Dal

For the past several months I've been eating the same dish for lunch at least five days out of every seven. It's a recipe that has a lot of variables, which lets me experiment. I'm putting up this post because I've stumbled upon a couple that I really like and don't want to forget them. I plan to come back to this post and update it whenever I find more variants that are keepers.

The recipe itself is a thoroughly American bastardization of an Indian dish, dal. "Dal" is just the Sanskrit verb, to split, and as a dish it refers to split lentils or beans with other ingredients. My basic recipe for dal consists of the following:

• Between 1.5 and 2 cups of lentils or beans.
• About two cups of petite diced tomatoes.
• Two onions of some kind, minced.
• One fairly small ginger root, grated.
• One fairly large head of garlic, crushed.
• Three tablespoons of curry powder.
• An additional ingredient for flavor.
• Rice, about 1.7 cups before cooking.

The recipe is very simple: the lentils/beans, onions, tomatoes, and the additional ingredient all go in the crock pot in the evening. Typically I mince up the onions, pour one tablespoon of vegetable oil over them, and then microwave them for about five minutes to get them started, which is a shortcut I learned from the America's Test Kitchen easy prep crock pot cookbook. Then I throw that plus the tomatoes, pulses and additional ingredient in the crock pot, and add a little boiling water to get things started and give the pulses something to absorb as they cook. The crock pot goes on low, and chugs away for nine or ten hours. In the morning, I add the ginger, garlic and curry powder, let everything cook for about another sixty minutes, put the rice in my rice cooker, and then assemble in small tupperware containers five servings of two-thirds of a cup of rice topped by a fifth of the contents of the crock pot. All five go in the refrigerator for a day, and then I backpack them to work one at a time for my lunch.

There are four variables in the recipe: beans/lentils, onions, the additional ingredient, and rice. The different rices don't really change the flavor much, although I suppose they do make a marginal difference in the texture, so I just vary those often enough that they help to diversify my diet a bit. For the onions, there are only four options: white, yellow, red and sweet. So far, I've only found that sweet onions make a big difference in the flavor of the dish; the other three all just taste onion-y. I do have favorites among the beans/lentils -- red lentils are what I like best, even though I think a lot of folks would find them too mushy after cooking.

The biggest variable is the "additional ingredient." That can be anything. It can be vegetables, fruit, mushrooms, nuts, coconut milk, or whatever else I can imagine blending with the core recipe. So far, here are the variants that I've enjoyed enough to post them here for the sake of not forgetting them:

• Mango dal -- red lentils, sweet onions, mango salsa. Oh my heavens, this is tasty. When I make a batch of this, I daydream about lunch all morning. If it wasn't important to keep a balanced diet, I'd just fix this every week and consider the matter settled.
• Chipotle dal -- white onions, three cans of chipotle peppers, button mushrooms, beans instead of lentils. I stumbled upon this about three weeks ago, and was very pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. I can't pin down why the occasional mushroom made the chipotle so much more enjoyable, but it certainly did.
• A nice variant that's not too different from mango dal, and not as healthy as most of my recipes, is tropical dal, where the flavoring ingredient is mango, coconut milk and banana. I use a lot less mango in that -- instead of a full portion of mango salsa, I just use one of the smaller fruit cup portions of mango. It's not as fresh, obviously, but there's so much going on flavor-wise that I don't really notice that.
• New edit, July 10, 2019: I'm currently eating my way through a batch of Pad Thai inspired dal. Here are my cryptic notes on how to make the sauce.

It's cheap, tasty, unbelievably easy to make, and healthy two different ways: it rounds out my diet and also helps to keep my weight in check. There are no down sides to it. It's one of the best discoveries I've made in my adult life.

Terpsichore

Quick crackpot analogy that just hit me this morning. Listening is dancing.

Some people aren't any good at dancing, and they know it. Some think they're wonderful dancers, but it's plain to everyone they know that they're awful. Some refuse to dance as a principled stance. Some seem to take to dancing very naturally, but are a little clumsy and raw. Some work very hard to be precise and accomplished dancers, sometimes building on top of a bed of inborn talent, other times overcoming a lack of talent with determined hard work.

And you can't get better at dancing just by watching other people do it. You have to put yourself at risk, suffer failed early attempts, and pay intense attention to what you're doing wrong and what moves you've got to retrain and purge in order to make progress.

Extremis

For quite a long time I've taught my interpersonal communication students that language is a scalpel: speakers and writers can use it for benign purposes, to promote healing, to end suffering, but it always does violence to reality. It always pushes in abstraction and slices away immediacy.

This morning, it crossed my mind that a failing grade is a bullet.

The thought of being shot, or of receiving a failing grade, is frightening. The experience is painful. People commonly change their behavior, under duress, to avoid either of them. Authority figures are issued the machinery to deliver them, and need to exercise great caution when using it. But it's also a bad mistake to be so gun/F-shy that they refrain from using it when it's called for. A pacifist police officer who won't fire a gun leaves other innocent parties at risk; a pushover educator who won't record an F places both students and their future colleagues at risk.

Some shots are warning shots, and some failing grades on individual assignments are timely warnings that enable students to redirect their efforts. Some people's gunshot wounds heal, leaving little loss in function, and some students rebound from failing a class, having changed their habits and their attitude. Some gunshot wounds are fatal, and some failing grades result in academic dismissal, or in such concentrated discouragement that the student drops out. And there are accidental gunshots and failing grades based in misunderstandings or recording errors; I hope the accidental failing grades are a lot less common than the gun accidents. Can't quite make the analogy work for suicide by gunshot, but I can live with a single mismatch.

It then struck me that guns, and bullets, also have a lot to do with people's relationship with animals, and that might be where the analogy breaks down. But no, we grade animals in a lot of settings, and often those grades make the difference between life and death. Livestock gets graded, and some livestock goes to the slaughterhouse and the dinner table, while other livestock lives on as breeding stock. Apparently in that class, the learning objective is to be unappetizing, and students get an F if they're delicious.

Then there's also the example of working animals, like disability service and bomb- or drug-sniffers, all of whom get extensive training, and are very much at risk of flunking out of the program. It could be argued that those who flunk are relegated to a cushy life as adoptable pets, but it's been my growing conviction for years that working animals have the truly healthy living arrangement, and that the overwhelming majority of human-pet relationships actually unfold as the piecemeal papering over of the animal's misery. But that thought wanders off in another direction, way off the path from the F and the bullet.