Moong dal with Ginger (Lentils)

This week, a fellow foodie and scientist who's also a brilliant chef, Sylvia, asked for a lentil recipe from moi, मुझसे (mujhsey), aamakey! Oh, my, was I flattered. But besides being flattered, I had to give her a recipe she could try without running to the Indian grocery store and spend hours in a dazed state of mind for Indian spices can be confusing, especially if you're unused to the desi labels. Anyway, so, here's my recipe, Indian style, followed by a twisted one. Let me know how yours turns out. Would love to see some photos too.
Ingredients
1 cup moong dal (mung bean lentils)
2 tbsp ginger
1/2 cup coriander leaves
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp chili powder (optional)
1 tsp cumin powder
1-2 medium chilies (Thai), sliced
1/2 cup purple onions, chopped
1 tbsp clarified butter/ grapeseed oil 
Half a lemon
Salt to taste

• Boil the moong dal with the chilies and salt. I prefer a pressure cooker since it takes less than 15 minutes, but you could boil it in a pot too. Set aside.
• Saute onions with ginger, coriander leaves, cumin seeds and powder in a flat-bottomed pan in oil or ghee (if you're super skinny and/or don't care if your heart complains). Add chili powder if you're feeling adventurous. When the onions have wilted, and the color changed to translucent/white, add the dal.
• Be careful, the lentils may splatter! Add about 1 cup of water, and let the mixture simmer for about 5 minutes. Add more water if you want the lentils less thick.
• Garnish with a few coriander leaves, and a dash of lime juice. Eat with basmati rice. Enjoy!

Alternate recipe:

• Boil the dal with carrots (2-3 medium), potatoes (1 medium) and chiles.
• Saute the onions with coriander leaves, ginger, cumin seeds and powder.
• Add the dal with the vegetables to it. Boil or let simmer on medium-heat.
• Instead of water, add vegetable broth or chicken broth to make the lentils less dense. Simmer some more.
• Add a splash of lime juice, garnish with coriander leaves.
• Serve hot with basmati rice, or drink it as a soup with bread.
• Enjoy!

Bengali Chicken Curry with Potatoes

Firstly, the chicken isn’t Bengali. The recipe is, sort of, with my angle to it. You can get chicken from wherever, preferably one without hormones and such. This dish calls for chicken with bones (because they were born with bones and boneless chickens really have a hard time standing up…ah, but you knew that). The dish tastes better with that kind of chicken. The measures are for a dish for 4 people or two extremely hungry teenagers or for one person unwilling to share.
Ingredients:
8-10 pieces, medium size chicken
4 potatoes, small/medium, halved horizontally
4 Roma tomatoes, medium, quartered
1-inch piece ginger, grated
3-4 medium garlic cloves, grated
2 purple onions, medium, grated
2 medium green chilies, sliced thin
Spices:
2 tbsp turmeric
1-2 tbsp red chili (Kashmiri chili) powder (or if you’re scared, half it)
1 tbsp coriander powder
1 tbsp cumin powder
Garam Masala: 4 cloves, 1/2 stick cinnamon (small), 3cardamom, all ground together
2 bayleaf
3-4 tbsp grapeseed oil
Salt to taste
Recipe:
Grate the onions, ginger, garlic into a nice paste. Separate half the onions for sautéing.


Place the chicken in a bowl, and mix in the paste with salt, half the ginger, garlic, cumin, turmeric, and coriander along with the chilies.


Heat the oil in a flat-bottomed pan or a pressure cooker. When the oil is hot, add in the bay leaf with the freshly ground garam masala followed by the rest of the onion, ginger and garlic. Sauté it for 3-4 minutes, and then add the potatoes along with the rest of the turmeric and chili powder.


After the potatoes have softened a bit, add the tomatoes. Cook till the tomatoes are defeated in the fight against you (kidding!). Add some salt to taste. The kitchen should by now smell like a restaurant or else you’ve done something wrong, like set fire to it. Please check.


Finally, add the chicken marinating in the ginger/garlic/onion paste. Sauté it with another tbsp of oil. Once the chicken appears incorporated in the onion/tomato mix, and the potatoes half-cooked, add 1-1 and ½ cups of water, or enough to cover the chicken.


Lower the heat to medium, and cover the lid. Let the chicken cook in its juices and merge with the tomatoes. The turmeric should permeate through the dish. The reason to use Kashmiri chili powder is to get that red/orange color and the heat. But if you can’t find that, regular chili powder will do.


