Mutton and Yellow Split Peas Curry (Beri di chana dal)

I loooove legumes. I could quite happily live off lentils and chickpeas and not miss meat. Well not too much anyways. But combining meat and legumes together is a pretty winning combination in my eyes. This mutton and yellow split curry is one of my absolutely favourite meat curries. I had to do some research to find out what yellow split peas are called in Bengali or other South Asian languages. We call yellow split peas chana dal, however it turns out that's incorrect as chana dal is quite literally dried, split chickpeas. Yellow split peas are apparently called matar dal. And who said food blogging wasn't educational, ehhh??

I actually used dried yellow split peas rather than relying on tinned lentils as I normally do. But it's only because I haven't found tinned yellow split peas in the supermarket yet. If I do, I would totally switch over. I like this curry best the next day after the sauce has dried up and thickened a little bit and the spices have had time to mature a little bit. That's also my favourite way to enjoy any dal curry, actually, is that weird? I decided to pair the curry with the homemade, yeast free naan that I've already blogged about a couple of weeks ago which is perfect to mop up all of the juices. It tastes just as good however with plain rice, which is the usual way us Bangladeshis eat it.

Mutton and Yellow Split Peas Curry

Serves 6-10

Prep time: 30-40 minutes (plus overnight soaking of yellow split peas)

Cooking Time: 1 hour - 1 hour 30 minutes

by Abida at The Red Lychee

Ingredients:

1/2 cup yellow split peas

1 kg of mutton diced into chunks
5 tablespoons vegetable oil
One and half medium onions
4 cloves of garlic, minced/grated
1 inch piece of ginger, minced/grated
2 bay leaves
1 cinnamon stick/cassia bark snapped into pieces
3 cardamoms
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp turmeric
1-1 1/2 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp cumin
Handful of Coriander
Salt to season
Water

Method:

1) Wash and then leave yellow split peas in a bowl of cold water to soak overnight. The next day, rinse yellow split peas, and then place in a pot with cold water. Cook on a mdium to high heat for about 30 minutes, until the peas have softened in the middle. Skim off the froth from the top of the pot every now and then. Once peas are cooked, drain and reserve to the side.

2) In a large pot, add oil. Allow to heat up, then add garlic. Allow garlic to turn golden then add garlic, onion, cardamom, bay leaf and cinnamon. Add salt and stir. Then add the meat and the turmeric. Cover and leave to simmer on a medium to high heat. Check every 3-5 minutes. If the meat is catching the pan, add a little bit of water.

3) After about 20 minutes, once the onions have softened to a much and the meat has shrunk in size, add the remaining ground spices. Cover again and leave to simmer on a medium heat so the spices cook out. Check every now and then, and add water 1/2 a cup at a time if the meat seems like it is burning.

3) After another 15-20 minutes, once the oil and sauce have separated,  add the split peas and coat in the sauce. Leave to cook for about 10 minutes, and then pour in enough water to cover the meat and peas. For me, that is usually about a cup and a half of water (I use a normal coffee mug). Turn up the heat to medium-high and allow the curry to simmer to a boil.

4) Once yellow split peas have softened, and the meat is tender to your liking, season with salt to your taste. Add coriander and remove from heat. Serve with plain rice or flat bread.

Ayr maas di aloo ar khomlar bakhol (Bengali Fish Curry with Potato and Orange)

Happy Monday, readers! I don't know about you, but last week flew by for me. I fully intended on posting a few more times last week, but somehow time eluded me. And it was a bit of a strange, up and down week, to be honest. 

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, I was awoken by a mosquito buzzing around my ear. I know what you're thinking, are you vacationing in some exotic resort, Abida? The answer is no, dear reader,  I'm still in the concrete jungle of London, and the temperature has hardly been sweltering. It was only when I got out of bed and looked in the mirror that I realised that I had been bit on my eyelid, and my whole left eye had swollen up as a result. I looked like something between Quasimodo and a heavyweight boxer. Not an attractive sight at all. 

I still had to go out though, much to my own trepidation, and so I tried to think of the best way to look less creepy. I tried curling the eyelashes on my swollen eye to make it look a little bigger, but when I curled my good eye, they just looked uneven again. Then I tried squinting my good eye, so at least the two matched a little, but it's surprisingly difficult to walk around in a busy city with squinted eyes. In the end, I just tried to keep my head down and minimise eye contact with other people as much as possible. Thankfully, my eye has gone back to normal now. 

