Pumpkin khichdi

Like a cross between risotto and savoury porridge

Hey there! My name is Apoorva Sripathi, I’m a writer, editor, and artist. This week’s paid subscriber newsletter is a recipe for pumpkin khichdi, a real autumn/winter warmer. I hope you’ll give it a go. If you’d like to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. Thank you so much.

pumpkin khichdi topped with deep-fried onions aka the good stuff

I have been unburdened by my past self in these last few weeks. By that I mean I have been baking. A lot. It also makes sense to bake, now that I’ve moved to a cold, damp, wet country. Everything is more substantial, both the cooking and the eating – and the baking is incidental as well as it warms up our compact home. But I do miss my experiments in cooking in Chennai: using the rice cooker to make cake; making tahini, hummus, and tortillas from scratch; assembling sandwiches using random ingredients on hand. They were the balms to my jagged self.

Now I cook an hour or two earlier as the light around me is slowly dying. I am suddenly hungry and I no longer want cold sandwiches. I always want carbs¹. For my recipe column at Something Curated, I initially picked up two small pumpkins to make roasted pumpkin parathas – one sweet with jaggery, white pepper, nutmeg and cardamom, and one savoury with dill, coriander, and ricotta. But I swerved and made sweet potato and paneer rye parathas because I craved and wanted the sheer satisfaction that only potatoes seem to provide.

The longer the pumpkins sat on my kitchen counter, the more they deserved to be treated special, but amorphous. I have never roasted pumpkins before – simply because I had no opportunities or an oven to do so – and so it made sense here, now. I roasted them with the spices I had on hand, and the result is a deeply flavourful mash to base your mains around. I have used this three ways so far: as a soup with coconut milk, pumpkin bread with pumpkin seeds, and this creamy khichdi that is as soft as a velvet blanket thrown over yourself during the coldest of days.