EVERYDAY DAL - Zen Strength & Conditioning

I’m excited to share this lovely Dal recipe with you! But first, some context because I think the way I came about this could be insightful for you too.

My food habits for the last few years have been oriented around fuel for health, for exercise, and time management. Part of running a small business is wearing many hats, such that I don’t have a lot of bandwidth to think creatively about food on a daily basis. I’ve converged on making batches of things about twice per week, and keeping in tupperwares for easy access. Funnily, over the years I’ve been pretty averse to the idea of “meal prep,” but in my own way I’ve basically come around to doing just that.

Now, I like food, and would be pretty unhappy eating the same boring thing day after day. I think that’s why I was averse to the idea of meal prep initially, as for some reason it implied flavorless repetition to me. Not necessarily so!

Fortunately, Sarah has a special interest and talent for consistently bringing home new, well-balanced, and convenient foods or snacks to try as she finds them at the grocery store, so I’m exposed to a fairly regular sampling of them.

More recently she brought home this “Everyday Dal” in-a-pouch. It’s red lentil, butternut squash, and coconut, and it’s in a sealed pouch that has a decent shelf life (~1 year) and warms up in the microwave in 60-90 seconds. And it’s soooo good! It reminded me of my mom’s Puerto Rican Paella, but with a totally different flavor profile.

However, at $4 per pouch, it’s a bit of an everyday ouch, so after having it a few times I had a thought that this was something that could be worth trying to make at home. It’s basically lentils with a bunch of spices, how hard could it be?

It turns out that it really is quite easy once you get familiar with the somewhat unique spices that you may not have in your pantry. The main novel ones are: cumin seeds, curry leaves, ground turmeric, coriander powder, and asafoetida. Asafoetida was probably the most unique one for me, it came in a special, medicine-like bottle. I’m still not quite sure what the flavor is, kind of onion-y and earthy?

At any rate, we got all our spices from New India Supermarket in El Cerrito. I’m sure a lot of this can be found online too, but in the east bay area we are fortunate to have diverse markets from many different cultures. The only option at the store was some pretty big bags of spices, so we now have enough to make this recipe for probably a full year =D!

The recipe below is enough for 4 servings, which is the starting point for you to try and decide if you like it. But the ways this recipe really wins for me, besides the taste, are that all the ingredients except tomatoes have a long shelf life, and it scales up easily.

After the first batch of 4 servings, I quickly jumped to 16 servings, which is the max our 6 quart instant pot will fit. And now we basically have our own Everyday Dal on tap, which is also an amazing source of fiber!

Recipe: All the credit goes to Piping Pot Curry for this recipe

Tools

Measuring cup/spoons
Instant Pot
Wooden spoon

Ingredients

1 tablespoon Ghee or Oil (Mauricio’s note: I just used butter)
1 teaspoon Cumin seeds (Jeera)
1 Green Chili Pepper sliced into 2 pieces or chopped
6 Curry Leaves (Kadi Patta)
1/4 teaspoon Asafoetida (Hing) optional, skip for gluten-free
3 cloves Garlic minced
1/2 Onion finely chopped
1 Tomato finely chopped
1 cup Split Pigeon Pea (Toor dal) washed
3 cup Water
Cilantro to garnish

Spices

1/4 teaspoon Ground Turmeric (Haldi powder)
1/2 teaspoon Coriander powder (Dhaniya powder)
1/2 teaspoon Red Chili powder (Mirchi powder)
1 teaspoon Salt

Instructions

Start the instant pot in sauté mode and heat the oil in it. Add cumin seeds, green chili, curry leaves, garlic and asafoetida.
After the garlic turns light brown, add the chopped onions and cook for 2 minutes until the onions turn golden brown.
Add tomato and spices and cook for another 2 minutes.
Add the washed dal and water. Stir it all up.
Change the instant pot setting to manual or pressure cook mode at high pressure for 5 mins. After the instant pot beeps, let the pressure release naturally for 5 minutes, then release the pressure manually.
Garnish with cilantro and stir. Optionally, sprinkle the juice of half a lemon. Dal tadka is ready to be served.

Notes

Thick dal: If you like thick dal, reduce the amount of water to 2.5 cups.

A note about consistency: Don’t worry if the dal does not look well mixed when you open the pot. Stir it well and it will be delicious. Some people like more cooked dal, you can also increase the pressure cooking time to 7-8 minutes.

Vegan Variation: Skip ghee and use oil of your choice.

Soaking: I did not soak the toor dal in this recipe. If you do soak the daal for 2 hours, you can reduce the cooking time to 3 minutes.

Green Chili Pepper: I typically use Thai, Birdeye or Serrano Chili Pepper in my recipes. Don’t forget to adjust to your taste (Mauricio’s note: we used half the listed pepper amount, and removed the seeds).

Nutrition

Coach Mauricio