Dinner du Jour - Healthy and Wholesome

Holidays are the times when preparing and having food is not a chore, it's a work of art, it's creativity, it's destressing, it's fun.

Monday was a holiday, as the city celebrated Eid. We too celebrated the holiday with great, wholesome, healthy and tasty food. Our fridge was stocked with great fresh vegetables - mushrooms, zucchini, capsicum, bell-peppers and broccoli. We decided to make sauteed vegetables, hung-yogurt cheese spread on toasted multi-grain bread with steaming hot tomato soup.

The hung-yogurt cheese spread has always been the pièce de résistance on our dinner table. This was my Mom's concoction - yogurt was hung overnight in a muslin, the solids retrieved in the morning mixed with a pinch of salt, lots of pepper, cilantro and chopped green chillies.

This time around, we gave Mom's concoction a new twist - we avoided salt - low sodium meals is a fad, we've caught on to! We added finely chopped Del Monte black olives, mashed capers, crushed black, pink, green, white and red peppercorns (that's something we took a fancy to after visiting Coorg). The cheese spread was whisked vigorously to fluff it up with air and it was then chilled.

Next we took on the vegetables. Into the pan went half a teaspoon of Del Monte olive oil, followed by rough onion cubes. When the onions turned light translucent, in went cubed zucchini. Exactly three minutes after that went in broccoli florets, followed by diced capsicum, bell-peppers and halved mushrooms. These were sauteed for the next seven minutes. The vegetables were cooked but retained their unique crunchiness. Then went it a good number of green Del Monte olives followed a sprinkling of oregano, crushed peppercorns and dill - no salt was added, keeping in mind the zero-sodium philosophy. After another two minutes of tossing the vegetables, it was all done.

Slices of multigrain bread were toasted on top of which a thick coating of the cheese spread was applied. For a touch of extra spiciness, we sprinkled Spanish paprika on the toast!

And the food was yum - the spread on toast was absolutely out of the world - flavourful, creamy, spicy with just about a touch of sourness! That went very well with the sauteed vegetables and soup!

It was truly a healthy and wholesome dinner - a dinner du jour! 

As the the Worldfoody.com page on Facebook says that the adventurous food lover in you would try the recipes, adjust ingredients to suit your tastes, then call them your own. That's what Neeti and I did - we adapted my Mom's concoction to give a different twist with olives and capers. You too can do that!

Bon appétit!