Day 7: Soup ExploDation!

I made Daal soup from Rushina’s book tonight.

Rushina had made her comfort food - her mum’s daal soup, for lunch one day at the studio. It was a quick and filling soup, and tasted quite unlike the daal soup that I’ve always known – flavour-infused water of Konkani daal-i toi, which is carefully spooned out without disturbing the settled pulses, and drunk as soup.

But despite being a simple recipe, my endeavor this evening was not without disasters…

For starters the recipe called for masoor daal, of which I had none. Being someone who has not yet fully grasped the differences of the various daals, I thought, why not just substitute masoor daal with tur daal. No big deal. Daal is daal. Of course, chana daal or udad daal would be too drastic a substitution, but tur may work…

So all ingredients went into the pressure cooker to cook, and I hoped it wouldn’t be a total disaster.

Then it was time to blitz the chunky daal into a smooth soup.

After having watched one too many disastrous scenes on television, of blenders blowing their tops off and spraying the entire kitchen with milkshake, I always make it a point to ensure the blender is firmly shut before blitzing its contents. But this time the heat of the boiling daal caused a build up of pressure within the blender, and THAT made the lid burst open and spew its scalding contents half across the house! 

Luckily, we all survived the soup volcano. I cleaned up, blitzed the rest of the soup and finished the recipe. As though subtistuing daals was not enough, due to a lack of commercial curry powder that the recipe requires, I used my Ammama’s sambar powder in the tadka.

Now having used tur daal in place of masoor daal and sambar powder in place of curry powder I was pretty sure it would end up tasting like, well, blitzed sambar.  But it actually turned out pretty good. It tasted like daal soup!

Next time, however, I shall do it right. (Sorry, Rushina!)