Sambar -- Take 2 (No, Not Samba. Wrong Continent)

I'm convinced that in Mexico you have to dance salsa when they make salsa, but what if the country of the food and the dance don't match? I'm not so foolish to believe that South Indians dance samba when they make sambar. In fact I'm sure they dance bhangra instead.

God, I hope they do...Check out the 1:57 minute mark. It's actually a really hard dance...

Maybe I danced around my kitchen a little while I was making this...maybe. It was my second sambar recipe, and if you want to make sambar, use my first recipe because I got this one online and it was a bad recipe, which I didn't know until the end. Partly it was probably my lack of tomatoes' fault, but mostly it was the recipe.

1 cup toor dal, but I used skinless urad dal, which is definitely wrong)

2 tbsp channa dal   

1 bunch coriander leaves 

2 tbsp coriander seeds

1 bunch curry leaves

ginger (all it said was "ginger" so I went with the standard 1 inch piece)

2 cloves garlic 

1 tsp asafetida (I assumed it should be grated, because that's just what you do. Explicit this recipe was not)

1 tsp jaggery (this is a dark sugar so I used regular sugar with a tiny, tiny drop of molasses) 1 tsp fenugreek

1 HUGE zucchini, chopped into 1/2-inch cubes, or really, however you want (but you can use almost any vegetable you want - potato, beans, caulifower, etc)

1 tbsp mustard seeds

2 tbsp oil 1 large onion, diced

6 dried red chilies 

1 tbsp rice salt to taste 

1/2 cup tamarind water (one golf-ball sized piece of tamarind soaked in boiling water for 30 minutes, then strained through a sieve) 

1 medium tomato, chopped 

1 tsp turmeri

I made the sambar masala just fine I thought, even roasting the mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds, cumin seeds, and black peppercorns longer than the coriander seeds, red chilies, rice, and channa dal (which is traditional, and which is why I thought this would be a good recipe in the first place. Poh, from Poh's Kitchen taught me this is important in an episode with Indian spice master Ragini Dey). I'd also never seen a masala with oil in it since it wouldn't keep a long time.

The middle part of the recipe was less "fine". See you have to make the sambhar masala and then you have to use some of the same ingredients in the dish itself, but the ingredients are only listed once, so when I got down into the meat of the recipe (it's vegetarian, yes) I had no idea how much of certain spices to add...so I added the same amount again. WAY too much spice without anything to soak it up! Spices are delicate and while you can play with them, you can't just double them haphazardly. Shame on you, recipe.

I finished the recipe just fine as well. I threw in some zucchini for texture and vegetable (yes, "for vegetable"). I'd even soaked a whole piece of tamarind and used my ENORMOUS new sieve to strain out the stringy bits. Oh it was beautiful, beautiful sieved tamarind. Well, the rest of of the tamarind is in my freezer waiting for the next time I don't mess up sambar...or a samba, or a salsa. I hate messing up a salsa...the dance, I mean. It's embarrassing. You feel like you're wasting the guy's time. He could have spent the last 5 minutes of his life dancing with someone else, someone with better technique, hands that fly through the air, feet that do extra steps that no one really teaches you. He could have danced with someone who'd flirt with him. I'm not going to flirt with you, arrogant dancing partner who decides I'm a waste of his time mid-dance. With food and dancing you need to have some self-respect.  

Oh, here's a hilarious video on learning to dance bhangra. Indian aerobics shows are much cooler than North American ones. Grapevine, anyone?