Madhur Jaffrey

This recipe, which I got from a South African Gujarati family, is not really a soup but rather a sweet and sour soupy dish called fajeto. It is normally served with meals in small bowls and eaten with the fried puffy breads called pooris, but I strain out all the leaves and seeds that would normally float in it and serve it as a soup. My friends and family love it. It needs to be served hot, as it is thickened with very nutritious chickpea flour that does not behave well when it is cold. It is very quick and easy to make, since it uses canned mango puree. One of India’s finest mangoes is the Alphonso, and it is canned Alphonso puree that you should look for. All Indian grocers carry it. The brand I like and use is Ratna. It comes slightly sweetened. Conveniently, the 30-ounce Ratna cans hold exactly 3 cups, just what you need here.

Here is another wonderful combination of fruit and raw vegetables that we often use to make our snack foods and salads. I find that it makes a light and delightful first course.

This is almost a meal in itself, nutritionally complete if you add some whole-grain pita bread (or rice) and yogurt on the side.

I sometimes serve these snacks with drinks, cutting the mushrooms into wedges and inserting a cocktail stick into each one.

One of my cousins was married to a Kashmiri gentleman, and for the period when he was working at the United Nations in New York he had brought along a manservant. My cousin let me have him once a week to cook and clean. His repertoire was limited—he could only cook dishes he had learned from my cousin, such as this simple Kashmiri staple, which we loved. Soon he was making it week after week, and it remains one of our favorites. In Kashmir, collard-type greens and rice are eaten as commonly as beans and rice in Central America, the season for them lasting from spring (when the greens are tender) until the snows start to fall in early winter (when the greens get coarser).

You may well call this a simple vindaloo. It has the pork, the garlic, the chilies, and the vinegar, but all in gentle proportions. It is a superb dish that is best enjoyed with plain rice. I like to use small red potatoes here, the larger of which may be halved.