A Lazy’s guide to cooking Khichdi

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About: I am no cooking pundit. I can’t cook well. In fact, while in a kitchen, I feel like a child lost in a Kumbh Mela. So, why this post then? Well, thats because you can’t go out to restaurants every night for dinner. Especially when there’s only one place for good food in your neighborhood and you don’t have a car. That pretty much explains why I HAVE to cook sometimes. Thanks to refrigerated ready to eat food, I don’t have much trouble. But sometimes, just sometimes, I feel that freshly cooked food tastes way better (of course, only if cooked by a good cook!) than microwaved ready-to-eat one.

Here is a quick way to prepare Khichdi. You can treat this as a Lazy person’s guide to cooking Khichdi sans all the usual troubles. Try this IF AND ONLY IF

• you’re out of country AND
• you absolutely don’t know cooking AND
• you’re out of ready-to-eat microwaveable packets AND
• you’re hungry (duh, so many ANDs)

In fact, I would be rather surprised if you even think of cooking this way, let alone following the recipe and cooking. Nevertheless, this recipe works really well for me. So, here you go. [I’m borrowing the style of recipe writing from Sudeshna]

Ingredients

Ingredients for Microwave Khichdi

• Rice – 1 fistfull
• Red Lentil (Masoor Daal, Musuri’r Daal) – 1 fistfull (well Clint Eastwood‘s Dollars trilogy seem to have taken a toll on my lingo )
• Onion (Pyaz, Penyaaj) – half
• Salt  (Namak, Nuun, Laubon) – as per your taste
• Garam Masala Powder – half tea spoon. You can use Haldi (Turmeric powder, Holud) instead of this. I didn’t buy Haldi when I came to Austin and now I’m too lazy to visit an Indian Store to buy Haldi.
• Carrot, Peas, Cauliflower – if you want, that is. I can never go this length but if you’ve tasted Khichdi earlier you’d agree that it sisn’t complete without this veggy trio.
• Egg (Anda, Dim) – 2 (since you gotta have Omlette with Khichdi). You can skip this if you’re a vegetarian.
• Mustard/Refined Oil – For frying onions and making Omlette

Preparation

• Wash dirt off the Masoor daal
• Cook for 5 min in Microwave (High)
• Take it out and add salt to taste
• Wash rice in a separate container and then add it to the Microwaved Masoor daal
• Cook for 10 min in Microwave (High)
• While the microwave is working, slices the half-onion into two type of pieces – biggest annular rings possible for Khichdi and miniscule pieces for omlette
• Fry the onlion slices in oil on a frying pan. When they are dark brown, put them in the semi cooked rice + masoor daal mixture and stir.
• Add some Garam Masala and stir

At 15 minutes

• Cook for another 5 min in the Microwave (High)
• Meanwhile, prepare your omlette.
• When the Microwave beeps, take the bowl out and spread the Khichdi on a plate. Let it cool off for a few minutes and attack!

Khichdi Ready

Well, if you’re serious about making Khichdi, try these resources:

Sudeshna’s BengaliCuisine, WikiHow, Anthony’s Kitchen, RecipeBazaar, QuickIndianCooking, IndianSnacks, Anubhavati, Aarti, Anupama, Sushma.

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