what a dal

UGH I'm already sorry for the pun. But dal! Made with lentils or split mung beans, dal is a simple, hearty, easily-adapted dish that I love. I sometimes use my Lord Krishna Cuisine cookbook for spices and flavorings, but usually I just wing it, using my own curry powder.

Here's a dal with sliced carrots, served with rice and homemade pickles; you can tell this is Kevin's plate because he has a serving of spicy garlic pickle in the back.

 

And here's a dal with radishes, served with poppadums, white rice (a rarity in our house, but so tasty) and a side salad.

Happy VeganMoFo! (and beetroot curry with meyer lemon chutney)

It's the first day of VeganMoFo! In case you've never heard of it before (in which case you must be new to vegan blogs--welcome), VeganMoFo is short for Vegan Month of Food, and it's a celebration of vegan food blogging! Blogs that participate in VeganMoFo commit to writing at least 20 posts about vegan food during the month of October. I love participating in VeganMoFo, and reading the blogroll at the main VeganMoFo headquarters, because it helps me find other great vegan blogs and get inspired  in both my own cooking and blogging. Also it makes me get myself in gear--I may have trouble posting more than once during the other months of the year, but when VeganMoFo comes, I don't kid around!

The past year has been really busy for me. Kevin and I got married and honeymooned, I was promoted at work, and then we bought a house. All of these things have been awesome, some (the house) more time-consuming than others, but it all adds up to me not being as adventurous in the kitchen. Instead of inventing my own recipes, I've mostly been relying on the recipes of others. Most of my VeganMoFo posts will be pointing you to some of the great vegan recipes I've made from around the internet. (I'll also toss in a couple things of my own, but I make no promises.)

Today we start with Beetroot Curry from Jeyashri's Kitchen. It's a pretty simple recipe, to which I added about a cup of beans for extra protein. Because I can't eat nightshades, I make my own sambar powder--anyone looking to do the same can just search for a sambar powder recipe online and just omit the spicy things! (To replace the hot pepper, see my guide for replacing peppers in cooking.)

 To the right, cooking alongside the curry, is Meyer Lemon Cherry Chutney from the Kitchn. I'd had some Meyer lemons that I wanted to turn into something really lemony, and this seemed like the best recipe to try. Despite the fact that Meyers are sweeter than most lemons, this is a really sour chutney! I like sour things, but I wasn't prepared for it. Fortunately the beetroot curry was mild and a little sweet, so the two things together worked perfectly.

Here we had the curry, the chutney, and some plain millet and lettuce to mellow out the stronger flavored food. If you were to try either the curry or chutney recipe on its own, I would recommend pairing the curry with something strong and sharp in taste; pair the chutney with mild, sweet-ish flavors. I strongly recommend both, especially together!

Indian breads

I love Indian food. Because I grew up in a small town, I never tried it until I was 18 or 19, when I went to college and joined our Hindu Student's Association--we'd go out for Indian food as a group on our occasional mandir visits, and we'd have it for every event we hosted. My friends in the group introduced me to different kinds of Indian food, and I loved it all. I was already vegan at that point, and it is such a vegan-friendly cuisine--when I lived in London, and later when I went to Ireland, I ate a LOT of Indian food because that was often the best option for me there.

And then, by the time I was 22, I developed my full-blown nightshade allergies, rendering Indian food among my greatest culinary enemies. Indian food that doesn't contain hot peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant is very hard to find! Especially since most Indian spice mixes involve cayenne or hot pepper of some sort. (Do you know what my FAVORITE Indian dish used to be? Baigan bharta, which is spicy eggplant in tomato sauce. All nightshades!!! I miss it.)

So I can't go out for Indian food anymore. But I can--and do--adapt some of my favorite recipes for myself at home. I make my own curry powder , and I make a lot of chana and chole dishes (because of my love for chickpeas). Many recipes are easy to adapt to nightshade free cooking just by leaving out the hot peppers.

But I miss the breads. Warm, oily breads right from the oven or fryer--those are much harder to replicate at home than curry or rice.

But I live for a challenge! Here are some Indian breads I have made at home!

Naan is the usual bread you get at Indian restaurants; it's a soft, flat, oven-baked bread. Most recipes call for yogurt, so it's rarely vegan. Definitely one advantage to making it at home!

Served here with homemade dal, a tamarind sauce, and fruit. I didn't use a specific recipe for it; I just googled "naan recipe" and read a bunch of the results, then took the amounts and techniques that appeared most often across all the recipes. It took a bit of time to make (since the dough sits over night), but surprisingly little work. I'll definitely make it again!

