Oh Dahl-ing!

Dear reader. Today is the day your cuisine habits will change forever. Forget the generic and greasy curry-in-a-jar, or the faff of having to hunt down the coconut milk or curry paste to make a Classic Thai Green at home. Save the pennies on yet another bland takeaway, and forget the painstaking and frankly outrageous number of ingredients that some recipes ask for. If you want a fabulous, cheap and tasty curry alternative, look no further than the humble dahl.

Made from red lentils and a sprinkling of other cheap and easily obtained ingredients, dahls are one of the most tragically underrated student meals out there. A dahl is traditionally served as an accompaniment with a selection of other more spicy curries in countries such as India and Sri Lanka, but it is more than enough to eat as a main meal. It is staggeringly easy to make and brings a smile to your face as you sit down with a steaming and aromatic home cooked meal, next to your housemate who is eating pasta sauce out of a jar and shooting dagger looks of envy at your plate. More importantly for the ever-economising student, a dahl costs hardly anything to make, as long as you have the right spices stocked up in the cupboard. If, like me, you tend to eat less meat whilst at Uni for whatever reason, lentils are pulses and can more than make up for the lack of protein in your diet.

Dahl can be eaten with rice, with wraps, with naan bread, pickles, yoghurt, or bread. You could probably even have it with weetabix, should you ever wish to do so. Make a huge pot of it and invite your friends round to show off your exemplary experimental cooking, at hardly any extra cost. Alternatively, make a huge pot of it and don't invite your friends round - you will be sorted for meals for weeks and will come to realise that dahl sandwiches as a packed lunch are not only surprisingly tasty but liven up your day no end.

How to make Dahl (And change your cooking habits change forever)

250g red lentils

1 x onion, chopped

Chilli powder

Cumin

Turmeric

Ginger

Tin tomatoes

Curry leaves (optional)

1 1/2 pints water

Fry chopped onion in pan until soft, then add chilli powder, turmeric, ginger and cumin. Use a sprinkling of all spices, or until you can smell them!

Add lentils, water, tomatoes and optional curry leaves. Stir well.

Bring to boil, then simmer for about 20 mins or until the texture of lentils is soft but not too mushy.
Season with salt, pepper and probably more chilli.
Serve with fluffy, hot rice, a nice pickle (my favourite is Branston), and maybe a natural yoghurt and cucumber dip.
Eat when hot, and then store in fridge if any left to be eaten as post night out snack or for previously mentioned sandwich filler.

If you're struggling with the dregs of a student loan or saving money on food to spend on holiday (always an option), then whipping up a quick dahl is the thing for you. Nutricious, cheap and incredibly filling, dahl, darling, is really the best student curry in the world.

Saturday Lunch Shenanigans

There's something quintessentially autumnal about the colour orange. Orange leaves on the ground, orange pumpkins at Halloween, oranges on sale in fruit shops as tart satsumas and juicy tangerines come into season.  Orange in the clothes shops, threaded through a woolly bobble hat or mittens set, along with other warming maroons and browns.  Orange on your legs perhaps, as you grasp at the last straws of summer by flocking to the nearest bottle of fake tan.  So it's fitting that my first blog post for a new term at uni in the middle of autumn, should be about a bowl of orange soup.  Or rather - a butternut squash, potato and red pepper melange of bright flavours and velvety textures that will warm your heart and fill your belly.

I have discovered, close to our new house, an absolute gem of an organic fruit and veg shop.  "Alligator", on Fulford Road York, is an Aladdin's cave for any ethical-minded foodie; all its produce from locally sourced potatoes, to chocolate, to rice, to yoghurt, to olive oil, to spinach, is organic. I made my first sojourn to this corner of cuisinal curiosity this saturday morning, after pausing in my morning of diligent study (!) with a hankering for the hot stuff. And by that I mean saturday soup.

Saturday soup is a recent phenomenon in our family at home, where everyone seems to meander back to the ranch round about lunchtime after various cafe shifts and weekend jobs, to reconvene over one kind of soup or another. Sometimes it happens in life that you hit upon a meal which coincides beautifully with the mood of the day, say, pasta and pesto for energy before training for example, and saturday soup is one of those. It perfectly suits the productive yet happy feeling of a saturday, and as a self-confessed creature of habit I have absorbed it fully into my food-at-uni-routine.

So to the soup.  After having selected a small but tasty looking squash, a couple of muddy potatoes and a loaf of sour-dough bread from aforementioned shop, I began the cooking process. Another reason to love soup: it's so so easy to make. Here is what to do:

Butternut squash, red pepper and potato soup

1x squash

A few potatoes

1 x red pepper

Salt, pepper, chilli powder, paprika

1 x onion

1 litre vegetable stock

Dice all vegetables into chunks.

Heat onion in some oil in large pan until soft. Add seasoning to this.  Chilli powder works well with the sweetness of the squash, so the soup has a bit of a kick.

Add all veg into pan and 'sweat' for a few mins while you make stock.

Make stock.

Add to pan and bring to boil, adjusting seasoning.

Lower heat and simmer til vegetables are soft, usually for about 15/20 mins.

Take off heat and blend using hand blender, or other.

Serve with slices of sour dough bread, wedges of cheddar cheese and some cherry tomatoes. Drizzle in balsamic vinegar, the sour dough bread is great at soaking this up.

Sit back and enjoy the different tastes and colours, and wonder whether autumn might not actually be your favourite season after all.

Next post: Falalfel Mania