Minced Meat & Cabbage in Coconut Sauce

This dish combines a few of my favorite ingredients. It turned out to be more delicious than expected. The minced meat was first cooked with all the seasonings and coconut milk in a pressure cooker, combined with shredded cabbage and then cooked until dry. It's perfect served on a bed of rice, but would go well with chapatis, as well.

Shutki Chingri Diye Bandhakopi - Stir-Fried Cabbage with Dried Shrimp

Stir-Fried Cabbage with Dried Shrimp

Credit for this recipe goes to Mum who used to cook shredded cabbage with black pepper and eggs. I've blogged before about Grated Cabbage with Eggs that is similar to this. Adding the shrimp powder (entirely optional) adds a lovely Burmese touch to this dish.

Bori Diye Bandhakopi - Stir-fried Cabbage with Lentil Dumplings

Bori Diye Bandhakopi

Boris or lentil dumplings add flavour and crunch to vegetable and fish dishes. Each is shaped like a little pagoda with a rounded base and a tiny pointed steeple. Just like garam masala powder, boris vary widely depending on each region in India. 

Lentil Dumplings

Bengali boris are small and delicately flavoured predominantly with asafoetida/hing and are made from a wide variety of lentils and/or vegetables as pictured above. This picture which I was lucky to find on the BongHaat website on the internet (http://zozu.site/media/1796977486733311584) features Til/Sesame, Posto/White Poppy Seed, Hing/Asafoetida, Fulkopi/Cauliflower, Chalkumro/Ash Gourd, Motor Dal/Split Pea, Kalai/Split Black Gram and Masoor/Red Lentil. Wadis from other parts of India are much larger and heavily spiced, predominantly with chili powder.

Cabbage is one of those vegetables that's available year-round here in North America. My favourite preparation with cabbage is to make it with shrimp, but we have recently developed an allergy to shrimp which we now try to avoid. On its own, cabbage is tasteless so adding boris is a great idea!

Muttar Keema Gobi - Shredded Cabbage with Minced Meat & Peas

Shredded Cabbage with Minced Meat & Peas

This is another dish inspired by Mum. She would take a whole cabbage, remove the core and stuff it with spiced, seasoned and browned ground meat. The cabbage would then be bound with kitchen twine so it wouldn't fall apart and browned on top of the stove. From the frying pan, the bound cabbage would be transferred to the pressure cooker with a wee bit of water, brought up to full pressure and cooked over medium-low heat for about half an hour. The yummiest stuffed cabbage there ever was!

I deconstructed it and made a stir-fried, shredded cabbage with ground sausage meat. The longer the cabbage is cooked, the sweeter it tastes, so take the time to simmer and stir till the cabbage turns golden brown.

Scrambled Eggs, Cabbage & Peas

Scrambled Eggs, Cabbage & Peas

Here's another dish that places Mum's presence front & center in my consciousness. I remember having this with hot rice in Rangoon and more frequently in Darjeeling. It's really simple to make with just a few ingredients and is so delicious! It goes well with rice or tortillas.

Stir-Fried Cabbage with Shrimp & Peas

Bandha Kopi Chingri Maach

Shrimp adds a depth of flavour to any and all vegetables and pasta. Generally, I like to cook the cabbage to a deep, golden brown which takes a lot longer. Leaving the cabbage crisp and crunchy cuts back on the time and effort it takes to make this side dish. Cooking it on medium heat allows everything to cook in their own juices, so I don't add water unless it sticks to the bottom of the pan. Serve this with steaming, hot rice or tortillas.

Burmese Stir-Fried Cabbage with Scrambled Eggs

Cabbage with Scrambled Eggs

Weekends were very special when we were growing up, made even more festive by Mum's cooking. She was a consummate cook of Indian, Burmese and Asian cuisines and passed on her love for cooking to all eight of us. We were curious and eager to try all kinds of food, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. 

Being a single mother of eight and a professor in a women's college meant that she was not able to spend as much time in the kitchen as she would have liked. Evenings and weekends were festive affairs because visitors dropped by unannounced, tea and snacks were constantly being served and meals were prepared by Mum with a lot of help from all of us and the hired help. There were occasions when her Thai students who lived at the hostel would arrive with all the necessary ingredients to prepare a feast for all of us. They were so happy to have a kitchen that was open to them so they could enjoy their cuisine, which they missed terribly.

This stir-fried cabbage dish is one that I associate with Mum's loving and nurturing nature. Cabbage is totally tasteless on its own, but is transformed when stir-fried until crisp, flavoured with the zing of black pepper powder and the umami of fish sauce. Add eggs into the mix and it assumes an unforgettable contrast in texture from the crispness of the cabbage to the creaminess of the scrambled eggs.

