Just Good Dal

Sometimes there's a story behind a dish. You know, like, "I'll always remember when I first ate _______. It was springtime in Paris and I was a young lass fresh out of boarding school, making my way in the world for the first time. It changed my life, for that's when I first met...." etc. This is not one of those dishes. I have no epic story for dal – I just make it about once a week, it's a quick, easy, cheap source of protein, and it tastes really good. Perhaps there is an epic tale to be found in potato curry or yogurt rice, but those are stories for another day.

This is a South Indian style of dal (lentil stew). One of the South Indian elements of this dish is the use of mustard seeds, which are tempered in oil at the start of the cooking process. (Some folks do the tempering at the end and add the mustard seeds to the finished dish, but that's not the way I roll.) The mustard seeds add a pleasant nuttiness, but the trick is to fry them until they turn gray and start popping all over the place. If you don't do that, your mustard seeds will be bitter, and you will miss out on the pleasant nuttiness, which would be sad. I usually use a sliced yellow onion when I make this dal, but this time switched things up by using scallions instead. Either works just fine, but the scallions nicely accent the ginger, and make the dish sing just a little bit more.

One other note: I use mung dal when I make this. You could try other lentils, and I'm sure the result would be tasty, if unorthodox.

Oh, and one more thing: If you are unfamiliar with cooking Indian food this may seem a little complicated, but it really is easy enough for me to whip this up any time during the week. Just go to your local Indian grocery and stock up on the lentils and spices, and you'll be fine. Added bonus: Everything is much less expensive there.

Ginger Scallion Dal
To cook the dal:
1 cup mung dal, picked over and rinsed three times
About 3½ cups of water (you can always add more if things start to dry out)

In a medium-sized pot, bring the dal and water to a boil, skimming off any foam that appears. Lower the heat and simmer for about 20 minutes, until dal is soft and starting to become mushy. Add more water if the dal starts to dry out.

While the dal is simmering, you will need to cook the seasoning:
2 tablespoons canola or peanut oil
1½ teaspoons black mustard seeds
1 jalapeno pepper, sliced in half lengthwise
⅛ teaspoon asafoetida
1 tablespoon cumin powder
2 bunches scallions, chopped in 2-inch pieces
1-inch length of ginger root, peeled and minced
Water
Salt
¼ teaspoon turmeric
Juice of 1 lemon
Handful of cilantro, chopped

In a large pot or very large saute skillet, pour the oil and begin to heat it on high. Add the jalapeno and mustard seeds, and wait for the seeds to turn gray and pop. Some will fly out of the pot, and that's OK. Immediately reduce heat and add asafoetida and cumin. Stir for a few seconds and take care to keep the spices from scorching. Add the scallions and ginger, and saute for a few minutes, until the scallions have started to soften. Add water to cover the scallions, salt, and turmeric. Simmer until the scallions are quite soft. Once the scallions are soft, add about 2½ cups of the cooked dal to the pot (or add all of the dal, if you are not reserving the bland stuff for children). Add more water if necessary, to reach the desired consistency. Add salt to taste. You will need a lot, as the dal you have added has no salt in it. Don't be afraid. Turn off the heat, then add the lemon juice and cilantro, and stir to combine. Serve with rice.

Lucky Chicken-Fried Tofu

I owe my friend Margie for this one. A few months ago she loaned me her copy of Miriam Ungererer's Good Cheap Food (sadly out of print, but definitely worth nabbing a copy if you can find one used), and I finally got around to reading it. Most of the recipes center around meat, which doesn't do me much good practically speaking, but I'm curious and Ms. Ungerer is an engaging writer and maybe someday I'll need to know how to cook veal kidneys, though I doubt it.

