Kalmi Shaak
Following Bengali tradition, Chitrita Banerji's mother presented this vegetable dish as a first course — delicate yet spicy, it gets the appetite going. But you could serve it as a side dish with the mung beans and the eggplant fritters. The original recipe called for mustard oil, but because it's so hard to find an FDA-approved brand — many bottles are labeled "for massage only," though Indians find that they're fine to cook with — we have substituted vegetable oil.