Alternatively, you could use a pressure cooker, sauté in it (the chicken, I mean), and then after the sautéing is complete, add water, put the lid on, wait for about 2-3 whistles, before turning the gas off.


If you want the curry to be less watery, remove the lid, and let the water evaporate a bit, the curry will be thicker. Adjust it based on how you’d like to eat this.


This should take you at the most, 30-40 minutes, because once it’s in the simmer phase, I’d strongly advise you to look for entertainment elsewhere. You could of course, stare at the pressure cooker and jump every time it shrieks, or watch the steam drip off the glass lid if you’re using a pan. That’s up to you, who am I to tell you how to use your time? But anyway, if you’ve made some white basmati rice alongside, then you can eat your chicken with it right after. If you’re a teenager and a very hungry one, you could eat the entire thing yourself. If you’re a polite adult, you may want to share it with someone.


It’s your call. Enjoy!

The Fall Colors of Chicken Curry

I'd like to imagine that Giada de Laurentis absolutely ADORES my curry leaf vermicelli. I'd like to go so far as the fact that the Iron Chef people begged me to join them, but I refused because I'm not that fond of the pale blue color of the chef's jacket. Like I said, those are conversations I really shouldn't share with you on my first blog, should I? Oh, well. You knew it was a lie, come on, didn’t you? I’m not a chef, my chopping skills are rudimentary, and every recipe is a scientific experiment. The only fact that's a fact is that I'm a foodie, and I love everything about it--the cooking, eating, talking (about it) and eating again. I appreciate organic foods, fresh, local produce, new recipes that can be simplified. I love food, whether you cook it or I do.


All of us have our secret recipes. Some of us share them, some are sneaky. If you're a spy, you can figure out family secrets (and recipes) easily. I'm not a spy, and if I were, I'd be very bad at it. So I have a motto. Which is, to share what I know, recipes, that is, and hopefully you'll do the same. My second motto is (who says you can have only one motto?) is: take that recipe, and make it simple. If something takes longer than an hour to make, prepare, monitor, turn, baste etc., you need to question, why? After all, life’s so short and there’s that hang-gliding lesson or that zip-lining trip you’d always wanted to take but never could make the time for? Okay, rule of thumb—if something takes more than an hour to make, as in, stand in front of the dish, stare at it or stir it (you know what I mean), then please, please question why you’re even trying to do this. Now if you like staring at bubbles, or splattering liquids, I’d suggest a spa or a volcano trip, but if you absolutely want to stand in front of your stove with a ladle and simmering liquid, be my guest. You can stir my soups too if you want (that didn’t come out right, did it?).


First of all, why Desi Twist? Desi, being that I’m Indian, desi meaning ‘from the country’, the country being India, and that’s cuisine most familiar. So if I present an Indianized apple pie recipe sometime later, please don’t be mad. I already said I love food, so bear with me, will you? Anyway, twisted, because I think every recipe can be modified, every recipe needs a shortcut and sometimes those twists in the original recipes can be great and good surprises. It’s what I look for when I eat out or steal my friends’ recipes. That’s what Desi Twist’s about—food made easy. Not food made inedible, in case you were wondering.


I live in California and still consider Delhi home. It adds a twist to my culinary thinking, especially an Indo-California one. The folks on the east coast tch, tch at our weather—oh, those poor Californians, no weather change, no fall colors, no color, only sunshine and beaches, oh, those poor people. Ah, but you see my fellow foodies, you enjoy your oranges, rusts and reds on trees, I’ll have that in my food, thank you very much. The good part of living in southern California is that you have tons of year-round farmers’ markets, organic food and fruit stands and fresh leafy greens to choose from. And nothing wrong if you want non-organic food, but to tell you the truth, the flavor in organically grown produce is something that cannot be reproduced in a factory setting. Eating local gets you food grown near you, supports the local community, and you end up eating food filled with sunshine, color and health.


Today, being the day of twists, I'm sharing a simplified version of a dish I've grown up with. This'll be one of the few recipes very Indian, more Indian than twisted. It's very Bengali actually—a typical chicken curry with potatoes. Not because I wanted to start with an authentic Indian dish, but because the dish exhibits all the fall colors—the yellows, ochres and rusts. This is comfort food, reminds me of home (as in Delhi), the weekend, and Ma cooking chicken for lunch while my sister and I tried our best on getting on each other's nerves. Yes, those days, when the biggest issue in my life was how to make my sister's (life) more miserable than mine. Oh, well. Chicken curry—my version, next post. You can share yours when you have the chance and feel the need to.

Till then, enjoy!