A Request for a Vegetarian Meal without Onions and Garlic

I was requested to post recipes for a meal without any onions and garlic. This was because the person who has requested is attending a wedding in a Kayastha family. Initially I was surprised by this request as most Kayastha’s I know are meat eating and few if any dishes are prepared without onions and garlic. However, I was wrong as there are many vegetarian Kayasthas who would not eat meat, but I am not sure about the onion and the garlic (which I had mistakenly considered mainly a Brahmin trait!). When one thinks about it there are several dishes which are equally wonderful without the onions and garlic. With this in mind I took a trip to our local vegetable market.

We are lucky in Newport, Wales in having a Saturday morning market, which is not as buzzing as the Sabzi Mandi (Vegetable market) in Delhi,

but at least we do see lots of fresh fruit and vegetable. Some grown locally and others imported from various parts of Africa and Asia. I wanted to prepare this meal with as fresh ingredients as possible.  So here I was in the market and found fresh tomatoes, garlic (which I can’t use for this meal!), lauki, mushrooms, cabbage, gajjar (carrot), muli (white Indian radish), beans and arbi. I thought I should be able to make enough dishes from these ingredients.

With the above fresh vegetables I thought of the following menu for my friend who wants a vegetarian meal without onions and garlic:

1. Starter

• Stuffed Mushrooms (recipe already on the blog) 
• Cabbage Kofta Pakora (recipe already on the blog)

1. Main Dishes

• Lauki rasedar with jeera
• Sambar (I didnt use onions which I know a lot of people use)
• Fried Arbi (recipe already on the blog under vegetarian dishes)
• Gajjar methi

1. Sweet

• Gajjar ka halwa for afters.

I hope this would go down for my vegetarian Kayastha friends as well. I am sure I will get some feed back.

I have already posted the recipe for Fried Arbi, stuffed Mushroom (for this meal I did not add garlic) and Cabbage kofta Pakora which are all under vegetarian dishes, but the next entries would be the above dishes. So here we go for the next few posts!