I had out of town friends visiting last Sunday and we ended up going to the new Indian restaurant in town for dinner. After a very long wait, we enjoyed chicken vindaloo, Indian eggplant (bartha), channa masala, rice and plain naan. Since my friends were departing on the ferry, I inherited the dinner leftovers — everything but the chicken, which the three of us polished off. I ate Indian food for my next meal and made the leftover rice into rice cakes for breakfasts (My mother made rice cakes like these: leftover rice mixed with beaten egg, nutmeg, vanilla, a little sugar and a few grains of salt, fried like pancakes in butter. I eat them topped with fresh fruit in the late spring and summer).

When I was a senior at university I took a room in a shared apartment with grad students from India and Thailand. We got along well and each of them taught me to make some of the foods from their home countries. I learned to make cucumber raita and a simple potato-coconut curry, a simple version of som tom, made with carrots instead of green papaya and a dish made with minced meat and basil.

As a junior abroad I had eaten a few curries in Indian restaurants in London and my mother made lamb curry over rice from leftover roast lamb, relying on commercial curry powder and lamb gravy, but the South Indian vegetarian cuisine of my roommate was new to me.

I remember that she taught me to remove the seeds from cucumbers and to cut them into small slices with a knife. I asked why we couldn’t grate the cucumber, but she said that the texture would be wrong.

Indeed. All of these years later when summer brings fresh green pickling cucumbers and cilantro to the market at the same time, I buy cukes by the half dozen, stock up on dried coconut and plain yogurt, take home a bunch of cilantro and make raita. Raita is an excellent side dish or salad to eat in warm weather.

I don’t measure anything for raita. Today I used four cucumbers, seeds carefully scraped away with a knife, three large dollops of plain yogurt, a handful of chopped fresh cilantro roots, stalks and leaves and a dash of sea salt. After mixing all of that in a bowl I heated about a teaspoon of peanut oil and added maybe half a teaspoon of mustard seeds, leaving them on the burner until the seeds began to pop. If chilies were in the market, I might have added up to a half of a minced serrano chile; as it is, I added a shake or two of red pepper flakes.

I ate this simple raita with an equally simple potato curry: peeled and boiled potatoes mashed with cumin seeds, coconut, salt and more cilantro, sometimes in a bowl, sometimes rolled up in a heated whole wheat tortilla.

After eating Indian food for a week at home, I am not tired of it, so today I made another bowl of raita, a pot of basmati rice and a simple version of aloo chole. I pored over various Indian and vegetarian cookbooks and looked online a bit before settling on the following method:

Mince one onion and add to one tablespoon of hot oil in a skillet (I use peanut oil for Indian food unless I am cooking with coconut oil). Stir onion until it begins to brown and add three cloves of minced garlic and a small knob of fresh ginger, grated. Add two teaspoons of ground coriander, and one teaspoon each of cumin seeds and tumeric, plus salt to taste. Add a bit of water if the mixture begins sticking to the pan.

When all of that smells toasty, but not burnt, add a can of tomato sauce (you can use chopped fresh tomatoes in tomato season), two cans of garbanzo beans — aka chick peas — and a dollop of tamarind paste. Cover and cook while you peel and chop three medium-sized potatoes. Add the potatoes and cook covered until the potatoes are done. Although the chick peas are already cooked, cooking them allows them to absorb some of the sauce and allows the sauce to develop flavor. While the aloo chole simmers, chop another handful of fresh cilantro to sprinkle on top after the cooking is done. One online cook suggested I add a squeeze of lemon and/or some garam masala. I did add the squeeze of lemon, but I was too lazy to make up garam masala today.

As of this writing, I have had two bowls of rice, aloo chole and raita, one for lunch and one for dinner. I am not tired of eating them yet. When I run out of whole wheat tortillas, I might make an Indian flat bread: rotis are pretty easy, made with whole wheat flour.

I have more complex Indian dishes in my repertory: long-simmered carrot halwa, bengan bartha, black-eyed peas cooked with mushrooms. I have the cookbook written by the original chef of Ajanta restaurant in Berkeley, which specializes in regional Indian foods. But on the cusp of summer I want simple recipes that do not take much time to prepare, especially because I am currently caring for a semi-invalid formerly feral cat with a seizure disorder. Onyx does not let me sleep many hours a night and I don’t like to leave her alone for more than two hours at a stretch. But even when Onyx was well I used the warmer weather to combat the weeds in my yards, leaving less time for meal preparation.