I'm not so sure about the scent of toor dal...

[rugessnome]

eeurgh I don't necessarily feel great at the moment :/

The two major things I have tried to do today are

1. make sambhar
2. find the perle cotton I've been using for bobbin lace

I have chopped most of the vegetables and I guess the toor dal is finally cooked for the sambhar. It has given off some not so great smells, I think partly because it slightly boiled over and the starchy water burnt and partly just I'm unused to it and not certain I like the smell.

I am using the recipe from the box of MDH sambhar masala, and my ~500g of vegetables are made of:


3 slender but long okra pods, sliced
7 green beans, in ~1cm slices
1 small Yukon Gold potato, about 2×2×3", the size of a child's fist, in very small cubes
1 small Indian eggplant similar in size to the potato also in small cubes
½ a honeynut squash, the half a little over 100g or about 4 oz, cut into thin pieces probably ~1×1×½cm
about 50-60g frozen peas
about 50g/5 pieces frozen drumstick


I haven't chopped my tomato or onion yet and I need to find my tamarind paste. The dal also pretty much boiled dry at the end, so I added an arbitrary amount of water back to it...

I have not succeeded at finding my thread in a large pile of clutter that is its last known location, but I've made a mess even as I did pick up some trash and recycling. And the bending over made me feel slightly unwell even before the dust has given me a cough 🙃.

Comments

[unspeakablehorror]

Burning things is always less than optimal for sure. I always have to be careful not to burn things when I cook because my attention is prone to wandering.

While I enjoy a number of North and South Indian dishes, I'm not sure that particular combination of vegetables in that particular dish would be to my liking. But tastes vary widely, so if this particular preparation is something you expected to like and didn't, perhaps it's because something went wrong with the preparation. I know dishes can sometimes be very sensitive to the order and way in which ingredients are added. And in same cases it's necessary to adapt things to better accommodate personal tastes. Although it's also the case that things can sometimes smell more unpleasant to a person when cooking than when being eaten. A lot of possibilities. How'd it turn out in the end?

[rugessnome]

...so unfortunately I cannot report back on the taste because I failed to finish cooking it thanks to not feeling well and then forgot to put everything into the fridge to work on later. 🙃 which made it a pretty unsuccessful day...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ although one single recipe did not recommend all those vegetables, they were all recommended in either a. the back of the box recipe or b. Crescent Dragonwagon's recipe that I made long ago, except she said butternut squash (no she's not Indian but she spent some time in Kerala and I do not think hers was terribly different from the sambhar I've had at a restaurant or from frozen.)

Possibly it would clarify things to note that the back of the masala box recipe had me cooking the dal alone in plain water, and that (plus it boiling over and scorching in the burner pan/burning on the electric stove element) was the smell I was having difficulties with... but I was also probably feeling somewhat unusually sensitive to smells that afternoon (and some other times last week) and I suspect that I might not have really enjoyed the smell of other food I normally enjoy eating at that time. (I think even the scent of rice--which although I do not eat it on a daily basis is typically a perfectly neutral food--might have been somewhat unappealing right then.)

(all this said, I have an inkling that the box recipe omitted making a tadka (I have no idea if that is the correct regional word) that I think might otherwise be expected (possibly expecting that users would know to do this finishing touch?) so that might, hypothetically, have been disappointing...)

[unspeakablehorror]

Sorry to hear it didn't work out! Yeah, sometimes I forget to put food away too. Always makes me very sad.

As for my feelings on the vegetable combo, it might just be my own specific pickiness about food combinations. Might be a lot of other people would love that combo.

And yeah, using a tadka (cooking the spices in oil) can be really important for the flavor.

Hopefully you'll have better luck next time!