With Ian recently back from a barbecue-intensive trip to Memphis, and with spring in the air (March 2010 – so far, the first snow-free March in the Twin Cities in recorded history, since 1891 – and no snow in the forecast), the time was right for spinach and lentils.

Enter a recipe for palak daal from 101 Cookbooks: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/palak-daal-recipe.html

Before I go off on a massive side track, my variation on this palak daal recipe (frozen spinach instead of fresh, red lentils instead of white) was tasty over brown rice, and satisfying in both the “I am hungry, and dinner is delicious” and “I enjoy eating foods that make me feel nourished” senses.

It did not include a terrifyingly scary number of ingredients like many Indian recipes require (even if the long ingredient list tends to be mostly spices and not that scary upon further review) and required little attention while cooking (I also made caesar dressing and ricotta for the next day’s dinner, AND cleaned up most of my mess in the kitchen). Also, I now have nutritious, satisfying lunches for several days next week.

Massive Hing Sidetrack

The recipe includes asafoetida (aka, hing), and I included it because I had some from a previous Indian cooking jag, and they have it available in bulk at the Co-op. I love you, Seward Co-op.

Here’s what I learned when I looked up, yet again, how to pronounce asafoetida (although, I’ll just call it hing, because I can’t pronounce it without evoking ass and fetid). Wikipedia, you both crack me up and give me often superficial but valuable and interesting insights into things I know little about:

• among its other names are evil’s dung, stinking gum, food of the gods, giant fennel. Evil’s dung and stinking gum seem like good, curse-free insults to me. Also, its names in many foreign languages are very devil poop focused. Which is weird to me, because I don’t think of supernatural beings as having a particular need to drop a deuce on any kind of regular basis.
• it’s an anti-flatulent. That’s handy knowledge for those of us obsessed with beans.
• It is used in adherents of some beliefs, such as Jainism, to add flavor to dishes because they don’t eat onions or garlic. These Jains don’t mess around, either – they don’t eat root vegetables (onions and garlic, but also carrots and potatoes – that would be a hard knock life trying to eat local in MN in the winter), because tiny life forms are injured when the plant is pulled up. And because consuming root vegetables requires that the entire plant be uprooted and therefore killed. Consumption of other vegetables isn’t a problem because it doesn’t kill the plant (it either lives on after the vegetables are picked, or it was seasonal and going to wither away anyway).