I did it! I made Yellow Mung Dal!

I have been wanting to expand my cooking knowledge for a while. I am having trouble digesting a lot of different foods, and have a pretty narrow diet right now. For a while i was only eating lentils and rice, oatmeal, vegetables, chili, and occasional fruit, occasional meat. I actually havent minded until recently, because I like eating the same thing all the time. I am weird that way. I have been making a big pot of rice and lentils together in my rice cooker at the beginning of the week, storing that in the fridge, and then using it as a base for lots of additional veggies or seasonings. Its real easy, really cheap. Try a bowl of lentils, rice, avocado, cayenne, and Braggs sometime. Throw on some sprouts or lettuce and its just really satisfying and light. Easy to digest. Etc.

But I finally hit a wall with lentils. Thats when I realized that I can probably eat other legumes. So now I have mung beans, split mung beans, green peas, and short grain brown rice (its just my favorite) to play with. My brother loves to cook, so he keeps sending me recipes but I haven't tried any yet.

I was talking about this to my friend @tanishqyeverma, too. He sent me to this excellent website that can be displayed in English as well as Hindi..

There are videos as well as recipes, which makes learning Indian cooking so much easier. When I just read recipes I kind of get lost. When I can see both, it helps me visualize what to do. I watched a whole bunch of recipe videos so that I could understand typical cooking methods, tools, spices, and other ingredients. Then I made a shopping list in order to round out my kitchen, so that I could experiment with recipes over time rather than just buy only per recipe.

Finding ingredients is a little tricky...

I live in Montana. So that means when you go to the grocery store, you can't even find "hot" salsa! haha! There is only mild and medium! I knew I probably wouldn't find everything, but I tried. For example, there simply are NOT any red chilis at all in the store right now here. Maybe in the summer we will have more variety of peppers, or maybe if I REALLY try, I could grow the right peppers myself. But for now I had to get green chilis. I also couldnt find a few other things. But i did find curry leaf and aesofitida, which really surprised me!

Today I decided to try the Moong Dal recipe because I had most of the correct ingredients. I advise you to go to the website to learn how to do it. Here is what is in this recipe:

हिन्दी में पढिये : Moong dal tadka

Ingredients for yellow moong dal recipe
Moong dal – ½ cup (100 grams)
Ghee – 2 tbsp
Green coriander – 2 to 3 tbsp (finely chopped)
Cumin seeds – ½ tsp
Asafoetida – 1 pinch
Tomato – 1 (finely chopped)
Curry leaves – 6 to 7
Coriander powder – 1 tsp
Whole red chilly powder – 1
Red chilly powder – ¼ tsp
Turmeric powder – ¼ tsp
Green chilly – 1 (finely chopped)
Ginger paste – ½ tsp
Salt – ¾ tsp or as per taste

This is the finished bowl of dal!

A couple things I did totally different

I already had some rice and split mung bean precooked in the fridge from two days ago, so I did not start out cooking the spices into that. The original style for dal is not to cook the rice along with the legumes at all, but to serve the dal over rice, or with various kinds of flatbread. So in this way I did it very differently because I precook it like this for my convenience. Here it is in the container from the fridge.

I also forgot to look for ghee, but thats usually expensive here anyway, so that was ok. I clarified some butter on my own the best I could, and used that.

I sauteed the spices together, and when they were done I cut up a fresh tomato I wanted to use up, and added it.

Then I put a couple cups of mung bean and rice into another pot, and added some water, and heated those up like a soup. I added the spice and ghee mixture, stirred it, and added chopped cilantro. IT TASTED AMAZING.

I am really proud of how this turned out. And my photo of it isnt so bad, neither! Its like a real cooking blog!

Let's look at it again

What I need to fix for next time:

I was scared to use a whole chili pepper because even though I am craving very spicy food, I don't cook with fresh chilis ever! So I only put a half a chili in there. THAT WAS MY MAIN MISTAKE because it wasnt spicy enough :). So I will put at least a whole chili if not more next time. Otherwise the flavor was rich and complex and all the right balance of tangy, sweet, salty, DELICIOUSNESS! The chilis tasted so good in there with their tangy and spicy flavor that I am excited to go crazy with chilis next time.

Thanks for reading !

Thank you so much to my brother who keeps sending me tons of amazing dal recipes, and to @tanishqyeverma for encouraging me and sending me this website! I plan to keep watching the videos from there and try more soon! I am thinking about making something with green peas.

Please check out my other recent posts!

xo,