When I arrived at the recipe for "South Carolina Fried Chicken," I found a four-leaf clover that had been pressed between the pages. Taking it as a sign, I stopped and thought about fried chicken for a bit. I thought about how good it is, and what makes it so good, and about how I wished I could share how good it is with my husband, and how sad I felt about never eating fried chicken with him. Then I spent a good two or three minutes chafing at the bonds of my partner's unyielding vegetarianism. Then I thought some more. I thought, what really makes fried chicken so tasty? Is it really the chicken? Or is it the salty, crispy, fried crust that covers the chicken? I think you can guess the answer I came up with. (The crust.)

So I put the fried chicken crust on some "tofu fingers" and they were pretty awesome. The trick is to make the crust nice and salty, so you get an initial salty jolt, which contrasts nicely with the more bland tofu inside. We enjoyed them with stir-fried greens and roasted potato slices. Thanks, Margie, for the four-leaf clover. It really was lucky. (Readers, go check out Margie's blog, Fun Simple Food. You'll be glad you did.)

The only hard part about making this is planning ahead to put your block of tofu in the freezer overnight. Freezing and then thawing the tofu makes it a bit chewier, and also seems to significantly decrease the amount of water it exudes while cooking. I just put my whole unopened package of tofu in the freezer, and it was fine. The package expanded a bit, but did not burst its seams. The next morning, I took the frozen tofu out, and let it thaw on my countertop for several hours.

Chicken-Fried Tofu
1 package of extra-firm tofu (frozen, then thawed)
All-purpose flour
Salt
Pepper
Oil (for frying)

Remove thawed tofu from its package and squeeze it a bit to remove excess water. Slice the tofu into 12 rectangular "fingers" of equal size. Heat about a half inch of canola oil in a non-stick skillet. While the oil is heating, place about a half cup of flour in a small bowl, then add a very generous amount of salt and black pepper to it and mix it together. When the oil is hot, dip a tofu piece in the flour mixture and roll it around until it is coated, then place it in the skillet. Repeat for the other tofu pieces until you run out of room in your skillet. You will have to do this in batches. Fry the tofu until it is golden brown on the bottom, then flip the pieces over using tongs and fry the other side. Drain on paper towels, add more salt if you wish, and serve immediately. Use barbecue sauce, ketchup, Sriracha, or whatever condiment you think would work.

Too Saucy

I recently had a conversation about tomato sauce with my four-year-old. You see, she refuses to eat anything but butter and salt on her pasta, and I am having a hard time just letting it go. I give her pasta with sauce. "I don't like it," she says, her jaw set, head tilted slightly to the side, with the steely glint of certainty in her eyes that belongs only to four-year-olds talking about food they don't like. "But why?" I ask. She thinks for a moment. "Too saucy," she replies.

Unfortunately I am no molecular gastronomist and I don't have equipment like liquid nitrogen tanks and candy flossing machines at my disposal, so I can't do anything about sauce being saucy. (But maybe this is a future career for the four-year-old? Perhaps she will follow in the footsteps of Ferran Adrià, and make sauce that is in no way saucy at all, but instead is foamy, crunchy, or stringy, or gelled in the shape of a cube, or perhaps take it a step further, and make sauce that is merely an essence to be inhaled in a puff of air.)

At any rate, today I present you with a sauce that the four-year-old did eat on her pasta, despite its innate sauciness. After much struggle and cajoling, and some respectably convincing faux-gagging, we somehow overcame the initial hurdle of the first bite. After that, the rest was easy. In the words of her six-year-old sister, it is "double hundred million good."

This is a sauce I made with roasted cherry tomatoes and onions. The onions are mellow and much more subtle than garlic, and balance the bright acidity of the tomatoes. If you've ever tried Marcella Hazan's famously simple tomato sauce, the one that calls for a can of tomatoes, a halved onion, and a stick of butter, you know what onions can do for tomatoes. (Make them taste really good, that's what. I'm sure the stick of butter helps too.) After roasting, everything is emulsified a bit in the blender, so the sauce has a creamy texture despite the fact that it has no cream. Which is cool, because you get the benefits of creaminess without the unwanted dilution of the tomatoey-oniony flavor.

