From the vegan kitchen

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Renowned restaurateur and author Ritu Dalmia’s recently launched cook-book Diva Green: A Vegetarian’s Cookbook gives a new lease of life to all that is vegetarian through simple yet classic recipes that are likely to surprise the meat-lovers.
Vegetarian food has always formed an essential part of Indian households, yet it has seldom received the kind of focus it deserves. Keeping this in mind, the restaurateur decided to jazz up the vegetarian delights. “I was born in a vegetarian household, so ideally this should have been my first book. In Diva Green, the division of chapters is based on how I think of recipes. There is always one dominant flavour or ingredient and the remaining components of the recipe dance around this ‘cutie’. For example, when I think of beetroot and make the pearl barley risotto with beetroot and goat cheese, it is not about risotto or goat cheese but the beetroot emerges as the hero of the dish,” says Dalmia.
Simple and easily available vegetables like pumpkin, tomato, potato and eggplant among others can create wonders rather than fancy vegetables like asparagus or broccoli, believes the chef. She says, “The whole idea is to cook tastiest of the dishes with the simplest, most easily available ingredients in your kitchen and create your own recipes,” she says.
“Often potato is treated like a little chorus girl, an addition to the main act. This drab looking vegetable turns into an elegant gnocchi when made into dough or can be made into excellent starters like potato pizzas. Similarly, pumpkin can be used to make soups, quiche, slow-roasted pumpkin salads, ravioli with pumpkin and almonds, pumpkin and cinnamon pie or even an ice cream. Then the eggplant slices have a variety of uses: as the filling for a sandwich, as a salad or as a topping for a canapé,” shares Dalmia.
Talking about some of her favourite savouries, Dalmia recalls, “I once ordered local pumpkin fritters, which are a bit savoury and a bit sweet, as an accompaniment when I had gone to South Africa for a safari. They were served as a side dish with the entrées, but I drizzled them with maple syrup and ate them as dessert. Soothing papaya curry or carrot and ginger soup are other dishes that I really like.”
The chef swears by vegetarian food and if given a chance would love to treat her guests with lavish vegetarian spread from Diva Green. She quips, “My guest list would feature Jeanette Winterson, Meryl Streep and Kailash Kher. The menu would include spaghetti with strawberries, bruschetta with preserved eggplant, sweet potato cupcakes as desserts among other things.”