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spinach with ginger and green chiles (saag bhaji)
In my bachelor days, when I would make Indian curries, the closest I usually got to a vegetable was the onion I cooked it with. It’s not that I don’t like veggies; I love them in fact. But when I was making curry, I was usually more concerned with convenience and speed than with balanced nutrition.
Thankfully, now that I’m married, Melanie is much more concerned with getting a green vegetable at every meal and so we’ve been experimenting with all kinds of recipes. (You can only eat microwaved frozen broccoli so many times.) And we’ve found a treasure trove of recipes in in the several Indian cookbooks by Madhur Jaffrey that we own.
This one comes from “Madhur Jaffrey’s Quick And Easy Indian Cooking”, and it is indeed quick and easy. The only “exotic” ingredient is the garam masala and if you’re going to cook Indian you need to get some anyway. A good source is Namaste.com
Like most Westernized Indian saag dishes, the recipe calls for spinach, but we had some spicy mustard greens we wanted to cook and just substituted them. The dish already has a little heat, but the mustard greens another little kick. This ain’t your momma’s reheated frozen spinach. Mmmm.
Ingredients:
1-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled
3 Tbsp vegetable oil (or ghee, if you have it)
1-1/4 pounds trimmed, washed spinach (or other leafy green)
2 to 3 fresh, hot green chiles, finely chopped (do not remove seeds)—I used a serrano and a jalapeno
about 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp garam masala
1/4 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
Directions:
Cut the ginger, crosswise, into very thin slices. Stacking them up, cut them into very fine slivers. Put the oil in a wok or large, wide pan and set over high heat. When the oil is very hot, put in the ginger. Stir until the ginger starts to brown. Put in the spinach and chiles. Stir and cook until the spinach has wilted completely. Add the salt, garam masala, sugar, and cayenne. Stir and cook for another 5 minutes.
Serves 4 as a side dish.
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