Bhatura was a bit more of a challenge for me, since it involves deep frying and I'd never had it before, so I didn't know if I'd gotten it right at first. It's a soft, delicious bread, with a slightly crispy outside because it's fried.

I got the recipe from the Cookery Corner blog. I went with all all-purpose flour, and used soy yogurt in place of the regular yogurt. It also takes some time (has to sit for at least 4 hours), but it is such a delicious recipe.

Because I don't like to deep fry (more for reasons of mess than of health), this is a special occasion food, but ohhhh my goodness, it does indeed make an occasion special. This is now my favorite Indian bread.

Next up, Paratha! If you've never had paratha before, it's basically a whole-wheat tortilla with a little more oil. (I think it's the same thing as Roti. I can't tell the difference, anyway, but maybe I am a philistine for thinking this?) It's quite good, and I've made it plain a couple times, but the real reason I'd got through the effort of making paratha is to stuff it! You can stuff it with any number of fillings, and it's always excellent.

For the dough, I use a recipe out of Yamuna Devi's Lord Krishna's Cuisine cookbook. You can find it online on A Cook at Heart's blog. (I used canola oil for the ghee, by the way, and like the blog writer, didn't use a full 1/2 cup in the dough. I think I used 1/3?) I made up my own filling--it's sauteed onions, spinach, and garam masala.

I know this picture is badly lit, but I like that you can see the whole process: the empty-rolled out dough, the bottom layer with the filling on it, my filling pan, a bag of flour, the rolling pin--it tells you everything you need to know! Hee. The next step is to put it in a well-oiled pan over medium heat, then brush oil over the top.

The sides cook pretty quickly; a couple minutes on each side. Then it's ready to eat!

Finally, though Pappadum isn't really a bread, and I didn't actually cook it so much as heat it up, pappadum is one of the other things I miss about Indian restaurants. So crispy and light! And perfect to dip into the sauces they always have at the table (ohhhh do I ever miss that oniony sauce, and the tamarind sauce...).

Pappadum, with an omelet (from Vegan Brunch) and sweet potatoes. These come in a box, and all you have to do is fry them or heat them over an open flame. I think you can microwave them, too, but I don't have a microwave. Though there are many different brands that are all good, I like this brand (Sharwood's), because they're very plain--no suspicious "spices," which, because this is Indian food, inevitably means hot pepper of some sort.

Those of you who aren't nightshade-free can probably get many of these things already at Indian restaurants, but I do have to say that it feels awesome to make them yourself, too. I recommend trying it! (And then you'll feel even more grateful when you order them out, because you'll know how much work went into the awesome food in front of you.)

curry powder

I love curries, but even the mildest of store-bought curry powders has cayenne in it. I'm allergic to cayenne (cayenne=a pepper=nightshade), so whenever a recipe calls for curry powder, I have to make it at home. This isn't as hard or annoying as it might sound. Were it hard or annoying to make, I could make a lot of it at once and just keep it in a spice jar for a while. But I like making it a tablespoon or so at a time because I can control and adjust the ingredients to taste.

Curry powder is, in approximate order of proportions: ground coriander seed, cumin, turmeric, and some other spices. Those are really the only three essentials (in my opinion), but then to that, you can add cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, mustard, ginger, fenugreek, asafoetida, black pepper, cayenne (if you can eat it). Because you can adjust the flavor ever so slightly with each of the spices you include or omit, making the curry powder a tablespoon or two at a time allows me to adjust the flavor of a recipe a bit each time. The cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, fenugreek, and ginger all give dishes a sweetish, warm taste; asafoetida, mustard, and black pepper give it a bitterness or a bite. Making curry powder yourself means you can make the flavor match the rest of the ingredients in a dish. Or your mood.

Plus I like to mix the curry powder in cute little bowls.

The real way to make your own curry powder is to do it with whole seeds--coriander seeds, cumin seads--that you lightly roast then grind before adding the other spices. I've done it once or twice, and it's incredibly tasty and distinctive, but it also requires some advanced planning, and depending on your recipe, a spice or coffee grinder. But if you're looking for great curry powder (and a lot of other awesome spice mixes), the Lord Krishna's Cuisine cookbook is one of my favorites. Recipes also abound online, of course. You can also just wing it! Use this as a guideline: 1 part cumin, 1 part coriander, 1/2 part turmeric, and 1/8 to 1/4 part any other ingredients (except asafoetida--only use a tiny sprinkle; that stuff is strong). So if a recipe calls for a tablespoon of curry powder that's 1 tsp cumin, 1 tsp coriander, 1/2 tsp turmeric, and dashes of whatever else you feel like.