Hi, Ray here again.
The weekend is here again and once more Saturday morning sees me browsing through the great range of curry recipes on the Curry Focus website. And, once again, I’m looking through the dal recipes to see if there is one for me to try out. And my eyes fix on a tarka dal recipe (it’s version 2 on the website – there is no significance to the version number which is just a number to differentiate recipes with the same name). I haven’t found any curry lovers who don’t like a good dal so this was the choice for this weekend.
I had a jar of masoor dal but needed to pick up some moong dal when I was out shopping, when I also got some dried Kashmiri chillies and fresh coriander (cilantro).
Like most dal recipes, this one is simple enough and late Sunday afternoon saw me preparing the ingredients in plenty of time before the dinner guests arrived. The dal contained lentils so there was no soaking that needed to take place, all that needed doing to the dal was washing it.
I waited for everyone to arrive before starting to cook the dal. Nothing out of the ordinary happened and I was serving up the Tarka Dal on basmati rice within 30 minutes. I actually used a serving dish for the first time in months.
And this was a great dal. It wasn’t too runny (I don’t really like runny dal) and was pretty tasty. There was a nice blend of red, yellow, white and green food on the plates. The one thing that I hadn’t encountered before was that the tarka was effectively raw. You can’t cook onions in 2 minutes. It was strange but wasn’t unpleasant. I suppose that if you like a more traditional tarka then you can cook the onions for 7/8 minutes. Anyways, everybody loved the dal and it received a great taste score of 8.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat level of “Medium to Hot”.
Like most dals, this was tasty and probably healthy (dal is a great source of protein). I can certainly recommend this dal recipe for everyone to try.
Dahl is long thought to cure (or at least prevent) cancer. A lady I work with has eaten dahl for breakfast everyday for about 10 years after her own cancer went into remission. She swears it’s what has kept it from returning. Great reason to eat curry for breakfast too.