This is the Thali I prepared for a late lunch - it is a collection of little taste thrills, always containing a soup or rasam, various dry curries, meatballs with kebab seasoning, and seasoned bread.
Most thali offer a light broth called rasam that is very spicy. It is like an appetizer. I prepared a hearty soup instead - I'll call it Chickweed - Radicchio Soup.I blanched the sorrel, then cooked and blenderized all my greens - kale, chard, radicchio, celery leaves, and chickweed. Then I cooked the turnips, potatoes, carrots, rutabagas, red peppers, garlic, onion, and green peppers. These were added to the broth and left to simmer with sliced beef.
I browned paneer cubes and added them at the end, to rest on the top of the soup. A Russian lady over at the garden told me to roll the paneer in egg, then flour, and then fry it. So I tried it this way in a non-stick pan. It worked beautifully.
This same woman has been showing me all the wild greens growing within the community garden. Wild mustard, arugula, hawks-beard, golden dock, wild radish, 'corn salad' and chickweed - all of these can supplement winter salads. I brought home small ears of corn, sunflower seeds, and little artichokes that someone had tossed in the debris pile. I notice this every year - good food is thrown away. (I think people in the Slow Food Movement favor this kind of scrounging/salvaging.)
Whenever I think of wild greens, I think of women in Greece during the World War II, who had to flee their villages. They went up into the hills to hide, and survived for months on wild greens and olives. They took their goats, too, and supplemented their diet with goats milk. In the book "Eleni" by American author Nickolas Gage he writes how his mother went up in the mountains to survive. She was later seized and executed by Communists for smuggling her children out of Greece.
The two dishes here are 'Boston-baked( round) beluga lentils and (flat) brown lentils' and basmati rice with black Nile barley, millet, buckwheat and vegetables. Each one of these grains is cooked separately, individually seasoned, and then mixed into the rice. This dish was 'dressed' with a sprinkling of leek roots and dried chili peppers.