Then after the Quasimodo-Eye Episode, my beloved mother accidentally threw an item that I needed into the bin. As we live in an apartment block, we have a communal rubbish storage system and so we ended up rifling through a giant metal bin trying to find said item. However, we managed to find said item in the end, so not all was lost. I'd like to say that's the only time I've ever accidentally thrown something in the bin and have had to fish it out, but it's actually happened a few more times than I care to admit. Forget misadventures in the kitchen, I think I should rename my blog to misadventures in life....

But anywho, on to the actual recipe, which I'm sure is the real reason you're here. I bring you today another traditional Bengali fish recipe. I do like my fish, and this curry makes a great meatless Monday meal. This dish uses Ayr fish, another freshwater Bengali fish which is great for the fish-phobic as it does not contain too many bones and has no scales to remove, yay! As when preparing any Bengali fish, the fish is cut into small pieces and then washed and left to soak in salted water before adding to the curry.

 The fish is paired with potato and orange peel, which although might sound a little strange, is quite a traditional combination in Bangladeshi, and especially Sylheti, home cooking.

Rather than adding only the zest, cut up pieces of orange peel are used. This adds a great citrus scent to the whole curry and the cooking process softens the orange peel and takes away any bitterness. It's a great way to jazz up a boring fish and potato dish and complements the spices in the sauce well. Even if you cannot get a hold of ayr fish, I would definitely recommend trying the potato and orange combination with another fish.

Bhaingan Bhorta (Aubergine Chutney)

I can often have a glut of things in the fridge or food cupboard. At the moment, it's spinach, which I accidentally bought an extra bag of (ideas for a recipe, anyone?). As the title implies, on this particular occasion, I had a few extra baby aubergines lurking around in the fridge. In the end, I decided to use them to make a quick and simple bhorta (or Satni as we call it in the area of Bangladeshi my family are from), which would loosely translate to chutney in English. In simple terms, it is just a process of mashed aubergines/eggplant along with some onion, chilli and coriander. I decided to leave the aubergines slightly chunky for a bit of texture rather than completely puree them. A subtle smokey taste is added to the dish by pan roasting the aubergine and onion.

Though a simple and economical dish, bhortas are a great alternative to curries as they are light and fresh tasting. As you can eat them cold, they are great for warmer days when you might not fancy eating something hot. There is just a hint of spice from the fresh green chillis and the few drops of mustard oil, however it is subtle and complements the overall fresh notes of the bhorta.


Traditionally, Bengalis will eat various types of vegetable bhortas with plain rice, however, as this aubergine bhorta is quite similar to aubergine dips, I think it could also taste pretty good with wedges of pita bread as a dip.

Murghi di Khadur Salan (Chicken with Bottle Gourd Curry)

Ah, the humble khadu. Sometimes known as doodhi or laukhi, this bottle gourd vegetable is now widely available in a lot of supermarkets in the UK. There are apparently lots of health benefits associated with doodhi too, from helping with digestion and weight loss to helping with stress relief. According to online sources, duudhi tastes great in desserts such as halwa, however, I bring you a recipe today using this vegetable in a curry. Typically, in Bangladeshi home cooking, khadu may be cooked either with fish or chicken. When it is cooked with fish, it is often cooked with less chilli. My preferred version however is in a spicy curry with chicken.

It is also around this time of year that many Bangladeshis in the UK attempt to grow  khadus in their own gardens. It's no easy feat considering the obvious difference in climate between the UK and Bangladesh. Even for the most seasoned of gardeners, growing a khadu takes dedication and and a good dose of coaxing. And in the end, you might only just end up with the one or two khadus, if even that. Yet, despite the odds, you get some people who will try to grow these vegetables year in and year out. If that doesn't show a love for vegetables, I don't know what does.

To prepare the khadu, you must first remove the outer green peel. You could do this with a vegetable peeler or a knife, but these days I like to do it using a traditional Bangladeshi sickle shaped knife called a da which you kind of crouch down over on the ground, allowing you to use both of your hands to hold the food item (remind me to blog about this strange but highly precise tool at a later date).
Once peeled, you need to cut the khadu in half lengthways. Then you can scoop out the seeds using a spoon. Once scooped out, roughly dice the khadu into big chunks.

