Supper tonight

Jan 19, 2004 16 Replies

Hi all, A simple meal tonight. The reason I'm posting is to say that this unlikely looking recipe is stunning! We had it with plain rice and a sag bhaji.


----- Now You're Cooking! v5.62 [Meal-Master Export Format]



Title: Hard-boiled Eggs In An Anglo-Indian Red Lentil Curry Sauce Categories: dairy, indian, vegetables, ish Yield: 4 - 6 servings


6 hot red chillies, dry;

-soaked in 5 tbs water



200 g red lentils
90 g chana dal or yellow split

-peas



1/2 ts ground turmeric
900 ml water; (1)
1 1/2 ts salt
4 cloves garlic; peeled and

-coarsely chop



7 cm fresh ginger; peeled and

-chopped



4 tb corn, peanut or safflower

-oil



1 md onion; halved sliced thin
2 md tomatoes, concassée
600 ml water; (2)
8 hard-boiled eggs; 2 per

-serving cayenne pepper or red



-paprika; garnishing lemon wedges; for serving



Soak the chillies in 5 tablespoons of boiling water for 1 hour or until slightly softened.



Combine the red lentils and chana dal and wash in several changes of water. Drain. Put in a good sized pan, add the turmeric and water (1), and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover partially with a lid, and cook for about 1 1/4 hours or until softened. Add the salt and stir to mix. The sauce will be fairly salty at this stage.



Put the chillies, their soaking liquid, the garlic and ginger into a blender. Blend until smooth.



Pour the oil into a medium, preferably non-stick, frying pan and set over a medium- high heat. When the oil is hot, put in the onion. Stir and fry until the onion slices are a rich reddish colour and slightly crisp. Add the garlic-ginger-chilli paste. Stir and fry for 2-3 minutes or until the oil begins to separate from the seasonings. Add the tomatoes. Stir and fry for 3-4 minutes or until thickened. Now empty the contents of the frying pan into the pan with the lentils. Add water (2) and stir to mix. Bring to a simmer and simmer on a low heat for a minute.



To serve, peel and halve the eggs, and arrange cut side up, in a single layer in a warmed, large, shallow dish. Heat the sauce through and, if it has thickened too much while sitting, thin it with water. It should have the consistency of flowing double cream. Pour it over the eggs but leave them visible. Garnish with a light sprinkling of cayenne pepper or paprika and serve with wedges of lemon. Extra sauce may be served on the side.



Recipe Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible



Contributor: scanned IMH


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Hi all!! Hle/on Mon, 19 Jan 2004 20:36:28 +0100, I said:-

Oops, sorry - posted to the wrong group, I ment to send it to alt.food.asian

I've posted several times to rec. alt.birds instead of this ng. I feel much better now, thanks Ian.

(checking to make sure which ng this is) Larry Southern Ontario

A '96 Dr Loosen riesling would go well with this. Ron

alt.food.asian

In fact, I filed it... :-) Anders

Interesting looking recipe, Ian. I have a few questions, though:

"chana dal" here refers to what is often called the yellow or golden lentil. It threw me for a loop at first, though, because (as I'm sure you know) "dal" refers to a class of cooked dishes, basically stewed pulses and "chana" in that context would mean "chickpea" (as in "chana masala").

crushed tomatoes, ne c'est pas? Fresh, or tinned?

Mark Lipton

Salut/Hi Mark Lipton,

Oh dear, how embarrassing! - the follow up to a mis-post.

le/on Mon, 19 Jan 2004 18:48:42 -0500, tu disais/you said:-

It was gorgeous. I rated it nearly as good as a Thai green beef & french bean curry we had a couple of days earlier. Jacquie rated it higher. This was the first consciously Anglo-Indian dish I've ever made - had some at "Chutney Mary"'s restaurant in London. Anyway, fire away.

Not quite. Dhal is the indian (dunno if it's Gujerati or what), but afaiac dal dhall is simply the generic word for "Lentil". More pedantically any split pulse - so you can have whole mung beans the things we sprout. When hulled and split, they are known as "Mung dhall".

Obviously, just as in any other restaurant, Dhall has come to mean a dish made from them. So you could have in an english restaurant "CaUliflower" in the menu, which implies thet it's cooked! This recipe uses two lentils, "red" or "Masoor" dhal, little salmon red lentils which cook quickly down to an ochre puree, and channa (as I know the spelling) which is a yellow pulse made (iirc and as you suggest) from chick peas. Another would be Toovar dhall made from Pigeon peas.

Concassee is a wonderful french shorthand expression. Tomatoes are skinned, deseeded, disgorged with salt and then coarsely chopped.

The original recipe said "fresh tomatoes, grated, discarding the skin that remains behind". For my money that's as near concassee as makes no difference.

In the original recipe, fresh, I can my own and used a half jar. (one jar is the equivalent of 500 gm tomatoes, peeled, deseeded, disgorged and chopped).

I followed the recipe almost to the letter, with the exception of the tomatoes. I've a little blender which I used, and which with care gave me a very smooth purée from the chiles, garlic and ginger. A mexican stone molcajete (temolcaxitl) or mortar and pestle would give excellent results, not necessarily any slower. I was unsure whether the chana would be cooked enough in the time, but they were, although they'd not reduced to a puree quite as thoroughly as the masoor did.

We drank water with the meal!!

