One of my favorite times of the day is opening up emails you send me, and over the weekend I got this message from a reader, Ruth. “I could eat Indian food every day - both northern and southern,” wrote Ruth who learned to cook from Indian friends. “So please post more Indian recipes.” I looked through the past few weeks of my blog and realized that I have posted more Italian than Indian recipes recently. Not so strange, when you consider the fact that it’s easy to throw together a great one-pot meal with a pasta, especially if you add a protein component. All you need is a salad and dinner’s on the table. Or in the brown bag. But like Ruth, I could eat Indian food every day. And I often do. But because Indian meals can be more elaborate than a one-pot recipe – you need rice or roti, a subzi (a cooked vegetable side), and a dal or a curry – it’s not always easy to get a quick and complete Indian meal on the fly. That’s why I often tend to combine components when I can so I have one less thing to make. A paratha is one of my favorite ways to get vegetables and grains in a single dish. Most of you know what a paratha is – it’s a flatbread stuffed with a vegetable and you can use almost any vegetable, really. While an aloo paratha is the most common, a cauliflower paratha a radish paratha, a sweet potato paratha, and even a tofu paratha are all arguably healthier options. This time, I decided to stuff my paratha with mushrooms. Until a few years back mushrooms were not a common ingredient in Indian cooking. When I was a child, my father would sometimes get them on a trip down south to the city he grew up in – Belgaum– bringing them with him on the plane or train to Bombay. Those mushrooms, foraged from the wild, would be brown and juicy and meaty and my mom would cook them up in a spicy, exquisite curry. Just a few years later, button mushrooms became easily available in little plastic packets in grocery stores and you could buy them almost anywhere in the city. Today, despite the reluctance some vegetarians in India exhibit toward this wonderful vegetable because of its meaty taste, mushrooms are a staple of Indian cuisine. Check to get new recipe updates by email.
I love mushrooms– crimini, button, shiitake, portabellas, oyster, whatever– I could eat them just about any time. So I knew, even before I started, that these parathas were going to be amazing. And they were. Mushrooms tend to express a lot of water, so one key step to ensuring your parathas are a success is to remove every trace of moisture from the stuffing. Also, a paratha stuffing should be soft and pliable and as smooth as possible– any big, hard lumps will cause tears in the paratha when you roll it. So be sure to follow instructions closely because every step I take, I take for a reason. I loved the look of this mushroom paratha too. The mushrooms give a pretty black color, which makes the parathas look quite unique. I roll my parathas really thin because that’s how Desi and I like them. They just taste better that way. Here’s the recipe for mushroom paratha. Enjoy!
More Indian mushroom recipes
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