Khadu as a stand alone vegetable doesn't really have a lot of taste to it, but it takes spice well and as such it makes a great accompaniment to the chicken in this curry. Some of my family members prefer this dish with minimum amounts of chilli so that they can enjoy the taste of the khadu more, as such I would recommend trying out the recipe and varying the amount of chilli powder according to your own taste. So if you like the flavour of South Asian curries but can't always tolerate the heat, then try this recipe out.

Bengali Pabda Macher Jhol (Bengali Pabda Fish Curry)

It occurred to me recently that almost three whole months into my food blogging career, I still don't have a single fish curry on here. Due to the geographical location of Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal, freshwater fish is very commonly consumed, sometimes more than meat or chicken. This is something that has been exported with the Bangladeshi diaspora in the UK and beyond.

Although we cook and eat a lot of fish curries in my family, I haven't posted any recipes here under the assumption that not many people would really be interested in them. But then after some thought, I realised that actually fish dishes are what sets Bengali cooking apart from Indian and Pakistani cuisine. It is far more representative of traditional Bengali cooking and really does deserve a lot more exposure. And thus this post was born!

Depending on where you are, buying Bengali fish may not be as difficult as you might think. Asian or Bengali food stores are to be found in most cities in the UK, and in actual fact, the Pabda used in this dish can be purchased from several of the big supermarket brands in larger cities like London. However, if it is not available to you, from what I have heard from chefs, something like John Dory or maybe even whole tilapia could be used.

As we buy our pabda frozen, we have to do all the preparing ourselves. There are no scales to remove, however, we do remove the tail and the head at about a 45 degree angle to remove some of the innards of the fish. Then depending on the size of the pabda, I cut it into small pieces, usually two. The fish is then washed out with water and left to soak in salted water while the other ingredients are being cooked.

Meat and Potato Curry

I am really not a Monday person. Last night, I was trying to make the most of the final hours of the weekend and curled up on my bed with my iPad. At some point however, I must have zonked out fully dressed, contacts lenses in and lights still switched on. I awakened some time later with a jolt and with a furtive glance at the clock was seized with the panic that I was late for work. I flew out of my bed then and ran to the bathroom and attempted to brush my teeth and shower in lightening fast time. Then I returned to my room in a manner befitting only a headless chicken and glanced at the clock again to check how I was doing for time... only to find it reading 12.40am. You see, in my haste I had totally mixed up the big hand and the little hand. It was a real groan out loud moment, I won't lie. So yeah, I'm really, really, really not a Monday person at all.

But embarrassing stories aside, let's move on to today's blog post! This is my standard recipe to use when cooking any kind of meat curry or bhuna. Like my simple chicken curry recipe, it can easily be adapted and you can substitute the potato for other vegetables. 

I have used mutton for this recipe which is the go to meat in our family for traditional cooking rather than lamb. For dishes like curry which involve a lot of stewing, mutton is an ideal choice and actually has a lot more flavour than lamb. This is probably my favourite curry to make, namely because you can actually throw everything into one pot and leave it alone to simmer away.

This a very traditional and homely dish that you would find in a lot of Bangladeshi homes over the week. The meat is juicy with a rich gravy and is contrasted well with the softness of the potato. 

Simple Chicken Curry

Did you know that Bangladeshis run 85-90% of all Indian restaurants in the UK? Despite the notoriety attached to curry strips like Brick Lane, the amount of authentic Bangladeshi cuisine out there  remains limited. Enter me. I am here to bring you a taste of some real Bangladeshi home cooking that has been handed down through the generations. And let me tell you this, home cooking is 150% better than anything you will try in an Indian restaurant.

Let's start off with my version of an everyday chicken curry, which is found in most Bangladeshi households. This is something that can easily be adapted to include lots of other vegetables, such as potato, with a few tweaks. As it is an everyday curry, it does not feature any heavy creams or sauces and can easily be knocked up in an hour. This curry is packed with flavour and the gentle heat is perfect to warm you up in these cold winter evenings.  

It all starts off with a few simple ingredients. Onion, garlic and ginger are our staples for any meat or chicken curry base along with a few ground spices. My three whole spices, cinnamon, bay leaves and cardamon are also always included in any curry including meat or chicken. The three add a sweetness and fragrance that complements the heat of the chilli powder.