I love lentils. There, I said it. I have always loved lentils. My mother made the best lentil soup. But all my life (well, until I was 26), I thought lentils came in only one color - brown; and that lentil soup was strictly vegetarian. What a shock when I was having dinner at a friend's house and they served lentil soup ... with little hot dogs in it! I was apoplectic. It couldn't be...no, not my lentils, being defiled in that way. A more pleasant discovery, however, was that lentils came in a new and exciting color: RED. My first grown up cookbook was Vegetarian Pleasures, by Jeanne Lemlin. I still can turn to the exact page for my favorite recipes in that book without looking them up in the index, that is how much I used that book. VP introduced me to red lentils. At that time, red lentils were not so easy to come by; definitely not to be found in the supermarket. Fortunately, I had access to wonderful varieties of foods in Philadelphia and South Jersey. I think I found the red lentils either at the Reading Terminal Market or at Healthworks, a little health food store in Collingswood, N.J. I tried them in a great recipe for dal and I was hooked. They tasted a bit more peppery than the brown supermarket lentils, cooked quickly (a plus for a working gal), and, well, they were red. Pink, really, but exotic and alluring. Much later, I discovered mung beans, but even then, I thought of them as things to be sprouted, not cooked. With this project, I have been exposed to such a variety of lentils such as I never imagined. The Indian grocers are lined with row upon row of lentils, split, skinned, whole, ground into flour. I have so far been using split mung, toovar (or toor), and urad. There are others that I have yet to try. I still love brown lentils (as you may have read in earlier posts, I use them in dosas). I also love all of the other lentils and their cousins, the split peas, and chick peas, and azuki, and ...
Here is my mom's recipe for lentil soup, with a couple of optional additions.
MJ's Lentil Soup
1 cup of brown lentils, rinsed and picked over.
4-5 cups of water
one medium brown onion, chopped
2-3 celery ribs, chopped
1T salt or to taste
a good grind or two of black pepper
1/2 cup chopped fennel bulb (optional)
1T dried dill weed (optional)
1T crushed fennel seed (optional)
(1 or 2 medium tomatoes, peeled and chopped) optional
three or four leaves of swiss chard, chopped (optional)
lemon wedges and pecorino romano or parmesean cheese to serve
Put the lentils, water, onion, celery, salt and pepper in a stock pot (along with whatever mix of optional items you like) and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to low and slowly simmer for about an hour or more until the lentils are falling apart. If you like an even creamier texture, puree one or two cups of the soup and then stir it back into the pot.
You can serve it plain, but my mom served it mixed with cooked vermicelli cut up into one inch pieces, or with rice. Squeeze the lemon into the soup and sprinkle the cheese on top. Still my number one meal.
Red Lentil Dal
from Vegetarian Pleasures
1 1/4 cups red lentils
3 cups water
1/2 t salt
2 T Ghee or oil
1/4 t black mustard seeds
1/4 t turmeric
1/4 t cayenne pepper
1/4 t ground cumin
1/4 t ground coriander
1/2 t minced gingerroot
Rinse and pick over the lentil and cook in the water for about 25 minutes until soft and smooth. Heat the ghee or oil in a pan and add the mustard seeds. cook until the seeds start to pop and then add the remaining spices and ginger and cook two more minutes. Add to the cooked dal and stir in.
My note: This makes a fairly thick mixture. You can cook the dal with one extra cup of water for a thinner consistency.
This is my Go To dal for a quick and easy treat. Nice to add cooked vegetables (such as squash, carrots, radishes, greens, etc., to it as well for a well-rounded meal.
Here are the results of our corn-sesame paniyaram/idli batter. The batter did not quite ferment as I had hoped. I think it was a bit dry and so just didn't have the oomph to rise. Also, maybe needed more heat and time. Anyway, I cheated a bit this morning and added a half teaspoon of baking powder to make sure they wouldn't turn out like hockey pucks. They actually turned out pretty good. A nice breakfast. Michael likes HushPuppies and Corn Bread. So these were the Indian version of that. The paniyaram do have a fritter-like feel to them. They are not deep fried, but are cooked in just a bit of butter to give them a nice browning on the outside and to keep them from sticking. I am still trying to figure how to turn them over. You can see the one next to the handle did not quite make it all the way back into its little cup. I am using a spoon and chopsticks and fingers to try to get them flipped. I'll get it eventually. As for the idli, they were a bit dense (really did need to get a better fermentation going) but still tasty. We put in corn kernels and hot pepper flakes (a bit of a deviation from the recipe) and they had a nice Southern feel with Indian overtones. Michael ate them with maple syrup. I ate mine with, get this, a sweet adzuki bean paste chutney. I'll post about that another time. Here is the recipe as we made it.
On our quest for vegetarian Indian food last night we ventured to Culver City. We drove around for about 20 minutes trying to find the restaurant and in the process passed by scores of teens and early twenty-somethings that looked like they had emerged from a Rave. People standing all over and in the middle of busy streets, no shoes, talking on phones, trying to flag down cars... It had the making for our own version of the Tina Fey & Steve C film "Date Night." When we finally found the place judgment said it was probably best to go there for a lunch than hang out with Seus Hat wearing acid dripping crowd.
As I mentioned in my last post, I purchased an idli stand during our trip to Artesia. The photos are actual idlis (is that the right pluralization, I wonder?) made in my very own kitchen. A vast improvement over the first ones I made in cupcake papers. The right equipment makes all the difference. The batter is easy to make. I made the first batch using a plain urad dal and basmati rice batter. Just put a bit of shredded carrot and some sliced cashews on top for interest. Not bad. I made a second batch and added some mustard seeds and ajwain seeds, yoghurt, and a bit of black salt (I'll do a post on the black salt next week). Much more interesting. What I really need is some hing (asafetida) to round out the taste. I had asafetida in my spice cabinet for years without doing much with it. I threw it out last year because I thought I would never use it; guaranteeing that I would want to use it a year later. Now, you would think that these beautiful idli would have been gobbled up at once. Not so. My son, who ate the idli at Udupi Palace, contends that he actually likes the ones I made in the cupcake papers better. No one else has tried them yet. Except for me, of course. For breakfast...with chutney. They do seem to reheat pretty well, although fresh is best. 
