Shoestring culinary magnificence
Yum, wow, I've been practicing a really easy tasty inexpensive curry I found online, and tonight found an African lentil dish that's just as cheap and easy and goes pretty well with it -- just in time, too, since my rice cooker still has lots of aromatic yellow rice left from Monday!
The curry is Kabuli Chana Dal, with my additional shortcut of using canned chickpeas, rinsed to cut down the salt content, and canned chopped tomatoes (if you can't get those unsalted, eliminate the other salt), and their shortcut of chopping half the chickpeas in an electric chopper (or food processor or blender). Now I'm the worst you'll find at timing cooking steps, but after making this Kabuli Chana Dal 2 or 3 times, I'm at least managing to take the lids off cans just as they're called for and so on, without burning the onions. Oh, the recipe didn't say anything about oil, but I start off with about a tablespoon of ghee. Prob'ly not required, but mm, I love what ghee does to a recipe!
The lentils are "Vegetarian Lentils" from South Africa, according to my The Africa News Cookbook, African Cooking for Western Kitchens. It calls for "orange lentils" which I took to mean red lentils. I used only half the salt, and before cooking, I washed the red lentils very thoroughly. They still raise a fair bit of white scum when boiled, which I skimmed off. The boiling took less than an hour (but then, I spent about 15 minutes washing the lentils in hot water). The Spicy Lentils (at the bottom of that page) is nearly the identical recipe.
For once, I actually used fresh garlic. Generally, I use pureed garlic from a jar; the same with ginger. Since we're running low on garlic purée but have a huge mesh bag of fresh garlic, I experimented with peeling a whole head of it rapidly, cutting the bottom all off at once, then almost squirting the cloves out of their peel. As you might gather, that gave me a lot more garlic than the recipes called for, but who'd use only one or two cloves in recipes this big? Going heavy on the garlic particularly makes sense with the Kabuli Chana Dal, since cans of chickpeas or tomatoes are never just the right size, so I wind up increasing them by around 50% (and the tomato chunks were the salted variety, so again, increasing the chickpeas and garlic made sense).
The aromatic yellow rice I mentioned is basically Madhur Jafferey's recipe, but made in a rice cooker. I wash 2 cups of basmati rice, add a half stick of cinnamon, 3 bay leaves, 4 cloves, and up to a teaspoon of turmeric, followed by 3 cups of water (which helps distribute the turmeric). It's lovely stuff!
The curry is Kabuli Chana Dal, with my additional shortcut of using canned chickpeas, rinsed to cut down the salt content, and canned chopped tomatoes (if you can't get those unsalted, eliminate the other salt), and their shortcut of chopping half the chickpeas in an electric chopper (or food processor or blender). Now I'm the worst you'll find at timing cooking steps, but after making this Kabuli Chana Dal 2 or 3 times, I'm at least managing to take the lids off cans just as they're called for and so on, without burning the onions. Oh, the recipe didn't say anything about oil, but I start off with about a tablespoon of ghee. Prob'ly not required, but mm, I love what ghee does to a recipe!
The lentils are "Vegetarian Lentils" from South Africa, according to my The Africa News Cookbook, African Cooking for Western Kitchens. It calls for "orange lentils" which I took to mean red lentils. I used only half the salt, and before cooking, I washed the red lentils very thoroughly. They still raise a fair bit of white scum when boiled, which I skimmed off. The boiling took less than an hour (but then, I spent about 15 minutes washing the lentils in hot water). The Spicy Lentils (at the bottom of that page) is nearly the identical recipe.
For once, I actually used fresh garlic. Generally, I use pureed garlic from a jar; the same with ginger. Since we're running low on garlic purée but have a huge mesh bag of fresh garlic, I experimented with peeling a whole head of it rapidly, cutting the bottom all off at once, then almost squirting the cloves out of their peel. As you might gather, that gave me a lot more garlic than the recipes called for, but who'd use only one or two cloves in recipes this big? Going heavy on the garlic particularly makes sense with the Kabuli Chana Dal, since cans of chickpeas or tomatoes are never just the right size, so I wind up increasing them by around 50% (and the tomato chunks were the salted variety, so again, increasing the chickpeas and garlic made sense).
The aromatic yellow rice I mentioned is basically Madhur Jafferey's recipe, but made in a rice cooker. I wash 2 cups of basmati rice, add a half stick of cinnamon, 3 bay leaves, 4 cloves, and up to a teaspoon of turmeric, followed by 3 cups of water (which helps distribute the turmeric). It's lovely stuff!