Dal / daal Makhani and the Haven

Hello all! This week has been amazing - I matched for residency, my dear friend/roommate got married to a great guy, I ate at my favorite hoagie restaurant in New Jersey (let the gloriousness of this moment not be underestimated), the Ravens are going to the super bowl, and Obama got inaugurated. Pretty hard to beat. Not unsurprisingly, Monday afternoon felt like a bit of an anticlimax. How do you top all that awesomeness?! With an unnecessarily elaborate Indian supper, that's how! I love Indian food - spicy, delicious, and (much of it) vegetarian. Now that I am comfortable with the basics of Indian cooking, I LOVE making it at home - all the great flavors of an Indian buffet without all the salt, butter, cream, and MSG.

If you're into Indian home cooking, Anupy Singla is a great resource. She is an Indian-American author with several cookbooks, none of which I own (sadly). She specializes in Indian slow cooker recipes as well as healthy vegan recipes. She has a great blog, Indian as Apple Pie. None of the recipes I have tried from her site have been duds - none. Today I made her Dal Makhani. I followed her recipe pretty closely, but I made enough changes that it bears a re-write here:

Rinse 1.5c dried lentils and 3/4c dried kidney beans. Black lentils are ideal, brown OK. Soak overnight.
Cover the beans and lentils with water and simmer with 1 cinnamon stick, 6 balls allspice or 3 cloves, 2 bay leaves, and 1t turmeric powder for about 1 hour, until soft enough to eat. Turn off and leave covered when done.
When the beans are done, process 4 cloves garlic, 1 onion, 1" fresh ginger, and 1.5 jalapenos (I left the seeds in - use your judgement depending on how much spice you like).
Next, heat 4T butter or EVOO in a saucepan.
Toast 1t cumin seeds until they sputter, ~1".


Add the garlic/onion/ginger/jalapeno mixture and saute until it becomes fragrant and slightly browned, 3-4".
Add 6 oz tomato paste and stir. Add a little water if needed to keep the mixture from sticking to the pan.
Put the lentils/beans and the contents of the saute pan into your slow cooker.
Stir in a few shakes of cardamom powder and salt to taste (~1t).
Cook for about 6 hours on low. Stir in 1/4 cup coconut milk at the end.

I paired it with garlic naan, saag, and raita. Note that if you get lazy with that saag recipe, you can replace most of the spices with a few shakes of garam masala and call it a day.

Pictures of the best hoagie place on the planet:

Hoagie Haven, Princeton, NJ. Can't get the photo to rotate =(

Grease stains in front of the bench out front: this is how you know it's good.