Endless Simmer - A Food Blog

Photo: 80p, clearly.

Spicy lentil dahl is the overlooked stepchild of any fancy Indian dinner, often lost between the savory samosas and the heat-packing curries. Poor, lonely dahl is even overshadowed by its own dipping vehicle, the wonderfully crisp naan.

But dahl, (also spelled daal, dal or dhal) is quite delicious in its own right, and I recently got to thinking it can’t be too hard to cook at home. Now, as you all know, I’m not really one for careful, planned-out testing of recipes. Usually I just take something tried and true, crush some pine nuts on top, throw in a weird fruit, and proclaim myself a genius. But for my dahl experimentation, I decided to go all Cooks Illustrated on ya’ll and try this baby until I got it perfect.

My online research revealed a wide range of recipes, but general agreement on the basics. Red lentils are the best, and they are boiled up with water, onions, garlic and spices, then covered and steamed just like rice. This epicurious recipe is a pretty typical example.

The main controversy comes over how to break up the lentils. Some say to soak them overnight beforehand; others insist the dahl must be blended in a food processor afterwards. I tried both and found them equally effective. (Obv. the blending is less time consuming.) Although if you prefer your dahl thick and chunky rather than sleek and smooth, neither method is necessary. Pictures of both creamy and chunky varieties coming up…

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UPDATE: Good idea, Margot…consider this “Lakshmi-Spiegel Green Chutney” entered in AFAM

I never spend much time with dead tree cooking publications. After I get through all the blogs, there’s just no time left. Plus, as you can probably tell, I’m not one for following recipes.

However, as Gansie mentioned previously, every time I go down to D.C., she sends me back on the bus with a pile of Bon Appetites, Gourmets - and if I’m lucky - Cook’s Illustrateds. Because she’s strangely obsessive a truly dedicated co-editor, she even steals little arrow flags from her office and marks every page for me that mentions pine nuts, phyllo or Padma Lakshmi.

It was this way I learned that the December issue of Gourmet featured the famed cookbook author/Top Chef host/2nd runner-up for Eater of the Year, and offered a few of her chutney recipes. The new Gourmet.com doesn’t seem to have this one in their archives, so here it is:

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Looks like it’s shaping up to be a recipe-heavy day here at endless simmer - on a food blog, who knew?

Edouble recently told us that cooking up a curry ain’t as hard as it sounds, you just have to be willing to cheat a tiny bit and use some of those premade curry sauces. As e-dubs points out, I’m not about to go home after work and grind up some lemongrass, so this is definitely allowed.

I put together this heavy-on-the-staples, light-on-the-liquid curry, based on the random ingredients I found at my new local food co-op (much more on that later). It’s a pretty unorthodox mixture, but I think the flavors all work. Usually Thai curries are reserved for chicken or shrimp, but I see no reason why their sweet, coconut-y goodness can’t be shared with something heavier, in this case, delicious baby sheep.

Plus, I’m not usually one to get all 30-minute-meals on ya’ll, but this is pretty damn quick and easy.

Recipe after the j.

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In my recent trek through South Africa, I was in general not too wowed by the food scene. Every meal from breakfast to dinner is served with french fries (def not complaining, but not exactly exotic) and many meals are anchored by a dry, mealy porridge-like substance called pap (I tried to provide you with a pic of this, but learned that google image searching for the word ‘pap’ is not a good idea.)

There is however, one original South African dish that is a must-eat:  bunny chow. A specialty of street vendors in Durban, a port city with a huge Indian population, bunny chow is a straight-forward but utterly genuis creation. The insides of a loaf of bread are removed and replaced with spicy veggie curries, and less frequently, lamb or chicken curry. When I first heard about this dish I thought they meant something like a bread roll, but no, they are not kidding around; it’s an entire loaf of sandwich bread filled to the brim.  The pic above (not mine) is a half order. The best part is once the curry is gone, the remaining bread crust is soaked full of tasty curry spices.

Bunny chow is so popular in SA that it is even the title of an upcoming movie from the country’s MTV division, which looks pretty amazing so here’s hoping it will be released in the states.

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