Three dinners from one delivery
One order, three dinners, no shopping in between. A potato and cabbage sabzi, a tray of roasted vegetables, and a tomato-onion base that becomes whatever you need it to be — built so that nothing is left over uselessly.
The problem with buying vegetables well is that you then have to use them, and half a cabbage in a fridge drawer is where good intentions go to die. So here is a single order that becomes three dinners, planned so the leftovers of one are the ingredients of the next and nothing sits there accusingly.
The order
1 kg potato · 1 round cabbage · 1 kg tomato · 1 kg onion (Indian for cooking, local if you also want it raw) · 1 head garlic · 1 piece ginger · 2 long chillies · 1 fresh herbs bunch · 2 carrots · 1 zucchini · 1 eggplant · 1 red & yellow capsicum pack.
Everything else assumed from your own cupboard: oil, salt, cumin, turmeric, chilli powder, and whatever you normally have. Nothing on the list is exotic and nothing is bought for one dish only.
Dinner one: potato and cabbage sabzi
The fastest of the three and the one to make on the day the order arrives, because it uses nothing that needs to sit.
Cut the potatoes into two-centimetre cubes — no need to peel them. Shred half the cabbage, not too fine. Slice one onion, chop two cloves of garlic, and split a long chilli.
Get oil hot in a wide pan, add a teaspoon of cumin seed and let it sizzle for ten seconds. Onion in, cook until it is going golden at the edges, then garlic, ginger and chilli for another minute. Potatoes in with turmeric and salt, stir to coat, add a splash of water, cover and leave on a medium heat for about twelve minutes until the potato is nearly done.
Now the cabbage. Raise the heat, uncover, and stir it through for four or five minutes only — you want it wilted with some bite left, not stewed. Off the heat, a lot of chopped coriander from the herb bunch, and a squeeze of lemon if you have one.
Eats with roti, with rice, or on its own. Better the next day, which is convenient.
Dinner two: the roasting tray
Almost no work, and it uses the vegetables that will not wait — the zucchini and the eggplant.
Cut the eggplant, zucchini, capsicum, one onion in wedges, and the carrots into rough chunks of roughly matching size. Toss on a tray with plenty of oil, salt and a whole head of garlic broken into unpeeled cloves. High oven, around 220°C, for 30 to 40 minutes, turning once when the edges start to colour.
Two things people get wrong. Not enough oil — eggplant in particular is a sponge and under-oiled eggplant roasts to leather. And crowding the tray, which steams the vegetables instead of roasting them; use two trays rather than one deep pile.
What comes out goes with anything: on rice, in a wrap, alongside grilled chicken, or mashed roughly with the squeezed-out roast garlic into something you can eat with bread. Roast twice as much as you need — cold roast vegetables are the best sandwich filling in this list.
Dinner three: the tomato-onion base
This is the one worth learning, because it is not a recipe so much as a starting point. Make it once and it is the foundation of a dozen dinners.
Slice three onions thin. In a heavy pan with a generous amount of oil, cook them on a medium-low heat for a genuinely long time — 20 to 25 minutes — until they are deep brown and collapsed. This step cannot be rushed and it is the entire difference between a base that tastes of something and one that tastes raw. Stir occasionally, turn the heat down if the edges catch.
Then a tablespoon of chopped garlic and ginger, one minute. Then your ground spices — a teaspoon each of cumin and coriander, half of turmeric, chilli to taste — thirty seconds only, or they burn. Then half a kilo of chopped tomato and a good pinch of salt.
Cook it down. Ten to fifteen minutes, until the tomato has broken up entirely and the oil separates and pools at the edges. That separation is the signal that it is ready; before it happens, the base is not finished.
From there, choose:
With lentils. Add cooked lentils and water to the consistency you want, simmer ten minutes, finish with coriander.
With potato. Cubed potato and enough water to cover, simmered until tender — 20 minutes and it is a full meal.
With eggs. Make wells in the base and crack eggs into them, cover, and cook until just set. Ten minutes from a fridge to the table.
With chicken or fish. Brown it first, set it aside, build the base in the same pan, return it, simmer through.
Double the base and freeze half. It keeps three months and turns a weeknight into a fifteen-minute job.
What is left over, and what to do with it
Half a cabbage, half the tomatoes, some onion, a few carrots and most of the herb bunch. That is deliberate: shredded cabbage and grated carrot with lemon, oil and salt is the crunch slaw, and it is the one salad that is better made an hour ahead. The remaining tomato and onion go into a kachumber with chilli and coriander.
Which is a fourth and a fifth thing to eat out of one order, and an empty fridge drawer at the end of the week. That is the point of planning it this way round.