Chana Daal: Trust Me You'll Love This

Not actually hard to make! 

I never actually meal plan before I go to the store. Shopping with a mission tends to drive me crazy since there's always one semi-obscure ingredient that goes missing or is too expensive to justify buying and stashing it in our tiny cabinets, where all manner of novelty spices and legumes lurk, awaiting release.

Because of this, I occasionally buy things simply because they fascinate me. I've got at least 5 types of wheat product, 5 types of rice, 3 types of lentils and various peas - some of which I own simply because I was too anxious to try something new. I'll not even touch on my spice fetish.

I have a special curiosity for South Asian food, which is why I wound up bringing home a bag of Chana Daal a few months ago. Unfortunately, nobody in my immediate family will touch anything spicy or leguminous, so until today I had no reason to cook it, except perhaps to hear the sweet gnashing of my lovely family's teeth. It actually only came out today because Tam has sworn off high FODMAP foods and I needed to dispense with some garlic and onions.

Needless to say, I'm happy I tried it.

Chana Daal is one of the may varieties of lentil and pea that bear the surname daal. The Chana variety is a yellow spit pea, which takes forever to cook, but which has a delightful taste and texture when you prepare it right. Daals are quite popular in Indian cuisine since there is a general aversion to sattvic (corrupting) foods in Hindu and Jain culture and a rejection of violence (ahinsa) in Jain eating in particular. I should note that this dish would not make the cut for Jain eaters since it contains both things that grow beneath the ground, which are bad, and tomatoes, which are ambivalently naughty. The long and the short of it is that Indian cuisine from all over the subcontinent is rich in amazing vegetarian and vegan dishes, many of which are founded on daals.

Chana Daal was called Bengal Gram by the British, possibly because they encountered it in Bengal,  but the version I'm making is based more on a cross between Delhi and  Punjabi recipes (which are not all that different, to be frank).

You'll want to wash and soak your daal overnight and maybe even microwave them in a bowl of water several times because they take FOREVER to cook. Pressure cookers are apparently highly recommended.

The daal is served with a seasoned oil garnish that you pour on top, but which I accidentally cooked into the dish. It was delicious either way.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups chana daal (yellow split peas)
1 tomato + 2 stewed tomatoes chopped
1/2 small onion chopped
1/4 cup green pepper
4-5 cloves garlic, grated or crushed
1 inch ginger grated
1 1/2 tsp sugar
salt to taste
oil

Spice mix
1 tsp Kashmiri chili powder (or another chili powder)
1 tsp coriander
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp garam masala
1 tsp plus kasuri methi leaves (fenugreek) or fenugreek powder

Spiced oil mix (tadka, or tempering)
2 tbsp-ish oil or butter ghee
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds
5-6 curry leaves

Step 1: Prep your daal
Wash, Drain and soak your daal for a day, then microwave it or pressure cook it to soften

Step 2: Make your masala
Heat oil in a pan, then sweat your onions and pepper until the onion goes clear, then add the ginger and garlic and cook for a minute, then throw in the tomatoes. Cook until the moisture evaporates off, then add your spices and stir about a bit. The volatile aromatics in the spices get along great with the oil, so doing this will help you get the most flavor out of your food.

Step 3: Mix it together
Add the daal to the masala mix and then enough water to cover everything (and then some). You'll have to cook this down a bit. Add the salt, sugar and kasuri methi leaves here if you've got 'em.

Step 4: Cook for a long time
Self explanatory, I hope. When it starts to get soft (after an hour or so, you're on the right track)

Step 5: Prep the tadka
Add the oil to a pan and  heat on high, then add the spices. You'll want to have a pan cover to hover over the spices after the mustard seeds start to pop. This step harnesses the aromatics in the spices and gives them an exciting new flavor. You can pour this over the top at the end of the dish (as you're supposed to do), or, like me, dump it in early and let the whole spices release into the mix. Curry leaves smell quite pungent, but are really good.

The Daal is done when the onions disintegrate and the peas are mushy.

It's great on its own, but is typically served with bread or rice and some raita (yogurt sauce). Your house will smell like the spices for days, which is glorious, and frankly probably better than what it usually smells like (probably dog). 

Soy Ginger Nile Perch

I'll admit that I lied about increasing the frequency of my posts, or at least that while my spirit was willing, my flesh was weak. Let's ignore the usual prurient reference of that quote for a moment and just move on to my new recipe...

Nice sauce smear there Chief :p

So one of the great finds since we've moved here to the Emirates has been the Nile Perch, a monstrous abomination of a fish that can grow as long as an adult human and probably could eat a baby if you fed it one - not that you would even think of doing that, dear reader. But despite the possibly high content of human baby flesh in its diet, (or perhaps because of it...?) the flesh of the fish is surprisingly tender and flavorful. Imagine the leathery blandness of a piece of cod, and then imagine the opposite, and you've got the Nile Perch. Since the Perch is a freshwater fish, I'd say the flavor and texture are actually kind of a combination of bass and walleye. It takes well to pretty much anything  you throw at it. I've breaded and fried it, baked it and pan-seared it with a mustard cream sauce.

