Dal

When LJ and I moved to the Olympia area we investigated local restaurants with the help of Yelp.  One of the most highly rated places was Curry Corner in Lacey.  We haven't eaten a lot of Indian food in our lives but that isn't because we don't enjoy it so we decided to make the trip across town one weekend to check it out.  Curry Corner completely lived up to the hype (LJ commented "I'm going to have to get use to possibility of good things being located in strip malls.") and the visit inspired me to try making a few dishes.

Dal is a simple dish to start with when exploring Indian food.  I have seen is served both as a soup and a side dish.  The ingredients are inexpensive and depending on the time of year you could find many of them in your garden.  The only difficult ingredient to find was Bengali five spice, which we couldn't find at our local grocery store.  We substituted Chinese five spice for it, and even though each contains a completely different set of five spices, the results were still excellent.

Red lentils form the base

Boiling the lentils

Prepped tomato for peeling

Peeled tomatoes after blanching

Cooking onion

Finished lentils

Added garlic and spices to onion

Added everything together

This is delicious stuff and incredibly easy to make.  We ate ours with naan (coming in a future post) but it easily could have been served over rice or as a soup.