Posted by kathryn in Shopping Basket, Vegan, Legumes, Vegetable recipes and Main courses

Since reading Jocelyn’s post about cabbage dal over at She Spills the Beans, I’ve been slightly obsessing about making this dal.

I love, love, LOVE dal and we’ve always got a few tubs of it in the freezer. While I often include silverbeet in my dal and despite being a huge cabbage fan, I’ve never made dal with cabbage. After receiving reasurrances from Jocelyn about how good it was, I decided to make some over the weekend.

This was all helped along by me finding the cutest cabbage at the Orange Grove School organic market on Saturday.

Saturday afternoon Richard and I were faffing about at home, doing chores, which is a perfect time to make dal. Dal does take a while to cook, but it’s very low maintenance cooking and perfect for when you’re at home and doing other stuff – a bit of cooking at the beginning and end, but then for the most part you just need to stir the pot occasionally as you pass through the kitchen.

The word dal basically means a split dried pea, bean or lentil, although it’s also come to mean the slow-cooked stew that you make from those split peas / beans. The dal stew is made by cooking split peas together with a little turmeric. When it’s fully cooked a tarka is made – this is a combination of herbs and spices that are popped in a small amount of oil or ghee, which is then stirred into the dal and provides most of the flavouring.

I usually make dal using split mung beans (mung / moong dal), which you can get from most health food shops. However this time I used split red lentils (also called just red lentils in Australia, or masoor dal), which means the dal cooked much quicker.

And Jocelyn is right, the cabbage is really good in it – soft and almost buttery, with a gentle flavour and none of the sulphur-ness you sometimes get with cabbage.

Cabbage Dal

Serves 4

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/2 head of cabbage, finely shredded
• 200g (split) red lentils, washed and drained
• 2 teaspoons whole black mustard seeds
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 teaspoon freshly grated ginger
• 3 small red chillis, finely sliced (if you’re not a chilli fan you can reduce this or cut them out completely)

Heat the oil in a large, heavy-based pan, add the onion, cumin, coriander and turmeric and stir fry for about 5 mins on a medium heat until the onion is slightly browned (your kitchen will smell wonderful at this point). Add the cabbage and continue cooking and stirring until the cabbage is covered in spices, slightly wilted but not yet cooked through.

Add the red lentils and cook for another 2 – 3 minutes while stirring to coat the lentils with all the spices. Add about 1 litre of water, bring to the boil and then turn the heat down as low as possible.

Put the lid on the pan and leave to cook – if you have a simmer mat, I’d put this underneath the dal at this point. Red lentils will take about 30 – 40 minutes to cook and you do need to stir occasionally, to prevent them sticking to the bottom of the pan. You may need to add a bit more water if it’s looking too thick.

Once the dal is cooked then you need to pop the spices for the tarka. Heat about 2 tablespoons of oil in a small saucepan. When hot put in the mustard seeds first, and then about 2 seconds later add the bay leaf, ginger and chillis. This mixture will pop and fizz away and it only needs to cook for about 10 seconds. Add the tarka to the dal, cover immediately and leave for about 5 minutes before serving, to let all the flavours combine.

This makes enough for 4 people, it does freeze really well however, so it can be worthwhile making up larger quantities.

11 July, 2006