Liquid Diet from an Indian Perspective

[DanM]

I will be on a liquid diet for the foreseeable future, so I want to come up with creative ideas on what I can eat other than cream of name your vegetable soups. There can be no chunks, seeds, or other bits in the food. I will pass everything through a strainer just to be safe. It has to be thin enough to drink. Lassis were mentioned in another thread. I was wondering what Indian dishes I could have while on this diet.

Thanks!

Dan

[Jenni]

May I ask why you are on a liquid diet? No worries if you don't want to share, and I hope this isn't too nosey.

Thin dal would be very nutritious for you, as well as delicious. Usually the tadka would mean some little seedy bits, but you could easily blend them into smoothness if you wanted (this would be better than straining - more flavour). In South India there is a dish called rasam, which is a thin, spicy "soup" with a lot of flavour. Again, you would have to blend for complete smoothness. There are many varieties of rasam - mint, garlic, tomato, pineapple, cumin, pepper, fenugreek...you can go on and on! A quick search online will help you find loads.

There's also kadhi, which is a soupy dish made from yoghurt stabalised with gram flour so that it can be heated. Again, seeds and spices would need to be blended in for you. It's a lovely dish though.

Ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine) has a whole range of liquid foods for a special diet after panchakarma (a special Ayurvedic purification treatment made of 5 main treatments). They tend to be pretty bland, but they can provide a starting point for interesting ideas for you. For instance, there's a pretty liquid form of kichdi (a "porridge" of rice and dal) that you could try. This can be seasoned with a variety of spices, but a good starting point would be fresh ginger, cumin, black pepper and asafetida. I don't know if you have specific calorie requirements, but kichdi is best with plenty of ghee

I hope this helps a little. The main problem you will find is that most dishes will have some spice seeds in them which will be a problem if you need total smoothness. Though as I have said, you can easily blend them. Good luck! I will try and think of some more things for you later.

[DanM]

Thanks Jenni. I will have surgery in two weeks to correct the damage caused by Crohn's disease. It will probably be 2 months before I can eat what I want again.

[v. gautam]

Red lentils, Lens culinaris, masoor dal, washed carefully, and cooked without any spices in plenty of water will have a thin clear supernatant that is an enormously flavorful broth by itself, or can become a stock base like chicken stock for other vegetarian soups. You can make a rice congee with this, and put petit pois, and mash those up.

Fantastic base for light tomato soup.

I regularly eat just the plain boiled red lentils, cooked slow and low, until completely dissolved by themselves, seasoned only with salt & fresh lime juice. Thai jasmine rice cooked to softness, is another favorite, in Bengal to accompany this. No ghee necessary, if this is the comfort food of chilhood! Mashed russet potato or yukon gold, too, pureed with milk, to accompany this. Or, mashed,pureed RIDGED GOURD, seasoned with salt & lime juice. Or, mashed, pureed acorn squash. You are into Bengali Brahman food!!!!!!!

Jasmine rice cooked to congee with coconut milk extracted fresh from frozen grated coconut. No cans with their chemical preservatives. Make sure to cook the milk thoroughly to kill any microbes.

[Or Maharashtrian Brahman, where saada vaaran is plain boiled tur [pigeon pea] dal, salt, lime juice, +/- ghee,with white rice].

Mung dal, very lightly roasted in a dry skillet cooked in plain water, salt; add green peas, tiny bit of ginger juice; puree. Eat with congee.

Urad dal, cook with low fat milk & water in slow cooker with chunk of ginger,& fennel & parsley stems in cheesecloth [remove later. Add some asafetida when you have a couple of hours left, if you desire, then yoghurt, if you like. Puree, eat with congee, and pureed cauliflower, potatoes, eggplant.

NO SEED, NO TEMPERING, NO SPICE in MANY dishes!! BRAHMAN cooking is extremely mild! Many vegetables are cooked in milk.

Rice, jasmine, washed, soaked, ground fine in blender: then cook down milk to your desired consistency, whatever you may tolerate, or use almond milk without boiling it down. Then introduce the rice slurry, gently cook it, and sweeten the mixture with maple syrup, or flavor with infusion of green cardamom & saffrom, and sweeten according to your desire. This will give you a mild dessert easy on the stomach.

ROASTED/PARCHED flour from BARLEY and CHICKPEAS, called TSAMPA, SHAKTU, SATTU, by Tibetans & Indians remain staples. They were the lifeblood of the Aryans, so much so that the word for "blessing" is ASHIRVAAD, where the ASHII refers to the 3 ASHI,viz. parched barley flour (shaktu), yoghurt, & ghee.

Tibetans will make a slurry of the TSAMPA with PHOCHAA, salted butter tea. It is a taste well worth acquiring. I know from experience that government hospitals in Calcutta began using this formula when faced with the problem of how to get malnourished female patients ready to undergo urgent surgery with the least delay, given their limited budgets.

Parched Chickpea flour can also be found, and can be cooked into very nutty tasting, delicious, soups lending a whole different dimension to the vegetable base. This SHAKTU/Sattu is very very different from the RAW chickpea flour, called BESAN, from which Kadhis, another type of vegtable-based or yoghurt-based brothy foods may be prepared.

The Iranian Kishk & the Iraqi kishk [the infamous kishk ha' baavli of the Torah!], two products sharing the same name but dissimilar to each other in content, and can also be looked into for soup base, along with true kefir.