What happens when you are a foodie as well as a gardener too? You love to eat different types of dishes. You always want to explore different food items and suddenly your plants started producing plenty of capsicums that too in the early summer. What will you do? Harvesting fresh homegrown vegetables itself full of fun. But having capsicum based dishes almost every alternate day will definitely bring happiness. Growing capsicum plants in containers is an easy task but preparing a menu with capsicum based dishes for the coming days is not an easy task.
I have 7 capsicum plants in 6 pots. Though I harvested 2 capsicums last month but from this month I have started actual harvesting of capsicum from my container garden. This month I harvested 7 capsicums at a time and I will harvest 3-4 more capsicums in the next week. So I can expect more & more capsicum in coming days.
I sowed seeds early days of last winter. I thought I would get a good amount of capsicum in the winter. But all of my plants were seriously affected by insects. So the growth of my plants was stagnant for almost 6 weeks. That is why I got only 2 fruits last winter season. I thought the capsicum plant is one season crop. So was disappointed. But later I came to know that those plants can survive more than one year if proper care is taken. So now I am hopeful after harvesting multiple fruits in this month. There are also many flowers on those plants.
In case you want to know that how I am caring my plants then I would say I follow almost same care for all vegetable plants and apply balanced fertilizer after every 10 days. My plants totally depends upon mustard cake fertilizer (sometimes charged with balanced NPK 18-18-18) & monthly foliar spray of micro nutrients & Epsom salt. That is all about fertilizer.
3 times foliar spray of organic fungicide (Thunders & Trichoderma viride) as well as insecticide (Kaka, neem oil, old butter milk, dashparni ark) every month. I never wanted to be expert, just kept it simple for all of my vegetable plants.
Okay, now here comes all those capsicum based dishes that I would love to have during the coming days. Capsicum is such a vegetable that is not so popular in this region. People mostly use it to make non-veg item because capsicum makes the taste of non-veg dishes better. Another item where capsicum is used that is fried rice. Some people may add it to mix veg curry if there is capsicum in their kitchen for several days, haha. Otherwise, most people in Bengal or other neighbouring parts do not buy it from the market. But whoever explore different dishes often try these delicious capsicum based dishes.
Aloo capsicum
The first item that comes to my mind is aloo capsicum or aloo shimla mirch. Most Northern Indian people call it capsicum. I love this dish a lot. It delicious to have with roti or paratha.
Capsicum raita
This is a very uncommon raita. You can hardly find such raita at a restaurant. So in case you want to try this then you need to prepare this at home. I love it but I can not have it very often because not everybody will like it.
Capsicum soup
Whoever likes the flavour of capsicum will definitely enjoy this awesome soup. I tried it several times. I tried a similar soup at a restaurant. But you can also easily make such soup at home too. As I would a good amount of capsicum from the garden then I can easily try this soup whenever I want.
Shimla mirch ka pakoda
If you do not like capsicum then also you will enjoy this capsicum based snack. It is very delicious. You can try it with various chatni. I love to have it with puffed rice/chivda/chire.Infact most Indian people love any kind of pakoda. So this is for everybody.
Shimla mirch masala curry
This is another very popular capsicum based curry. It is a tasty main course dish to have with pulao as well as various Indian flatbread (like roti, paratha, naan, kulcha etc). Did you ever try it? It is a very delicious & super rich & spicy dish.
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