Fried Veggies: Many in One

We all want varieties in our meals, don't we? Who would want to eat the same fried rice for both lunch and dinner? Or who would really want to have only biscuits for tea time snacks?! We do want to try out new stuffs, but at the same time, the one working on it often ends up exhausted trying out too many varieties on the same day. So, I came up with something that can ease out things for you, but at the same time it still provides variety to everyone at home.

Using one base recipe, we can derive at below three (or even more) variety of dishes:
1. Fried Rice
2. Spring Rolls/ Fried Momos
3. Steamed Momos
4. Others: Veg Noodles, Macaroni

Many in One

At first, prepare the fried veggies in bulk and keep it aside. Next, you may decide to either cook rice  for lunch(fried rice), or prepare dough for momos for evening snacks (steamed or fried).

Ingredients:

• Vegetables: 2 onions, 2 Carrots, beans, 1 capsicum, lots of cabbage, onion springs
• Minced Ginger and Garlic 
• Salt and Pepper
• Oil for frying
• Equal quantities of maida(all purpose floor) & wheat floor for preparing momo dough
• Cooked Rice for fried rice

Preparing Fried Veggies:

• Chop all vegetables into small pieces. 
• In a large pan, add sufficient oil. Once it becomes hot, add ginger, garlic and then onion. 
• Once this turns golden, add rest of the vegetables and cook them on medium flame without adding water. You may close it with a lid for faster cooking, but remember to keep stirring it frequently.
• After around 5-7 minutes, you will notice that the veggies turn a little translucent, indicating that its cooked. It better to leave the vegetables a little crunchy. Add onion springs and cook for less than a minute. Now add salt and pepper powder. Stir well and turn off the flame. 
• Keep some veggies aside for momos and use the rest to prepare fried rice as mentioned below.

Preparing Fried Rice:

• To the same pan which has the fried veggies, add a spoon of soy sauce. Saute on high flame for a minute and turn off flame. 
• Then add cooked-and-cooled rice and mix well. 
• Adjust salt & pepper as per taste. Your fried rice is now ready to be served.

Preparing Momos Outer sheets:

• Mix equal quantities of wheat flour and maida. 
• Add salt and water. Mix well to bring it to the consistency of poori dough. 
• Keep it covered for 20mins before rolling them.

Preparing Fried/Steamed Momos:

• Make round balls out of the dough and press them flat with a rolling pin.
• Now at the center of the flattened dough, place the vegetable fillings as shown below.
• Slowly pinch and bring the edges together and seal them.
• This is now ready to be deep fried (medium flame) or steamed in a cooker (medium flame, without whistle, for 15mins).

Spring Rolls/Fried Momos

Steamed Momos

Note:

• Momos turn out very delicious when we add cabbage in large quantities.
• To get an Indian flavor, you can choose to garnish the veggies with chopped coriander leaves instead of onion spring.
• Both momos and fried rice tastes best when served with tomato/chili sauce.
• For more spice, you can add chopped green chilies while preparing fried veggies, or alternatively use hot spicy sauce.
• Instead of adding cooked rice, you can choose to cook noodles or macaroni, and add the same fried veggies to it. This gives you veg noodles/ veg macaroni and adds variety at home.