Ghee Rice II

If mutton stew is around, can ghee rice be far behind?
Ghee rice is pretty common in most houses now.. If it's a party ..well, then, lets make ghee rice and a plethora of dishes to go with it, veg or nonveg based. Sunday lunches in my mom's house tended towards biryani during my days there but lazy me, opts for ghee rice and a curry to celebrate the weekend. The winter doesn't help.. we almost stop eating rice as plain rice in the cold weather and only the pulavs and fried rice seems to satisfy. So here is another version of the typical Malabar style ghee rice.

Mutton Stew My Style

Its Feb already and there is hardly any signs of the great winter letting up.. The schools closed in preparation for the great storm that assailed the East coast and now will open only mid next week... now at least I can sleep in on these cold cold days without gearing up to confront the icy winds seeping in from the windows. I guess I am going into hibernation, putting on more padding to keep warm as well as turning indoors to avoid battling the cold. Though once we are dressed in clothes, well, layers and layers of them, the cold is not so bad, but the body is just stiff and unbending.

Just kidding.. I love the snow  and the white beauty all around..it is so picturesque and calm..They say its a "storm"..to me storm means lightning and thunder, floods of water and general mayhem.. the Kerala Monsoons. Well, the mayhem and floods of snow are there on the roads as is evident in the news, but the glamorous sound and light show is missing and the "storm" is a day filled with an eerie unnatural silence with a steady stream of cotton candy floating down covering the roof and trees with "frosting".

Masoor Dal/ Whole Pink Lentils

The other day NY Times came out with a series of dal/lentil recipes, in an effort to entice the common man to eat more of the Indian common man's food..dal...they added curry powder, apples, coconut milk and a myriad other assortments to dress up our humble staple. I am sure the whole family of lentils and beans felt like Cinderalla in America even if it was for just one day. Makes you think..apples in dal? maybe not a bad idea. Well, we do use pumpkin, cashews, poppy seeds and tamarind in our recipes....all kinds of sweet and sour pairings...can apples be far behind? The problem with knowing how to make a dal one way is that you make it every day  in auto-pilot mode before you think of something new.   Still it was soothing to see the words "dal" and "tarka" used so casually, like old friends,  in the article.