in the opening lines of her famous “Pride and Prejudice”.

I agree! I agree! “Tis a truth universally acknowledged, that only people who love to eat, can really cook very well!” To be able to dish up means that you know which flavors tempt, which ones tease, and which ones elicit gluttony, which satisfy and which haunt!

With that in mind, I started breakfast today – I mulled over what was in my larder and decided to make the very basic Upma – a steaming hot, satisfyingly filling, rice semolina concoction, which is one of the very first dishes taught to a young girl who is being groomed to cook in her in-laws joint family kitchen after marriage. All I had seen was a bland, oatmeal kinda dish – yummy, nonetheless, cause my mother is a chef non pariel. She would whip this dish with chopped onions, a bit of chopped ginger and it would taste just fantastic.

But I always have to go a step further and make it a healthy meal, so here’s what I decided to put into the dish:
Semolina: 1 cup
Carrot: 1/2 finely grated
Green pepper: 1/2 finely chopped
Onion: 1 finely chopped
Ginger root: small piece finely grated
Potato: 1/2 finely chopped
Chili: 1 red
Water: 2 cups
Oil: 1 tsp
Black mustard seeds: 1/4 tsp

As I started to cook this meal, I got a call from a friend in India. Normally, I cannot multi task while cooking because I need to concentrate, but since this dish (remember, I had mentioned that this is one the first dishes a young girl learns to make?) was something I could make while blindfolded, I continued to talk and cook.

First, I roasted the semolina in the dry, hot pan with no oil.
See picture on the right. Then I removed it from the pan and dropped in the oil. Waited until the oil was hot to drop in the mustard seeds. When the seeds crackled, in came the chopped onions, red chili, grated ginger and chopped potatoes. Few minutes until the potatoes cooked, turned down the heat and added 2 cups of water. Added salt and waited for the water to boil. Once the water boiled, added the roasted semolina in slowly until all the water was absorbed. Now added the chopped green peppers, and closed the dish to let the green pepper partially cook in the steam. 2 more minutes, and this dish is done – add the grated carrot and here it is – a heart-healthy, low-fat, satisfying, breakfast dish – just eat it- you need no accompaniments with this.

Leftover magic – Fixing the bad dish…

We had dosa for breakfast today. And I was too lazy to make the accompaniments of Chutney, Sambar etc. So, we did what we usually do – use one of the leftover dishes that was bought from a restaurant.

We had been to a Thai place a couple of days ago and ordered a Coconut soup. Looked yummy when it was served, but the cook had had a free hand at the salt – so the dish was too salty.  As usual, unless it is very unpalatable, we do not return the dishes, so we ate as much as we could and packed the rest.  So, there it was – a salty coconut soup flavored with sliced ginger root and mushrooms, great accompaniment for the dosa but unedible all the same.

I told my son I would fix it but it was already too watery for the time-honored way to reduce salt in a dish – just add water and heat.  So I added a teaspoonful of the organic brown rice flour I had bought some time ago and heated the dish in the microwave for about 2 minutes until it was boiling. Took it out, stirred and added more water and heated it for another minute. It was a perfectly fine – the salt had toned down, the consistency was just right and it was perfect with the crisp dosas.