This has to be one of the prettiest salads I’ve ever made. The dressing was initially a little bland, probably because the papaya wasn’t a very good one. I perked it up with a squeeze of lemon juice and that made all the difference.
It’s an unusual way of enjoying a mix of fruits and vegetables.
The last time I cooked fenugreek leaves with lentils, I followed a south Indian recipe. This time I used a Maharashtrian recipe, substituting oil for the ghee. I used frozen fenugreek leaves because I have such a hard time finding them fresh.
This recipe contains onion, mustard seed, cumin seed, chilli powder and turmeric fried in a bit of oil. Fenugreek sprouts are added and cooked briefly at the end. I let these sprouts continue growing for quite a while in order to get the start of leaves, but that isn’t required.
This is the sort of meal I throw together for lunch when I’m home. I had two king oyster mushrooms which I forgot to put in my mushroom pasta, two leftover baby bok choy, and fenugreek sprouts which I’d left to develop some leaves.
I started by heating some oil and adding two smashed garlic cloves, 1/2″ of sliced ginger, and 2 dried red chiles. Meanwhile I started some water to boil for rice noodles.
I chopped the bok choy and mushrooms and added them to the spices, along with the white part of a spring onion, then put on a lid and let it cook on medium-high heat, stirring from time to time. When the water was ready, I cooked the rice noodles, drained them, and set them aside.
When the vegetables were cooked, I removed the lid and added the rice noodles, a bit of soy sauce, some mirin, a touch of sesame oil, and ketjap manis. I removed it from the heat and stirred in the rinsed fenugreek sprouts and the green part of the spring onion.
I removed the chiles, garlic and ginger before serving.
I’m very fond of fenugreek leaves and fenugreek seeds, so when I saw a recipe for a fenugreek sprout salad, I had to try it.
The taste of fenugreek doesn’t really come through strongly, and this tastes very similar to a salad of soy bean sprouts.
I really like fenugreek leaves, and they are quite tasty in this simple potato dish.
This recipe brings my favourite ridge gourd and fenugreek leaf together.