"Ian Hoare" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

alt.food.asian

The question remains - what do you drink with it? _That_ would be a challenge ... eggs, curry, tomatoes ... wine killers to a man ...

Oh, BTW - I also filed it. Perhaps I should start hanging out on alt.food.asian too?

Cheers

Nils Gustaf

Hi, Ian -

That misposted meal certainly _sounds_ interesting! What is "7 cm" of ginger? Is that a typo? Seems to me that a weight or volume measurement would be more appropriate for ginger, as the cross section varies so drastically.

Tom S

Salut/Hi Nils Gustaf Lindgren,

le/on Tue, 20 Jan 2004 06:11:19 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

Water (though fruit juice would have been good, and an indian _if_ drinking with meal would probably drink lassi)!! If I HAD to find a wine for it, hmmm.... with 4 hot (180k scoville) seed in chillies for 4 people, it was pretty hot. I'd do the usual, try a sweetish gewurztraminer.

Umm, I can't recommend it wholeheartedly, it's pretty stuffed with people trying to be more erudite than the next over the transliteration of Mandarin, and the exact components of some obscure dish eaten by a visitor to a Korean Restaurant in Philadelphia! (of which they could neither remember the name of the dish exactly, nor the name of the restaurant). I'm being unkind!

There are the occasional gems though.

Salut/Hi Tom S,

le/on Tue, 20 Jan 2004 14:02:36 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

Yum!

It's a piece of fresh root ginger 3 inches long.

Nope, it's how Madhur measures ginger.

ginger, as the cross section varies so

Perfectly legitimate observation. However, I reckon that she's thinking in terms of the average thumb diameter ginger, and adjust accordingly. Volume can be tricky as you only find you've cut too much AFTER you've peeled and chopped it, and weight is tricky as not too many people can weigh accurately less than 10 grams (1/3 ounce for the metrically challenged). It's genuinely a problem - in earlier books she said a 1" or 2" cube, but is that 8 cubic inches (which it should be, really) or what. That's not _bad_, but a bit hit and miss with 1" cube= 1 cu inch, 2" cube = 8 cu in 3" cube' cu in, and it's unrealistic to expect the average housewife to measure a 1.7 inch cube from a piece of ginger!

If anyone DOES try thisd recipe, I'd love to know if they dared open a wine with it, how it went, and what _they_ thought of the dish.

Hmm... Personally, I do my best to steer clear of green beef, but de gustibus. ;-)

Why do you say "Anglo-Indian"? Eggs are certainly not a stranger to various Indian curries that I've had, and all the other ingredients look fairly typical of contemporary Indian cooking.

I agree with most of the above, but there does seem to be a tradition of using pulses in fairly liquid stews. An Indian cookbook I have from the 1940s does devote a whole section to "daals" (I think that was the transliteration used) and they do have a common character to them. However, as I have never visited India, the true tradition there may be quite different from what I understand.

Thanks! Filed away for future reference.

We drank water with the meal!!

I am not at all surprised, though a lassi would no doubt have been equally appropriate. Anyway, I for one am glad that you misposted this. Hello, alt.food.wine.and-the-occasional-recipe!

Mark Lipton

"Ian Hoare" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

What do you think of the sugg of 1995 Wehlener Sonnenuhr from Dr Lohsen? I had it, early last autumn, and I wouldn´t fancy it with such a hot dish, myself (I´d prefer a nice deep comfy sitting chair, and some Mozart ... preferably that lovely piece for flute and harp ...)

Verb sap, I´d say ...

Cheers

Nils Gustaf

Salut/Hi Nils Gustaf

le/on Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:03:48 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

BTW, there's not enough tomato to have much effect on the overall taste (at least in terms of wine unfriendliness). It's a bit like grumbling at a tsetse fly biting just after you've been mauled by a lion!

The wine's too good to risk destroying with a curry like that. If the bottle were already open, I'd risk a sip or two, but with no great expectation that it would survive. Don't get me wrong, I'm no wuss, nor a chile head, and I've certainly eaten hotter food with pleasure. That said, it had some power.

As far as a wine pairing: how about a Gruner Veltliner? Notoriously good for hard-to-match dishes....

Just thinking about the wine I would drink with this. Think a Pinot Gris from Washington State. Eggs, spices, etc.

Rich

Salut/Hi Mark Lipton,

le/on Tue, 20 Jan 2004 14:02:59 -0500, tu disais/you said:-

ORL right, Thai green curry of beaf and beans. Today was home made cumberland sausage with about 6 veg! Tomorrow will be the remains of yesterday's curries, and Thursday will ne a Thai red curry of chicken and bamboo shoots, and stir fried Thai-i-fied vegetables. Sigh... we've got to get them in before the paying customers arrive!

Basically, "eminent authority"!!! If Madhur Jaffrey says it's anglo-indian then I have to accept it. I _think_ the particularity was the lentil sauce. Almost all truly indian lentil dishes I've had have more spices then just turmeric, and don't often prepare a "flavouring mix" quite like that.

What I found MOST interesting on the Singapore leg of our round the world trip, was that the curries we ate in "Little India" there, where we were staying, were FAR more like the sort of dishes I make at home and whose recipes I've garnered, than anything in any restaurant in the UK. I'm not saying that's the same as visiting India, far from it. I agree that dhall (spell it as we wish) is almost as basic in an indian meal as bread is to a Frenchman and potatoes to an Englishman.

Kind of you.

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