Tangy Dal

The past few weeks / months I've been working pretty hard to study for two oral exams for my Ph.D. program in Math, which will be held tomorrow. As such (and due to passover) I've been pretty lax about posting and cooking. However, I did manage to make a nice dal a few days ago which I figure I will share (I think I'm done with studying and now I get to relax). I call this a tangy dal since the key flavors enhancing the dal are ginger, tomato paste and a little apple cider vinegar (plus some brown sugar). I decided to try to make something tangy since I remember my old roommate's girlfriend telling me that in Bangladesh cuisine, curries and dals are often tangy, and this sounded interesting to me.
The dal I chose to use was Mong Dal. Its a very small whole lentil which results in a pretty thick consistency when fully cooked. I soaked a cup or so of these over-night. The next day I heated some oil in a pot and added a few bay leaves, and some finely diced dried hot pepper (often people use this whole, but I decided to experiment with dicing it this time), plus half a stick of cinnamon and a few cloves. After about a minute and once the bay leaves began to brown (not burn) I added in some mustard seeds and some cumin seeds and gave them about a minute also. When the mustard seeds started to pop (and when I managed to finish dicing a large onion and some garlic) in when the onion and garlic. Mostly out of forgetfulness, but did not add any ginger at this point. However, in retrospect, my later method in including the ginger worked well, so I might just go with that again in the future.

Once the onions got translucent I cleared a spot on the bottom of the pot and add a little more oil and then the drained dal. The idea was to roast them a little (but it didn't see to work since they were pretty water-logged). I'm not really sure how much water I ended up using, but I would need to guess over two cups. The key was to make sure that the lentils didn't burn on the bottom. After cooking for about an hour and a half, the dal separated and became a thick sauce.

It was also at about this point when I remembered that I should have used some ginger. The difference between a bad dal and a good dal comes in the last minute of cooking. There is only so much flavor which can be imparted to a dal which cooks for about two hours. Solid spices work --- powder spices lose their flavor over the long cooking time. The way to spice dal is, in the end, to add an oil and tomato based spice sauce to the dal. I had run out of onion, or else I would have used some in this, but what I ended up doing is dicing some garlic, and ginger. Then I heated up about two tablespoons of oil, and added some garam masala powder plus a little curry powder to the oil and after a few second of sizzling I added the ginger and garlic. I gave it just enough time for the garlic to begin to brown, before I added in a little over half a can of tomato paste, and mixed this together thoroughly. This mixture then went into my dal and got mixed until well distributed. The final touch was a little brown sugar and a few dashes of apple cider vinegar. The spice level was a little high, so I added a few spoonfuls of yogurt directly into the pot and mixed it up.

This dal keeps for a long time, and can be microwaved in two minutes for a great meal. I had bought a loaf of rye bread from the Jewish bakery nearby, so I used toasted slices of the bread to dip into the dal (though more traditional Indian breads probably work well too).

I think that the tangyness worked well with this type of lentil, though I'm not sure why.

Good points to remember with dal is that a little acid after cooking works well. People often squeeze some lemon into the dal -- I didn't have lemon so I used some vinegar (just a little). Also remember to only use solid spices during the cooking, and afterwards to include the powder spices in the form of a tomato/oil mixture. Also make sure the lentils are fully broken down before adding this mix.

Master Chef NYU Premiere, April 13th, 6pm

Here is the advertisement for the Master Chef NYU Premiere:

The Master Chef Premiere and Smart Cooking Expo is on Monday, April 13 in the Palladium Multi-purpose room from 6-8pm.
You can:
* Taste the Winning Team's 3-course dinner
* Meet with the SHC Dietitian and the Peer Health Awareness Team peer educators to have your healthful eating questions answered
* Enjoy a refreshing fruit Smoothie
* Watch the competition unfold and see who wins during the screening of Master Chef 2009 an NYU-TV production.

I will be there (not eating anything due to passover). Let me know if you want to come and I can make sure we all find our way there together. I imagine that I'll be second most featured in the video they make, plus you'll get to see me receive my prize.

Big pot of food

Every once in a while I make a large quantity of food, enjoy it for a few days, and then get sick of eating it. I am not one to waste, so I instead improvise and create a big pot of food, including this previously made dish, with a variety of other food stuff, so as to change the flavor enough so I can resume enjoying the content. A little while back I made a very nice black beans dish which, after realizing that eating any non-trivial amount caused excess expulsion of gas, I abandoned eating. On Wednesday I resolved to turn this fart food into something I could eat safely (by amply diluting the beans with other material). Thus was born my most recent big pot of food.

Most people, I imagine, have the experience of food accruing in the fridge, without any clear destination. In addition to my black beans, I had some odds and ends of vegetables, an old cheese rind, and two Yuenging Light beers (I mistakenly bought these rather than regular ones and immediately regretted it). The key rule in this game is to cook stuff for a while and too be careful about overloading with flavors. When I started out I was unsure whether I was making a soup or what. After chopping the veggies and adding the beer, plus a little cider and cider vinegar, I determined that make this a full meal in its self. So I added some pearl barley and threw in the cheese rind.

A thought crossed my mind, somewhere after the cheese rind began to cook into the mixture -- if I made a soup, how would I be able to bring it to my office? I have never invested in a soup carrying device, so this would be utterly impossible. What happened next, I can not alone take credit for --- I am but acting as any one would who stands on the shoulders of food giants. I decided that to both thicken up the mixture and to improve the nutrients, I would add an ample amount of oatmeal and cook it until the oatmeal was totally broken down. The result was thick enough to be stored and brought to NYU. The oatmeal made for a really nice thick sauce which carried the flavors quiet well.

I will need to keep this in mind as a good way to thicken a soup (just be sure to cook it enough that it fully breaks apart).