The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

Masoor dal – the salmon-pink, hulled lentil – is a quick-cooking dal that needs no prior soaking or laborious cooking. My masoor dal tadka recipe rides on the pliability of masoor and has the dish ready to serve in a matter of minutes.

In case you’re wondering, tadka is the process of tempering spices in hot oil and pouring them along with the oil into a dish. I use ghee for tadka in this recipe; the aroma of ghee brings out the earthy flavor of masoor dal. (more…)

Confession time: I had to Google "nenua in English" for this post. I learnt that the vegetable is called sponge gourd: the name comes from the fact that the fibrous core of the gourd is dried and used as a sponge/loofah. Not surprisingly, the Latin name of sponge gourd is Luffa cylindra.

Be that as it may, it feels stilted to call the very Bihari nenua "sponge gourd" especially since I’m blogging about a very Bihari recipe. I’ll continue calling it nenua in this post.

Gourds pair well with dal, as in the lovely ridge gourd moong dal. Nenua chana is another case in point. This is a very uncomplicated recipe with few ingredients, the perfect kind for a new cook to test their skills on.

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In my pre-teen years, food mentions in books would send my senses into overdrive visualizing them. The less familiar the food, the more vivid the imagined details. "Hot buttered scones", said Enid Blyton, and I pictured mildly sweet nimki-like snack twisted into conical shape, dripping with melted butter. "Lemonade" to my mind was a cross between nimbu pani and Limca. "Red radishes" were slender, graceful and blood red, more alluring than the humble white we had access to.

Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, I realised I am not much changed today. Ashima makes "thick channa dal with swollen brown raisins" for her party. What can that be like?  Now I don’t just imagine, I cook my interpretation of it :)

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Osaman is Gujarat’s answer to rasam: a light broth with ‘dal water’ as base. It gets its kick from the high-power tempering – salt, sweet, sour and hot all at once.

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Those beautiful pale green berries on the vegetable vendor’s cart looked so bewitching, I had to pick them up. I used them in this delicious amla dal (gooseberry dal) and loved the result, I can heartily recommend the recipe to you.

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If you a want a change from the same old yellow dal but not something as heavy as rajma and channa, sabut moong dal (greem gram) is the one to go for.

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Doesn’t food acquire an exotic sheen when described in language alien to its roots? Mangodi sounds like something grandmas from my native place would add to curries simmering in earthen pots. Sundried lentil dumplings? That’s like stuff my hostel-residing cousins in Bangalore would cook on a rare Sunday, as they do pasta and bruschetta.

But there you have it. Mangodi = sundried lentil dumplings. Choose the name you like. Made of ground moong dal with a hint of salt and spices, mangodi globules are sun-dried for 2-3 days before they are ready to use in curries.

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