We are always looking for ways to incorporate vegetables into our food and in this recipe, the goat cheese works like a binder and adds flavor to the asparagus.

Fried in a light delicate pakora batter, squash blossoms were ethereally delicious, especially when the fried blossom pakora was stuffed inside a fresh blossom.

Seldom made at home, samosas are popular on street side corners or carts bubbling away on large vats of hot oil.

You may never look at tempura the same way after you’ve tasted a pakora!

These cutlets are best made in the spring, when fresh peas are available.

The days of Holi are, hands down, some of the best memories of my childhood in India. Based on the lunar calendar, festivities begin the day after the full moon, usually in March, when there are neighborhood bonfires with people singing and dancing around them. The bonfire signifies the end of sorrows, grievances and the healing of old wounds. The morning after, street parties begin! My two brothers and I would wake up, put on old throwaway clothes and hit the streets, our pockets overflowing with colored powders. We would stalk the neighborhood, visiting friends and family, throwing powders on everyone and each other, then continue to frolic all day long. My parents, on the other hand, would stay home most of the day and join family or friends for decadent late-night soirees with card games, flowing whiskey, samosas, pakoras and occasional sips of bhang, a popular cannabis-infused elixir. Unrecognizable, our bodies covered in layers and layers of colored powders and exhausted from the excitement, my brothers and I would end the day eating street foods — pani poori, chaats, biryanis and pakoras — then head home to wash up. Pakoras are delicious vegetable fritters with a deeply flavorful chickpea batter — and though I am not a big proponent of deep-frying at home, some occasions warrant it. You can even make these in a skillet filled with oil, then strain the oil and use it for cooking later.

Inspired by the lentil cakes of Maharashtra, these are lighter and fluffier because of the addition of zucchini.

Pakora is the lesser-known cousin of tempura. Just like tempura, it’s a fritter made with vegetables such as onions, peppers, potatoes — but instead of a batter of white flour, the batter is made with chickpea flour.

Channa usually refers to garbanzo beans, and you could use the common white or the black variety. Having cooked and seasoned garbanzo beans in the refrigerator is like have a semi-serious meal a few minutes away.

These make the most delicious snacks to go with cocktails or a martini. They are rich, so eat sparingly!

During my childhood, my mother would start preparing for Holi a few days before by making savory and sweet snacks. One of my favorite snacks was mathi, a salty deep-fried cracker usually spiced with black pepper.

I love the flavor of papaya and often add it to chopped salads or Indian street snacks, called chaats.

Also called ‘sayun patata’, this is one of the most popular breakfast dishes of the Sindhi culture ~ seviyan (or seyun) are simply toasted vermicelli, usually made from whole wheat flour.

Here are dates stuffed with a savory mixture of chèvre with a touch of minced serrano pepper to bring up the heat and aromatic minced mint leaves.

When I was working as a microbiologist in Canada many years ago, a Hungarian co-worker would often bring in cabbage rolls for lunch. Common to the cuisine of central, northern and eastern European countries, cabbage rolls are usually stuffed with meat and rice. While I developed a fondness for them at the time, they were largely forgotten until recently. In helpless and heartfelt solidarity with our Ukrainian brothers and sisters as we watch the havoc unfold, I find myself wanting to cook their cuisine, from borscht to holubtsi, the Ukrainian cabbage roll. These are a simple vegetarian version.

Poha, which simply means flattened rice, is a quintessential Indian breakfast particularly popular in Gujarat. It is easy and quick to make and is usually prepared with potatoes. The peanuts add a delicious crunch. But eating starch with starch can get heavy and substituting other vegetables like asparagus or roasted yellow beets instead makes for a more interesting, healthy and delicious version.

Lettuce wraps are essentially a delicious and nutritious vessel for fillings and are far more satisfying than salads - especially in the summer, when the heat in our bodies helps us digest raw foods.

These peppers are stuffed with garbanzo beans, but you just as easily stuff them with hummus or a different bean. To create a layer of flavors, the peppers are topped with yogurt as well as a green herb sauce. If you have leftovers, the next day just chop everything up and add it to scrambled eggs, rice or pasta.

Here is a recipe for first creating a spreadable slightly fluffy seasoned cream cheese and next, you can choose three options of masalas to prepare.

This dessert is inspired by a street sweet of India called ‘Daulat ki chaat’ (daulat means rich). It is rich but incredibly light and essentially just a whipped cream but the incremental addition of sugar and saffron makes all the difference.

As you can probably guess, the popcorn at my house is neither microwave popcorn nor does it have only melted butter.

Chaat — a family of roadside salty, sweet, tangy and crunchy snacks in India — come in many sizes, shapes and flavors. After leaving India, this is the food I missed most and, over time, taught myself how to make versions of it. These days, I can pretty much turn anything into a chaat if I just have the right sauces, which usually comprise of a creamy yogurt sauce flecked with cumin, a bright herby cilantro chutney or just a handful of herbs and something sweet — perhaps diced mango or peaches, or just a dash of sugar. The crunch can come via crushed nuts, tortilla or potato chips. Top it off with a sprinkle of black salt and roasted crushed cumin seeds and there you have a chaat.

The garbanzo beans are seasoned to a spicy richness with cumin, black pepper, ginger and asafetida and then added to the salad.

Commonly used in Mexican cuisine, hoja santa are an essential ingredient in the green mole from Oaxaca and often used in soups or stews.

As a,way to incorporate more sesame seeds into my diet, I devised this simple mixture to top off a salad, morning oatmeal, or stir into a pot of rice.

Frozen peas may be a year-round offering, but this beautiful spring weather calls for the fresh variety.

