Category Archives: Winndian Food

What a Dal!

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Lens Culinaris: The Lentil Plant

Since marrying a South Indian man, I have made a Herculean effort to love dal, the soupy lentil concoction that is the underpinning of most vegetarian Indian meals.  Typically, my dal tastes like ground-up books from a flooded Delhi library.

Masoor Dal

Further challenging my quest to make a good pot of dal is understanding the word itself: in Hindhi, ‘dal’ refers to a panoply of lentils, legumes, beans, as well as to any dish made with them.  In ‘Classic Vegetarian Indian and Grain Cooking’ Julie Sahni helpfully explains that hulled dals, such as the red masoor or the yellow toovar, are the most suitable for simmering into creamy  soups as they fall apart entirely during the cooking process.

But my dals have always suffered from major taste and texture problems: more musty than aromatic, and more vomitous than creamy.

Finally though, I have arrived at a dal I can not only tolerate, but enjoy.  It might be more Winndian than Indian, but here is my method:

1) Brown vegetables

I use roughly four cups assorted vegetables, cut into smallish pieces.  It’s good to mix up tastes and textures: use something brassy like cauliflower or broccoli, something sweet like corn or carrots, and something mild and like zucchini or green potato. Working in batches, brown them in a single layers in oil in a nice big non-nonstick pot.  Remove from the pot as you go and don’t overcook – they’ll finish later on in the soup.

Most dal recipes don’t have so many vegetables-but I find that they add some love to the texture, and the browning contributes mightily to the flavour.

2) Brown your aromatics

On medium-high heat:  start with a nice big diced onion, and once it’s starting to color, add in 1-2 tbsp each of garlic and ginger. Put in green chile to your taste as well.  Don’t be shy. After a minute or two toss in 2-3 green cardamom pods, 2 whole cloves, and a whopping 1 tbsp brown mustard seeds.  Stand back as the mustard seeds start to pop all over the place, then:

3) Let the magic happen

By adding in one cup of red lentils (masoor), all the browned vegetables, 1/2 tsp turmeric, a palmful of shredded non-sweetned coconut, and enough water or vegetable stock to cover everything by about an inch.  Don’t get generous with the turmeric, it really creates a musty dead library book flavour if you add too much.  If you want a creamier texture, substitute coconut milk for some of the water. Let everything mingle together for abut 25 minutes.  Season with salt and pepper to taste, and top up with more liquid if the texture is too thick for your liking.

4) Give it some bling

Traditionally, dals are garnished with tarka, aka tadka, which is a spice-perfumed ghee.  After consulting a number of Indian cookbooks, I have determined that you can pretty much just make this up as you go along.  Heat up the ghee, then add some whole Indian spices (try cumin and mustard seed for a start), let them pop and brown, then add a nice powdered spice mix (try whatever curry powder or garam masala you have around). If you don’t have ghee, use regular butter, but you won’t be able to get it as hot without burning, so your spices won’t diffuse as well into the butter.

If you’re too tired for all that, garnish with any or all of: a pat of butter, kefir, yogurt, coriander, or toasted almonds.  I have also used tart green apple, minced small, which is weird but tasty.

Dal with Lots of Vegetables – Not Photogenic

Do you know how to make Delirious Goat?

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Which is different than making a goat delirious, in case you were wondering.  Or how about some Old Trout Poached in Wine?  Fireweed Honey Vinaigrette?  Pickled Pike?

Great food grows a soul when it binds people to places and to each other.   Regional cuisines define these links, and are a cultural portal for outsiders. Much of the lore of regional cuisine is transmitted through cookbooks, and their tenor affects how a society is viewed around the world.

Italians have drawn fierce divisions between their various regions, the Japanese have bonded their food to the sea and the seasons, and the Indians have used a lexicon of spices to spell out their local tastes.  On the prairies,  the activities of our respective kitchens are still coalescing into a defined regional cuisine.  We often excuse ourselves by blaming the weather.

The Boreal Gourmet (Michele Genest, www.borealgourmet.com) explores the food of the Yukon and puts to rest any notion that our challenging seasons are to blame for our lack of cultural definition.   In land even more frigid than Manitoba, it is perhaps the relative scarcity and high cost of fresh imported produce which has helped maintain a connection to the foodstuffs of the land.

A great regional cookbook not only includes recipes on how to cook local ingredients, but should give a little whiff of the breath of the people. Interspersed with recipes such as ‘Wrapped Caribou Roast with Rowan Jelly’ and ‘Moose Curry with Rhubarb Chutney’, The Boreal Gourmet tells wonderful stories about bush-camp cooks with frostbitten fingers and about how to find the best lowbush cranberry picking spots.   This book will introduce you to new Canadian staples -rosehips, spruce tips, and caribou.  It will tell you how to make sure soapberries set up in gelatin and how the elders make them into ice cream.  Because of her travels through the Mediterranean, Genest spins local ingredients with global creativity – Moose Moussaka, anyone?

Inundated with food publications and celebrity chefs from the US, has our attention has turned too far southward? Perhaps the true bounty of Canada is to the north – grazing through and blooming out of the snowbanks we so often blame for our culinary inattentions.

Vulgare Vulgare: Part 1(Why)

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Record numbers of readers showed up at Zolli last week to read about vulgar comments and aching loins, so I figured I could keep traffic up with an implied promise of scandal.  Sorry:  Hordeum vulgare vulgare is otherwise known as barley.