Its flesh has been compared to Chilean Seabass (aka Patagonian Toothfish), though it's likely none of us really knows what that is like. Apparently, the Patagonian Toothfish has been fished to near extinction, so if you order it in a high end joint you're likely just eating its cousin, the Antarctic Toothfish and paying way too much for the privilege. The Seabass actually got its name when a guy named Lee Lantz correctly deemed "Patagonian Toothfish" to be a shitty marketing tag, so he changed it to something more palatable - much as how Goosefish are now Monkfish and apparently Sea Urchins used to be called "whore's eggs."

Freshwater fish have actually played an incredibly important role in the history of food among the upper classes of a number of societies. The Chinese kept lakes in some of their larger estates to provide a steady supply of fresh fish in landlocked areas, and in Europe fish ponds were kept as early as Roman times. European nobles were especially keen on maintaining fish ponds on their properties, in part because they were attractive, but also because they had to refrain from their usual fare of meat (oh so much meat) on Fridays and during fasts, lest they risk angering the Lord, or at least the Papacy. The fish could either be consumed locally or sold at a premium in local markets, where merchants in towns were able to pay high prices for relatively rare fish meat (getting actual seafood even 20 miles from the coast usually meant getting it old, smelly and pricey).

The recipe is criminally easy, but quite tasty. Since acquiring Nile Perch will be tough for most of you, you can use firm fleshed white fish like Goosefish (Monkfish!), Grouper, or even Halibut, but try to avoid tough stuff like Snappers or  Cod. And stay away from the whore's eggs.

Marinade Ingredients:
2 cloves garlic, smashed
1/2 inch of ginger thinly sliced
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 tsp sesame oil
1/8 cup honey or maple syrup
juice of 1 orange
1 tsp canola oil

For Sauce: combine Marinade with
2 tbsp sugar
2 star anise

2 fillets of Nile Perch

Step 1:
Marinate the Perch in the ingredients for an hour or so

Step 2:
Preheat the Oven to about 375. I imagine that my oven is preheated to 375, but the stove we currently suffer only increases in 50 degree C increments, so you have to jockey between way too hot and too cool, and even then it's a crapshoot.

Step 3:
Put both fillets on baking paper and bake for about 25 minutes, or until the flesh flakes away. Don't overcook it, for God's sake.

Step 4:
Take the remaining marinade and make a sauce out of it. I know this is going to sound weird, because you just soaked fish in it, but you want the flavors of the fish in the sauce for richness. Add the marinade and the two tablespoons of sugar and the star anise to a small saucepan and reduce until you have a thick consistency. Cool a bit and fish out the chunky stuff.

Serve over rice with some sort of green. I usually use steamed broccoli or pak choi. 

Khaleej by Belly?

Dear Reader (hi mom),

I apologize for neglecting you for so long. It's not that I haven't been cooking or engaging in fringe professional historical work for the past year, it's that I was too lazy to document it for the rest of you. I'll admit that this is because I'm lazy and selfish and terrible and understand that there are no actual consequences for being lazy and selfish and terrible on the internet. Come to think of it, those may actually be prerequisites for its use.

But things have changed. (Oh how they've changed!)

Our adventure in Beirut ended not in the fiery cataclysm that so many of you had hoped for, but, rather anticlimactically, in an actual job. WHICH, I turned into a real professional historical temp at the AUB, then parlayed my success there into a sparkly new gig in the Gulf. Remarkably, my new employers actually read this blog and still decided I was the sort of individual they wanted to have around them for the foreseeable future.

Though we've only been here a month and a half, the Emirates has already demonstrated itself to be an oasis of sorts (Ha ha. No more puns) for the fledgling epicure. If you want something, it's available somewhere for a price. And usually that price is oddly less than you'd expect to pay.

As they are forced to cater to at least five continents worth of expats in addition to the needs of the local population, supermarkets here are really the first I've seen to truly deserve the epithet. Imagine Best Buy grafted onto Walmart with a top notch seafood section, a bakery serving everything from turnovers to Persian flatbread, a cheese cooler that stretches for miles and a produce selection that occupies an acre and has a section dedicated to South Asian foods, which include terrifying gourds that appear to be in the terminal stages of an advanced sexually transmitted disease (don't ask how they got it).

The sheer opportunity presented by this has already crippled me. I've swapped one cooking rut for another but shall work through it, dear reader, with your help.

Next up: I take on the Nile Perch, a fish that could swallow a toddler and would gladly do it for the sheer hell of it, but which tastes delightful in a soy glaze. (It's gotta be from all the toddlers).

Oh my God! Why are they in the water with it?!
Photo taken from Google Images http://www.ventureco-worldwide.com/africa/uganda/fishing-for-nile-perch-at-murchison-falls-uganda/