In the summer, corn can be found on street carts all over India. And the seasoning could not be simpler: salt & chili powder with a squeeze of lemon juice.

Bhel poori is a common Indian street food native to Mumbai and cities in Gujarat. Usually made with puffed rice (a very common snack in India) and varying mixes of seasonal vegetables, herbs, chutneys and crunch bits of chickpea flour or wheat flour. This is an instant ‘salad’ so put it together just before eating. The ‘bhel’ refers to puffed rice and ‘poori’ refers to bits of pooris (fried wheat puffs) crushed just before mixing. Here we are replacing the poori with sev, a crispy chickpea noodle found in most Indian grocery stores.

There are umpteen ways to stuff peppers - this recipe will work for 4 large peppers as well.

Back in 2001, we opened Indika with this salad, and it was an instant success. To satisfy my chaat cravings, I ate it for lunch for three weeks straight. The sweet, spicy, tangy flavors paired with greens made it a satisfying, substantial salad. We served it at Pondicheri in New York City; our landlord would come in for it regularly and declared it the best chicken salad in the city.

Hummus is central to many Mediterranean cuisines — but it does not need to be made with chickpeas. Medieval cookbooks mainly mention only two ingredients in hummus_ chickpeas and ground sesame, but today, we add garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. Instead of chickpeas, one can use simple yellow or red lentils, red beans or black beans for a different flavor. This recipe uses micro-nutrient dense black beans combined with black sesame seeds, which I have resolved to eat more of due to their high calcium content.

Here is a simple way to coat a masala, spice blend, on the pecans for added flavor.

These sweet, spicy and tart nuts are a big hit at Pondicheri Bake Lab + Shop. Flavors that will satisfy all of your tastebud’s desires.

There are a variety of Asian-type rolls, most of which originate from China. However, my favorite are the fresh spring rolls native to Vietnam. I love that they are rice-paper wrapped and not fried, and as far as filling goes, pretty much anything works. Traditionally made with chicken, pork or shrimp and vermicelli, I love stuffing them with a mixture of raw and cooked vegetables with lots of herbs for fragrance and flavor. When picking vegetables, make sure they are cold when you are ready to make the rolls. It does take a bit of expertise to make them — at first, I was making lumpy, awkwardly shaped rolls with vegetables sticking out. They still tasted good, and my family happily ate them up. It took some time and practice to get them to look uniform — the key is not to overstuff them and pack the vegetables in tight when rolling.

From the Persian sambusak, a crisp filled baked pastry and the precursor to the samosa, to the Lebanese sfeeha, open faced square meat pies, there exists a whole family of savory snacks worth getting to know. My current favorite is the fatayer, a triangular baked pastry usually stuffed with cheese, feta, spinach or meat that is easy and fun to make.

Chaats are beloved savory snacks that originated in India and are usually available at roadside stalls or food carts. At the core, they are salty, sweet, spicy, crunchy snacks usually involving vegetables, lentils and herbs with drizzles of chutneys and yogurt. It’s the food from India most of us transplants miss the most. Over the years, I have tried dozens of variations from corn mint chaat to the quintessential pani poori and loved them all. Here is a salad loosely based on the idea of a chaat. The yogurt provides the creamy touch, mushroom the meaty, cherry the sweet and tarragon the herbaceous finish.

This is is one of the most iconic and utterly delicious snack foods from the state of Gujarat.

India has officially recorded 500 regional preparations of dal, the lentil stew, yet I can promise you that none of them is served cold. This may be in part because based on Ayurvedic principles, beans are easier to digest warm. However, I decided to do some experimenting and started with the simplest kind of lentil, the humble yellow moong dal. It just needs a 20-minute soak and cooks in another 15-20 minutes. Instead of sesame seeds, I used toasted peanut butter and instead of lemon, I topped the spread off with amchur, the green mango powder and lemony coriander seeds. And in place of garlic, I used ginger, which is typically used when preparing dal to mitigate the bloating often associated with beans. The results were absolutely delicious and worth a try. I know I will be experimenting with new combinations for some time to come.

According to Ayurveda, peppers — like garlic and onions — are heating vegetables, which warm and stimulate the body. This helps prepare us for fighting off infections, which is all the more reason to eat them.

As we said our final goodbye to Indika, the restaurant I opened in 2001, this past week, I was reminiscing about Corn Mint Chaat, a popular summer salad. Renditions of street food from India, with magical combinations of fresh vegetables and aromatic herb-infused sweet, spicy and savory chutneys with crunchy tidbits in almost any form — and sometimes turned on its head into a salad — bring on tastes that make most of us transplants from India swoon. One of the unusual flavors common to chaat is black salt, a sulfurous salt native to India. It smells funky (imagine boiled egg aroma), appears pink but turns blackish when it hits food or water and is absolutely delicious on chaats. Over the years, I have experimented with dozens of chaat combinations — from using potato or tortilla chips for crunch to grilled kale and basil leaves for herbs — but making one is no easy task. However, here is a take on the corn mint chaat that may be relatively easy to execute at home.

Here, we make a simple golden butter infused with fresh turmeric juice and some complimentary spices! Do give it a try…

Masalas do not have to be complex — they can be as simple as parsley, garlic, black pepper and olive oil. Having a masala in your kitchen cabinet or refrigerator is a great hack to whipping up a quick meal.

Here, a simple roasted composed beet chaat gets the crowning glory of chaat masala however, most salads are good candidates for a sprinkle of chaat masala.

There is nothing that symbolizes the beginning of life and the sweetness of humanity more than apples, especially when they are roasted in ghee and drizzled with honey and fresh cream. Consider it one of life’s simple pleasures and this is the time to indulge.