This is served as a side dish to accompany any Asian meal and is best suited to be had with hot, steamed long-grain rice.

Stir-Fried Cabbage with Fish

Maach Diye Bandha Kopi

Cabbage cooked with fish bones and head is very tasty, but it takes some skill to safely remove the bones. In this case, I've taken pieces of filleted fish that flake too easily and fall apart when added to a gravy and used them to flavour the cabbage. Stir-frying cabbage until golden brown makes it much sweeter so that no sugar is needed. This side dish goes well with either steamed rice or any form of Indian bread.

Keema Gobi - Shredded Cabbage & Minced Meat

Keema Gobi

Mum was a working, single mother of eight. She has been my mentor all my life and inspires me in the kitchen, my home and in my day-to-day life. I believe that even though she's busy with the challenges in the next world, she is by my side just as she was when she was here.

When we were growing up in Darjeeling, India, week days flew by in a hive of activity of going to school, doing our homework and socializing with friends. Weekends were very special because Mum would do the cooking and even though we were on a tight budget, we ate very well. The pressure cooker was our friend and went everywhere with us. We spent the winters in Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) and our pressure cooker accompanied us on our close-to 24-hour train journey. Life could not go on without that essential tool in the kitchen.

So many dishes come to mind when I think of Mum in the kitchen. She was very adventurous and made complex (Lobster Thermidor) and labour-intensive (Yakhni Pulao) recipes, all of which we were eager to assist with and loved. 

This is a deconstruction of a recipe she made with cabbage stuffed with minced meat. She would cut a head of cabbage in half and remove part of the inside which she chopped up and cooked with the minced meat. She would cook the meat and chopped cabbage with spices, onions, garlic, ginger and tomatoes and stuff the cabbage halves with the cooked meat, tie the whole head of cabbage with kitchen twine and brown it in the pressure cooker in hot oil. The pressure cooker would then be heated to full pressure and the contents cooked without any water for 10-15 minutes. The resulting slices of cabbage were something to behold, our home was filled with tantalizing aromas and it was so delicious to eat!

I took the lazy person's way out and simply shredded the cabbage and cooked it along with the minced meat in the pressure cooker. Still delicious and evoked so many memories of Mum and our idyllic childhood.

Burmese Stir-Fried Cabbage with Dried Shrimp & Eggs

Burmese Stir-Fried Cabbage
with Dried Shrimp & Eggs

Credit for this recipe goes to Mum who used to cook shredded cabbage with black pepper and eggs. I've blogged before about Grated Cabbage that is similar to this. Adding the shrimp powder (entirely optional) adds a lovely Burmese touch to this dish.

Chicken Keema & Cabbage - Ground Chicken & Cabbage

An easy chicken curry made with ground chicken and shredded cabbage that tastes great as a stuffing for pita pocket sandwiches or served over steamed Basmati rice.

Grated Cabbage with Eggs

Deem Diye Bandha Kopi

Credit for this recipe goes to Mum who used to cook shredded cabbage with black pepper and eggs. I find it easier to grate the cabbage in the food processor and do the same with the onions and garlic. Adding the shrimp powder (entirely optional) adds a lovely Burmese touch to this dish.

Fried Cabbage with Shrimp

Bandha Kopi Chingri Mach

Serves: 6

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cooking Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

1 cabbage, shredded

18-20 large shrimp, shelled and deveined

6-8 baby potatoes, cut in eighths

3 Tbsp. extra light olive oil

½ tsp. shah jeera or cumin seeds

1 cinnamon stick

1 star anise
1 tsp. Kashmiri mirch or chili powder

2 tsp. ginger paste

1 tsp. garlic paste

2 medium onions, sliced

6-8 plum tomatoes, cut in half

Salt to taste

1 tsp. Ghee or melted Butter
½ tsp. Bengali garam masala (ground cinnamon, cardamom and cloves)

2 – 3 green chilies, left whole

Directions:

1. Heat oil in a pan over medium-high heat and fry shrimp until pink.
2. Remove shrimp and set aside.
3. Heat oil in same pan and add cumin seeds, cinnamon stick & star anise.
4. When cumin starts to sizzle, brown the sliced onions.
5. Add cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, ginger & garlic pastes, chili powder and salt.
6. Stir well, cover & cook cabbage over medium heat until it turns golden brown, stirring every 10 minutes.
7. Adjust salt to taste and return fried shrimp to pan.
8. Cook for 5 more minutes, garnish with ghee, garam masala and whole green chilies.
9. Transfer to a serving dish and serve with steamed rice or tortillas.