Winter Desi Dinners: One Sunday Pot, Three Cold-Night Meals

It is 5:40 p.m., dark outside, and nobody wants to start a gravy

In January the problem is not appetite. It is the hour between getting home and eating, when you want something thick and hot and you have nothing left for onion browning. The answer in a lot of desi kitchens is simple: cook one long-simmered pot on the weekend and let it carry the week.

Not every curry works for this. Quick karahis want to be eaten at once. Beans, lentils, greens and slow-cooked meat go the other way, and several of the recipes in our library say so in their own tips. Here are four that suit winter desi dinners, with what each one can become.

Four pots that get better overnight

Dal makhani serves 4 and uses 200 g (7 oz) black lentils and 50 g (1.8 oz) kidney beans. The recipe soaks them for about 8 hours, pressure-cooks or boils them for roughly 40 minutes, then simmers the masala with 3 tomatoes, ginger, garlic, butter and 100 ml (0.4 cup) cream. The recipe tip is blunt: the longer and slower it simmers, the creamier and darker it gets, and it tastes better the next day. Make a double batch and you have two dinners without doubling the work.

Rajma serves 4 from 300 g (1.5 cups) dried kidney beans, soaked about 4 hours and boiled around 40 minutes. Crush a few beans against the side of the pan and the gravy thickens without flour. Tinned beans will do on a weeknight, though you skip the soak and the flavour is a little thinner.

Sarson da saag needs 500 g (1.1 lb) mustard greens and 200 g (7 oz) spinach, boiled about 25 minutes, then thickened with 2 tablespoons of cornmeal. In a US store, mustard greens are usually in the Southern greens section next to collards. Mash by hand or with a wooden masher, not a fine blender, if you want the rustic texture.

Nihari is the weekend project: 1.2 kg (2.65 lb) beef, a simmer of about 3.5 hours, and a flour slurry added at the end. Our recipe says the beef should shred with a spoon before the slurry goes in, and that a pressure cooker can bring the first stage to about an hour. It is a Saturday pot, and the leftover gravy works with leftover meat for two more nights.

What each pot turns into

A Sunday pot stops being boring when you change what goes next to it. A few combinations from the dishes above:

Dal thickens as it sits, so always loosen it with a splash of hot water when reheating. That is in our daal recipe tips, and it applies to every lentil dish here.

Reheating without ruining it

Cool the pot quickly. Do not leave a whole pot on the stove to cool for hours on its own, because the center of a big pot stays warm for a long time. Split it into shallow containers, get it into the fridge within about 2 hours, and reheat until it is steaming hot all the way through. Three to four days in the fridge is the usual guidance for cooked bean and meat dishes; if you will not eat it in that time, freeze part of it on day one.

For rice served alongside, the safe window is shorter: cool within about an hour, refrigerate, and eat within a day.

A decision list for a Sunday

• Two hours free, no meat: dal makhani. The soak happens overnight, the cooking mostly watches itself.
• One hour free, tired: rajma with tinned beans, or khichdi, which needs 150 g (0.75 cup) each of rice and moong lentils and about 30 minutes.
• A long afternoon at home: nihari, with the slow simmer going while you do something else.
• Cooking for someone who avoids dairy: choose rajma, and use oil rather than butter and cream in the other dishes.

If you cook from dried beans often, soak them in the morning before work. Eight hours on the counter is the normal range in our dal recipe; pour off the soaking water and boil in fresh.

One mistake to avoid

Adding the salt, tomato or lemon too early to dried beans can leave them stubborn, so many cooks wait until the beans are tender. It is a common kitchen rule rather than something we have measured, but it matches the order in our rajma steps: boil the beans first, build the masala separately, then combine.

Shopping for the week

Dried black lentils (sabut urad), kidney beans, mustard greens, spinach, cornmeal, onions, ginger, garlic, tomatoes, butter, a small tub of cream, basmati. For the pantry staples you already own, Degchi can keep them marked Have, Low or Out and fill the shopping list from what is running low; a quick try-it version is on the home page. For more cold-weather cooking from Bangladesh, our khichuri rainy-day recipe is another one-pot answer to a grey evening.