And, um, I know this is weird, but this sauce goes really well with sliced cucumbers. It's no molecular gastronomy, but maybe you should try making a cucumber sandwich with this sauce spread on the bread. Don't say you don't like it until you try it. Of course,  it's also very, very good on pasta with a little Parmesan cheese. Angel hair or spaghetti would work best.

Roasted Onion and Cherry Tomato Sauce
2 pints cherry tomatoes, washed and dried
1½ large yellow onions, chopped into inch-wide chunks (go against the grain of the onion)
A few glugs of olive oil
Salt
Dash of sherry vinegar
Freshly ground black pepper

Preheat your oven to 425°. Place the cherry tomatoes and onions on a large, rimmed sheet pan. Pour a few glugs of olive oil over them, then mix with your hands to ensure all tomatoes and pieces of onion are coated with oil. Spread the onions and tomatoes evenly over the sheet pan, and sprinkle all with salt. Place the pan on the middle rack in the oven and roast for approximately 20-23 minutes, until cherry tomatoes are done. The skins should be wrinkled and split, but not charred. Remove all of the tomatoes from the pan and set them aside. Return the pan with the onions back into the oven and continue to roast until the onions are fully cooked and soft, approximately 5-7 minutes.

Scrape the onions and any juices from the pan into your blender container, and add the tomatoes. Puree until the mixture is fairly smooth and emulsified, but still has some lumps. Pour the sauce into a bowl, add just a faint dash of sherry vinegar, freshly ground black pepper to taste, and more salt if needed. Serve with pasta (or cucumbers, if you trust me).

You Can Never Have Too Much Squash

It was Wallis Simpson who said, "You can never be too rich or too thin." She never did mention whether is was possible to have too much squash. My guess is that if she ever had her staff make squash bhajis for her, she would have appended "or too much squash" to her famous statement (and amended the "too thin" portion of it). But back then, there really wasn't much Indian food in England (my, how times have changed), so she probably never even tried a bhaji. Too bad for her – poor skinny rich girl.

A bhaji is essentially just a vegetable dipped in a chana dal (besan) flour batter and fried. (Chickpea flour would also work well, if that is easier for you to find.) I wrote about them back in February, and the formula remains the same regardless of choice of vegetable. My husband is the potato bhaji king, and even makes them for our six-year-old to snack on after school. She brings the extras to school in her lunch box the next day, with a little container of ketchup. Indian French fries!

This time of year, most people are drowning in squash, so I thought I'd just throw the bhaji idea out there. I made a cucumber yogurt sauce to accompany the bhajis. Just add peeled, grated cucumber to plain yogurt, stir, and salt to taste. I should note that in this batch I also did tomatoes and jalapenos. The tomatoes tasted good (and spattered in the oil a lot, so beware), but were a bit soggy. I think green tomatoes would work better. The jalapenos were delicious, but extremely spicy. If you do these, consume them with lots of yogurt sauce, and at your own risk.

Squash Bhajis
Slice squash (about three or four small ones) into rounds a little less than half an inch thick.

For the batter: *
Mix one cup chana dal flour (besan) with one teaspoon of salt, about 1/8 teaspoon of asafoetida, the desired amount of red chili powder. Add enough water to make the batter the consistency of pancake batter (it should cling to your vegetables). I used around 3/4 cup of water.

Frying the bhajis:
3. Heat about an inch of canola oil in a small saucepan or wok. Make sure the oil is good and hot before you fry the bhajis, or the batter will fall off the vegetables.

3. Dip a squash slice in the batter, drop gently into the oil, and fry until crisp and browned. Turn the bhaji to brown the other side if necessary. Remove from the oil with a slotted spoon, drain the bhajis on paper towels, and serve fresh.

*You can use a little more or less asafoetida, or none at all. It gives a sulfurous, garlicky flavor which some people find a little strange at first. I happen to like it, but you definitely don't want to overdo it.