South Indian Sambar: Tamarind, Lentils and Spices

I love making recipes when I don't need to go buy any ingredients. It's only kind of fair because I happen to have a lot of weird ingredients that normal people don't usually stock in their kitchens (chana dal, asafoetida, curry leaves, and even soaked and sieved tamarind in my freezer), but this recipe is exactly why I love Indian cooking - you take a ton of spices, cook them according to a formula and end up enjoying food you were maybe a bit skeptical about trying in the first place. Oh, and your kitchen smells amazing.

Ingredients:
Sambar Powder:
1 tbsp coriander seeds
1 tsp chana dal (like split yellow peas, but not exactly the same. Any split pea substitution is fine, but it won't be exactly the same)
1/2 tsp urad dal (look in South Asian stores and have some good conversations like I did)
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp asafetida, grated (this stuff smells like onion...sort of...it's sticky and gets all over your hands, but it's so good for digestion and is everywhere in South Indian cooking)
2-4 dried red chillis
1/4 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp mustard seeds

1/4 tsp fenugreek seeds (called 'methi', these are little yellow pebbles)

Sambar:
1 cup toor dal. Okay, this is the one place I cheated. I just gone on two major trips in search of urad dal and chana dal and not looked for toor dal. Apparently nothing can replace toor dal in sambar, says the internet, but screw the internet. I used chana dal...it was nutty and delicious and nothing like other sambars I've had, but I'm okay with that. The next time I stumble upon toor dal I'll buy it.

1 lime-sized chunk of tamarind
2 medium onions, chopped
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
1 curry leaf sprig. Yeah trying finding fresh ones...that's maybe a losing battle in Montreal, but dried can be found fairly easily. Cross your fingers and hope they're fresh. Me, I just had a bunch of sort of crushed old ones so I stuck them in a tea infuser (you don't want to eat these guys) and tossed them into the sambar.

1 tbsp chopped coriander leaves
1 tsp salt 

3-4 cups water

Seasoning:
1 tsp oil, 1 tsp ghee (or two tsp oil)

1 tsp mustard seeds  

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 pinch asafoetida (grated and then pinched, presumably)

1/4 tsp turmeric powder

Instructions:
Put the sambar powder ingredients in a small frying pan on medium-low heat. When you can smell them and they start to darken a little, take them off the heat and grind them to a fine powder in a mortar and pestle, blender or food processor. All these spices should be whole, but if you have, say, ground cumin instead of whole, and you're stubborn about not buying the whole ones you can add the ground ones after you've toasted the whole ones before you crush everything together. The ground spices will burn if you add them to an oil-free frying pan with the others. Oh, and it's maybe a bit strange that you wouldn't cook the chana dal for the sambar powder, but that's pretty normal for rice and lentils in South Indian dishes)

Soak the tamarind in warm water (very warm, but not boiling) for 15 minutes. Then take a fine-mesh sieve placed over a bowl and press the soaked tamarind lump through as much as you can. It's a real pain, it's true, but you want to get as much of the softened pulp through the mesh as possible. Throw out the hard material that's left, then add enough water to the pulp to give you 1 cup. 
"Cook the toor dal in 2 cups of water until it's soft". I hate ambiguous instructions like that, especially with lentils that get mushy if over-cooked and chewy if under-cooked, AND every lentil is different, so mine took about 25 minutes, but if I'd actually used toor dal, who knows how long it would have taken. Probably I could have looked it up really easily...I'm up there with people who are too stubborn to buy whole spices, apparently. I'm such a hypocrite. Anyway, bring the water to a boil (after rinsing the dal in cold water a few times to remove any dirt or stones) and add the dal. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium or medium-low and simmer for who knows how long...

In a large pot, heat the oil (and ghee). My favourite part: add the mustard and cumin seeds. It'll take them about 30 seconds to start to pop. When they stop, add the asafetida and turmeric powder, curry leaves, and chopped onions. Cook 5 minutes. Add tomatoes. Cook 5 minutes. Add 1 cup water. Add ground sambar powder. Boil. Inhale. Smile. Exhale.

 Mash the cooked toor dal (with a masher, a large, blunt object, or in a food processor. A blender will suck. It probably won't blend well unless you use something intense like a VitaMix. Add the dal to the spiced tomato mixture in the large pot.

 Boil for another 5 minutes. Add the tamarind pulp and salt. Stir and add more water if needed (it should be more like a soup than a stew, but the flavour gets watered down pretty quickly, so be careful, especially if you didn't work that hard at pushing the tamarind through the sieve). Boil for yet another 5 minutes.

Turn off the heat, cover, and prepare dosa or idli, or get the rice that you started cooking 25 minutes ago (you did, right? I sure didn't...). When you're ready to serve, top the sambar with chopped coriander leaves. Normally every person at the meal would get a small bowl of sambar so you can garnish each individually, or give up from exhaustion and just throw all the coriander in to the hot soup to lose its colour and some of its flavour and nutritional clout  : )

This is perfect to make with dosa because they take no time at all. Rice can be made in advance, but idli seem as though they may be a nuisance. I'll try that sometime and let you know.