Vegetable Soup and Papaya Salad (Sabji Shorba & Papita Salaad)

These were both very popular with my partner. I figured he would like them. The salad was practically Mexican: papaya, avocado, lime, honey. The recipe calls for Jerusalem artichokes, or "sunchokes," but the grocery store didn't have them. Thank goodness for iPhones! I was half ready to buy regular artichokes when I decided to Google them. Turns out they are completely different things. A Jerusalem artichoke, it turns out, is a tuber. The internet suggested turnips as a possible substitution, so I went with that. When I returned home, I checked the cookbook, which suggests jicama or celeriac. Those would have been nice, but the turnips turned out just fine.

The soup was a bit of an adventure. I hadn't noticed that the recipe calls for a pressure cooker. No alternate instructions. Yamuna simply assumes that you have a pressure cooker. It turns out that I do have a pressure cooker, but I'd never used it. I got it from my aunt about a year ago, but there's no instruction booklet, so I had to just go with intuition. Fortunately, it's pretty much idiot proof. Its a newer pressure cooker, and electric one, so it doesn't have the little rocker piece. Instead, it's all digital and pretty self-explanatory.

The soup was great. A million ingredients: tomatoes, carrots, celery, potatoes, zucchini, corn, green beans, spinach, and whole barley, wheat, and rye, plus two kinds of rice and split green peas. Yum!