Quick & Easy Vegetable Biryani

This is an extremely painless version of biryani which takes about 5-10 minutes prep work followed by 10 minutes in the pressure cooker. Ofcourse you cannot compare its taste with your traditional Hyderabadi dum Biryani :-) :-) nevertheless this tastes pretty good for a 20 minute recipe :-)

For the Biryani (following portion feeds 2):
1. Wash 1 1/2 cups of basmati rice and soak in 2 1/2 cups of water.
2.  Take some ghee in the pressure cooker. Add whole garam masala to it i.e. jeera (cumin), kali elaichi (black cardamom), dalchini (cinnamon), star anise & bay leaves.
3. Add some onions sliced lengthwise, biryani masala and tomato puree, saute for 2-3 mins.
4. Now add a small bag of frozen mixed vegetables, soaked rice along with the water, chopped fresh mint leaves & salt to taste.
5. Shut the pressure cooker and cook for 7-10 mins.
6. After pressure escapes from the cooker, add fresh chopped cilantro to the rice and serve hot.

For the Raita:
1. Finely chop onions, green chillies, cucumber & tomatoes.
2. Add water to some yogurt so that it thins out.
3. Add the ingredients from #1 & #2 and to it add kala namak (black salt), chat masala, ground roasted jeera & salt. Adjust amount of salt since chat masala and kala namak are already salty.

Note:
1. Rice :: water proportion is 1 :: 2, but if you cook in the pressure cooker, with vegetables that will release water, the rice will become mush. So use little less than double the amount of water.
2. Be generous with the tomato puree. It gives the biryani a rich color and adds to the flavor.
3. If you are a non vegetarian, add some chicken bouillon cubes into the rice and skip or reduce the salt. Really improves the flavor.
4. I use Everest Biryani masala and find it significantly better that MDH & Badshah biryani masala.