Here’s why I am bewitched by barley and why I think you should be too:

1)  It’s the only thing you’ll ever have in common with Spartacus.

Roman gladiators ate so much of this stamina-building grain they were called, hordearii, meaning ‘barley men’.   But barley predates the gladiators by about 5000 years: grown in the fertile crescent of the Middle East in 10 000 BC, it was one of the first agricultural domesticates.  It is eaten in harsh climates around the world by hardy people, like Mongolians and Zollipop.

2) It will allow you to eat more pork.

Barley’s cell walls contain ß-Glucan, which was recently touted by the USA FDA as a cholesterol lowering agent.  Before you get too excited for your next beer and ribs gorge-fest, please note that barley’s liquid form does not have the same nutritional effects.

3) It will allow you to eat less pork, and not notice.

Modern nutritional guidelines suggest we should eat more fiber.  LOTS more fiber. Like 20-30g per day, which unless you have a ruminant stomach system, is rather hard to achieve.  But a serving of pearled barley has far more fibre (3g) than most grains, more than double the amount of brown rice (1.75 g).  This high amount of fiber contributes to satiety, which is doctor-speak for feeling full when in fact you are eating rabbit food.

4) It actually tastes really good.

Zolli will elaborate on this in Vulgare Vulgare: Part 2 (How). You have to be careful though.   Having sampled different barley products while researching this post, I have noted that those from local health food/organic stores are less processed and decidedly more, well, husky.  They have a mouth-feel comparable to a ground up used book.  The product you want is called Harvest Time Pearled Barley in the red bag.  It’s brought in from Saskatchewan, and they sell it at Sobey’s. I have yet to find a Manitoban source, but please comment if you know of one.

5) It grows on the prairies.

While you might be getting a bit sick of the locavore trend, this really is one of the most compelling reasons to eat barley.  In 2001, the average Canadian ate 160 times more rice than barley.  That’s odd,  since barley grows in our backyard, and rice grows in places where it doesn’t snow.  In fact our frigid environment makes barley less susceptible to many crop diseases, such as the ominous ‘net blotch’ and the seedy sounding ‘smuts’.  Vulgare vulgare, indeed.

The bottom line here really boils down to marketing: Canada is the third worldwide producer of barley, and one tenth of that is grown right here in our fair province.  It’s one of Manitoba’s top five crops.  But we don’t eat it.

Why? That’s where it gets complicated.  There are many different strains of barley which have different intended end-users in the animal feed, human feed, and human drink (malting) industries.  Owing to lack of consumer pull and the intricacies of pricing regulations, the vast majority of barley grown is malting grade, but ends up as animal feed.  Which is a cryin’ shame.  (For more information, refer to the riveting government publication, Marketing Signals in the Barley Sector.  Or just trust me.)

Have I won you over yet? No?  Tune in next week for Vulgare vulgare: Part 2(How).

Sources (lazily referenced):

Origins of word Horde: Calliope; Mar2008, Vol. 18 Issue 7, p28-29

UN Food and Agriculture Organization

Market Signals in the Barley Sector, Alberta Government

Crops in Manitoba (Janet Honey, Prepared for Department of Agribusiness and Agricultural Economics, University of Manitoba)

Baik B, Ullrich S. Balrye for food: Characteristics, improvement, and renewed interest. Journal of Cereal Science 48(2008): 233-42

Vij’s Chicken Curry Part 5- You’re On, White Girl

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Chicken Curry and Naan

OK.  The Garam Masala was made, the chicken thighs were thawed, and the pot was waiting.  I had no choice but to forge ahead. Having demonstrated my paradoxical ability to dessicate chicken breast while cooking it in liquid,  I was greatly encouraged by the appearance of chicken thighs in this recipe.

Vij’s Chicken Curry recipe is a template curry, in that the basic method forms the basis for many different curry recipes:

1) Dice and fry two onions until golden, then add a palmful of garlic and sauté until aromatic.

2) Add a palmful of ginger, about two cups tomatoes, 1 tbsp each of salt, ground cumin, your garam masala, and coriander, 1/2 tsp each of cayenne and ground black pepper, and 1 tsp turmeric for color.  Cook until the oil separates from the mixture, about five minutes. (Zolli modified the recipe here by adding two cups whole canned San Marzano tomatoes – winter tomatoes are tasteless). You have now completed your wet masala.

3) Add the meat (in this case, 3 lbs of chicken thighs), and cook until the surface is opaque.  Then add a cup of dairy (this is optional, but makes for a more unctuous result, here Vikram/Meeru suggest sour cream but I have also seen recipes with plain yogurt) and the juice from the canned whole tomatoes, cover, and simmer until the meat is cooked through (about 15-20 minutes).

4) Garnish with coriander.

It was actually really good. Amen.

Vij’s Chicken Curry Part 4 – Make the Garam Masala

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Roasting Garam Masala Spices

Out of respect for the genius that is the Vikram/Meeru team, Zolli will not reprint their garam masla recipe here.  Suffice it to say that it contains mostly cumin, smaller amounts of cloves, black cardamom, and cinnamon, and tiny amounts of mace and nutmeg.  If you want more info, their awesome cookbook is available at Amazon.  Barring that, use a masala recipe with similar spices.

They direct you to roast the whole spices together until the cumin turns a deeper shade of brown, then to add the mace and nutmeg and grind together in a spice grinder.  Not surprisingly, the result tastes like a more pheremonal version of pumpkin pie.

Finished Garam Masala