TracyFood

Recipe-in-progress: translating Nepali dal bhaat to my Oregon kitchen. 20 November 2007 2:09 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,nepal,pictures,recipes,travel,vegan,vegetarian , 4 comments

First things first, some definitions: dal means lentils, or really any kind of dried pulses, and bhaat means cooked rice (as opposed to rice plants growing in a field, or just the grains: green rice, brown rice, hulled rice, or rice milled to turn pretty white but not yet cooked). Put them together into dal bhaat and you have white rice with a thin lentil stew (almost a soup), and it is just about synonymous with food in Nepal. It is superfood and comfort food all at once, and it is delicious. We did not eat it every day of our trek in Nepal, but in my case not for lack of wanting to; when we didn’t have dal bhaat, it was usually because we had filled up on all the other delicious food, and I’m pretty sure it was always available. Some days we ate it twice, and I maintain that it was tastier every single time. By dinner time on our second day of trekking, I had resolved to “always leave room for dal bhaat” (it says so in my little paper journal entries of October 15 and everything). But I digress.

Ten days ago, my mom emailed me these recipes, and by last Friday, when I realized it had been almost two weeks since my last dal bhaat, I decided I had better give it a shot, if only to avoid going into withdrawal. Here’s how it went. (more…)