Alu – potol bhate – Potato and pointed gourd bharta

What you’ll need:

Potato: 1 medium

Pointed gourd: 3/4

Onion :1 sliced

Chilly: 1 green or red dried

Cumin seeds: ½ tsp

Mustard or any other oil: 1 tsp

Salt: 1 pinch

How to:

1.      Skin the pointed gourds  as shown.

2.      Boil the potato and the gourds. You can also put it inside your rice pot. That’s how it was done by my mother.

3.      Skin the potato.

4.      Fry the cumin seeds, chilly and sliced onion in the oil, and pour the 

      entire thing on the boiled veggies, add salt and mash.

Healthy and delicious. Just try it out. You can also make similar bhartas with pumpkin, eggs or brinjals. You will find pumpkin bharta here.

Potol Rossa – Whole pointed gourds

Little S is very excited about my Adsense earnings. Everyday as he comes back from school, he makes me open my homepage- if it is not already open that is, checks out the figures, and multiplies it by 45 to see the figure in Indian Rupees that we have reached.  He has it all charted out - the various toys and gadgets that he will buy at different milestones…so much for the earner…L

“Mamma now when we reach 550Rs, we will buy a Beyblade metal fusion, okay?”

“But you bought a metal fusion last month, and lost it in 1 day” – I complained.

“But I’m not going to lose it this time, I promise” he plants a kiss on my cheek.

Old trick, but I’m not going to give in, I say to myself as I get ready for a long drawn argument.

“But Betu you keep saying that and you keep losing things – last year you lost your new bicycle, after riding it for just 1 day, you lost your basketball this April, 3 badminton rackets in the 1 month of summer camp, I’m not even mentioning the little things you keep losing everyday in school !” I’m exasperated.

Little boy in tears now.

“I lose everything, right? What about the same Mamma and same Bapi I’m using for the past 8 years? I haven’t lost either of you, did I?”

I’m speechless.

I am quickly making all the potol (pointed gourd) dishes I know of, as they will very soon vanish from the Mumbai market, now that the monsoons are here. Alu-potol er ChheNchki, I have already posted few weeks back, alu-potoler dalna- Sandeepa from Bong Mom’s Cookbook has posted it a few days back. Today I am making Potol Rossa. I made this dish after a long long time. It was my mom’s specialty, and me and my entire extended family, we all just loved it. I had made it a few years back, but didn’t turn out to be as good as hers. So this time I made no mistake but promptly called her to re-run me through her recipe. She did, and voila! I did it!

Potol Rossa – Whole pointed gourds (parwal) in a thickish tangy gravy

What you’ll need:

Pointed gourds - whole, peeled and slitted from both ends, so that the gourd remain whole

Onion – 1 small

Garlic – 4 fat cloves

Ginger – 1 tbsp

Tomato – 1 small

Green chillies – 2

Coriander pdr – 1 tsp

Cumin pdr – 1 tsp

Garam masala pdr – 1 tsp

Whole bay leaves – 2

Cumin seeds – ½ tsp

Salt – ½ tsp

Turmeric – ½ tsp

Sugar – ½ tsp (optional, add it only if you are a Bengali)

Kishmish (raisins) – 10/12, soaked for about half an hour in water

Mustard oil – 3 tsp

How to go about it:

Step 1: Rub the gourds lightly with turmeric and salt, and fry it in 1 tsp mustard oil. Fry it well, good enough to be eaten as it is. Sprinkle water (or oil, if you don’t mind too much of it!) if you feel gourds are sticking to the bottom. Remove and keep aside.

 Step2: Make a paste of the Onion, Garlic, Ginger, Tomato, Green chillies, Coriander pdr, Cumin pdr & Garam masala pdr, adding very little, about 2 spoons of water.








Step3: Add the remaining oil in the same wok, and heat. Add the cumin seeds and the bay leaves.






Step 4: Add the paste, the soaked raisins and fry till you can smell the beautiful aroma that only mom’s kitchen can give.

Step 5: Add the pre-fried gourds, mix, so that all of them get nicely coated with the masala.

 Step 6: Add about half a cup of water, and bring it to boil. As it comes to a boil, cover and let it simmer for 2 mins. 

Your luscious, distinctly tangy and very tasty pointed gourds are ready. There are people in my native town Durgapur, who have started eating parwal after tasting my mom’s Rossa Potol ! So do try this J

PS: Avoid ripe yellow parwals with hard black seeds. If the seeds are hard and black, remove them.

Alu-potoler chheNchki - Bengali pointed gourd with potatoes

Never spared as much as a thought to the simplest possible dish, common in all Bengali households – the ChheNchki, not until I left home. Sunday morning breakfasts almost always used to be this ChheNchki with white luchi (puri made out of maida, refined wheat flour), the only variation being that in summers it used to be potatoes with diskettes of pointed gourd and in winters pointed gourd used to be replaced with cauliflower florets. When I was small, vegetables used to be seasonal – pointed gourds were available only in summers and cauliflowers only in winters. Now of course, everything is available round the year, robbing our Banerjee—da  of the excitement of spotting the first cauliflower of the season, or the pride of bringing home the first harvest of brilliant red tomatoes before the boastful Mr. Roy next door. Coming back to chheNchki, the process of preparing it is not half as complicated as the spelling. Apart from all holidays begining with a breakfast of chheNchki accompanied with ruti (chapatti), luchi (puri) or porota (small triangular parathas), it also used to be a quick fix savior for the hapless homemaker caught unawares with sudden unannounced visitors , who were frequent back then. The reason why dishes like chheNchki, was popular was, you just slice everything in a jiffy, and toss them into the wok, and it takes care of itself, needing minimum supervision, so that the unprepared host can concentrate on the luchis, which need full attention.

Today, neither do I receive unannounced guests (people are way too polite these days to barge in without meticulous intimation), nor can I afford a breakfast of luchi (too much calories for us) but cant help missing those small simple things that smell of my childhood, of the small quiet town called Durgapur, of Ma. It is on those days that I cook chheNchki –it fills the house with the aroma of panch phoron tossed in hot oil, and drifts me to my childhood….in a small sleepy town in faraway West Bengal called Durgapur.

You will need:

Potato : 1 large

Pointed gourd : 4-5

Panch phoron: 1 tsp

Green chillies : 2

Salt : ½ a spoon

 How to :

Step 1 : Chop potatoes and pointed gourds into ½ cm thich diskettes.

Step 2: Heat oil in a wok and throw in the panch phoron or whatever tadka you are using.

Step 3: As the whole seeds splutter throw in the split green chilly

Step 4: Throw in the chopped potatoes and gourds

Step 5: Add salt and 2 tbsp of water. Close in the lid

Your chheNchki is ready in 5 minutes. Remove lid, check if potatoes are done and take it off the flame. If potatoes are not done, keep it on for some more time.

 Pictorial guide :

If you donot have panch phoron you can mix all or any of these 5 seeds- jeera (cumin), kalonji (onion seeds), methi (fenugreek seeds), saunf (fennel seeds), randhuni (celery seeds). Mix them in any proportion, wont make a difference, if  one or more of the ingredients are missing, still no problem. If nothing else is available just use cumin seeds. 

Did your Ma cook chheNchki differently ? If yes, please share....there are lots of people like me waiting out there, all ears :)