Shelf5

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Yellow lentil soup & Meatball curry

Toor dal soup & Kofta curry

Source: Easy Indian Cooking, Suneeta Vaswani

I’ve been making a chicken tikka masala recipe that appeared in Fine Cooking for years. It uses ingredients I almost always have on hand, it’s a relatively simple recipe, it always turns out great, and it makes plenty of leftovers for weekday lunches.

One day, I noticed in the blurb about the recipe author, that the author (Suneeta Vaswani), had a cookbook of easy Indian dishes. So I picked it up.

Then the book sat on Shelf5 for months. I had gone through it and highlighted some recipes, but never got around to making any of them because most of them required getting special ingredients.

Until today, when I made it a point to make two recipes from the book: a soup and a meatball curry.

The biggest challenge of this meal was finding yellow lentils for the soup. We didn’t succeed. You can find plenty of split yellow peas, but yellow lentils (toor dal) are hard to find in regular grocery stores. We settled for channa dal. The soup turned out beautiful, but I’m still curious how it would have been different with the yellow lentils. (I will make it again, and let you know.) A nice soup, with just the right amount of heat.

The meatball recipe was a little time-consuming (but as are all meatball recipes). The recipe uses an interesting technique to “set” the meatballs before frying them, to help keep them intact. They too turned out lovely, with a nice curry sauce to serve over rice.

To accompany the meal, we made the sweet lassi from Easy Indian Cooking. We accidentally left out the water, but quite enjoyed the outcome. (Give it a try and see what you think!)

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