Palong (spinach) and beet (beetroot) shaak bhaja (sautéed)

This week's partial menu

This Friday I bought some beetroot, those had some leaves on it. Then I bought a bunch of spinach, one cauliflower, and three big eggplants. After coming to the USA, I started using this word, 'eggplant'. Before that, brinjal was the common English word for me as an Indian to describe 'Begun' (বেগুন). Anyway, I was not sure what exactly I will do with those three big brinjals. But, this vegetable is one of the favorite vegetable for us. Therefore, I kept those three in the cart. We had some pieces of sea bass fish and a slab of paneer (Indian cottage cheese) in the freezer. Other than those, I had all other ingredients to make beetroot-paneer curry, fulkopi-r roast (white cauliflower curry), begun bhaja (fried eggplant), begun bahar (eggplant curry), macher jhal (fish curry), shaak bhaja (sautéed green leaves) and musuri-r daal (red lentil soup). These all for the coming week. We will have it with rice or roti (handmade, whole wheat flatbread). Generally in the weekdays, with the brown rice and in the weekend days with the luxury of polished white basmati rice in the lunch. Roti in the dinner.

Generally, the menu will start with shaak (green leaves). Here in our case, sautéed spinach. It is better not to throw away the fresh green leaves of beetroot. Therefore, I also added the leaves from the beetroot bunch with the spinach. It also gave a nice red colored pieces of stem within the greens. If your food looks nice then you will feel an added attraction to it. First I cut them into small pieces and washed thoroughly. Then in the pan I added very little amount of mustard oil and panch-foron (five spices) and two-three silted green chili as foron for the shaak. In Bengali cuisine, foron means flavoring of the cooking oil before you put your vegetables in the hot oil. The flavor of the oil slowly goes into the vegetable during cooking. The way of flavoring or 'foron' (ফোড়ন) will vary according to the type of curry you are cooking. But the invariable thing of this flavoring is, you have to heat the oil properly and then add just a small teaspoon of your flavoring spices for a full wok of curry and keep sautéing until you get the fragrance of the properly fried spices. Just after you get the nice smell, add your vegetables otherwise you will burn your spices and that will ruin the taste of your curry. In this case, for Palong (spinach) and beet shaak bhaja (sautéed green leaves) I added 'panch-foron"(five spices: seeds of Fenugreek, Fennel, Nigella aka kalonji or kala jeera, Cumin and Radhuni; some times black mustard seeds are also used in panch-foron. Anyway, back to the story of my this week's kitchen, I added panch-foron and some green chili in the mustard oil and the added some peanuts with skin in the flavored oil. Peanut with shaak is quite common in bengali kitchen. Peanut will give a nice crunchy texture in the shaak and also will add some good fat in the diet. After I got a properly fried but not burnt peanut in my pan, I added the Palong and beet shaak (spinach and beetroot leaves). Then some salt, a little sugar and mixed them and cooked with cover until they wilted. After adding salt, your shaak will leave some water. so do not ever add water in the shaak. At the end, you probably need to uncover your cooking pan, increase the heat and wait for that water to evaporate from your pan. At this point I added some poppy seed and mixed it. It will also increase crispness and taste. As the water is mostly evaporated you are done. That's it. The easiest regular healthy Bengali item, you can cook. Generally we avoid shaak in the dinner as it is full of fiber, it may not be digested properly at the night. Enjoy the 'shaak bhaja' with warm rice as the first item of a full plate Bengali lunch. 

Rest of the recipes of the list of curries I mentioned above will come one by one. Till then bye.  

 Palong (spinach) and beet shaak bhaja (sautéed)