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  Ankurit haleem with nakuni pyaaz ka qorma

The grass, contrary to popular belief, is not greener on the other side of the fence. In the world of food, at least, there is certainly a belief that what you eat is the best; what others eat is suspect. Food is such a habit that I know of people who travel thousands of kilometres and then keep looking out for the familiar dishes they have left behind.

Having said that, I must also admit that there are some people who are curious about other kinds of food. Among a great many vegetarians there is some kind of curiosity about the food that they won't touch. And increasingly, as people go off meat and fish for health or ecological reasons, there is a bit of nostalgia about what they've forsaken.

It's for such people that chef Sharad Dewan has been thinking of innovative ideas.'Because there is a large section of people in Calcutta who are vegetarian, I’ve been conceiving vegetarian menus with a difference,' says the chef who is the area director, food production, at The Park, Calcutta.

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  Nadru ka haleem with makhana ka qorma

And the menu with a difference includes a dish that intrigues me — vegetarian haleem. Now I am a great haleem lover, and enjoy the mash of wheat and meat immensely. Chef Dewan has replaced the meat in haleem with vegetables that have some of the characteristics of meat — such as its fibrous texture. So he cooks haleem with jackfruit or arbi (colocasia), or even ageing sprouts and colocasia shoots (loti).

'One day at home, the cook prepared loti for us,' he says. Chef Dewan found that the texture of loti was very similar to that of meat, and tried making some kababs with it. 'It worked out very well. So I decided to cook haleem with loti,' he says. And that's been quite a success too.

Other chefs too often use veggies for meat-like vegetarian dishes. Jackfruit curry is quite like meat curry, and minced soya nugget is similar to minced meat. Chef Suprabhat Roy, the executive chef of Delhi's Eros Hilton Hotel, prepares chaanp with soya that tastes a bit like mutton — and even looks like a piece of meat.

Another non-vegetarian dish — nargisi kofta, which is a dish of eggs in gravy — has a vegetarian version. This is a speciality of Pranay Singh, executive chef of Swisstel Kolkata. He takes a potato, roasts it lightly, scoops out a bit of the middle and then stuffs it with chana dal which looks like egg yolk. Then he cooks the stuffed potatoes in gravy.

Chef Dewan does quite a few wonderful things with vegetables too. Apart from jackfruit, he prepares haleem with grated bottle gourd, peeled lotus stems and banana flower. And he serves all this with different kinds of vegetable qormas — prepared with jackfruit seeds or pearl onions or arbi. The lotus stem haleem is presented with makhaney ka qorma (prepared with lotus seeds), and the mocha (banana flower) haleem comes with qorma cooked with thor, which is the edible part of a banana trunk.

I think this is a trend that is going to catch on. More and more people are going off red meat for a host of reasons. If you give them something that tastes as good (well, to be honest, almost as good), I'm sure they'll be happy. But for me, let my haleem be cooked with meat. Others can have their vegetables.

Kathal Ka Haleem

(serves 6)

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Ingredients:

• 1kg jackfruit • 100g chana dal • 200g dalia • 400g thinly sliced onion • 40g ginger and garlic paste • 300g ghee • 30ml lemon juice • 3tsp Kashmiri red chilli powder • 2tsp coriander powder • 2tsp cumin powder • salt to taste • 1tsp garam masala • potli masala • 1tbsp finely chopped coriander and mint leaves

Method:

Wash and soak the chana dal and dalia separately for four hours. Boil them separately and keep aside. Peel the jackfruit. Cut into thin slices and boil in salted water. Heat ghee in a kadhai and fry the onions till golden brown. Add ginger and garlic paste and saut well. Add chilli powder, coriander powder and cumin powder. Add the jackfruit and salt and stir well. Keep it aside.

In a separate handi, stir the dalia and dal on a slow flame till you get a thick sticky consistency. Add the dal -and-dalia mix to the vegetable with chopped coriander and mint leaves. Stir well and continuously on slow heat and finally finish with lemon juice. Now take the potli masala (whole coriander, whole cumin, paan ki jad, khas ki jad, kapoor kathli, rose petals, sandalwood powder, bay leaves, patthar ka phool, kababchini and black peppercorn, tied together in muslin) and boil in water for 10 minutes. Remove the potli. Add the water to the haleem along with garam masala and stir constantly till it becomes thick and sticky.

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Garnish with green chillies, lemon wedges, ginger slivers, coriander and mint leaves and browned onions.

Photographs by Rashbehari Das; courtesy The Park, Calcutta