Leftover lentils?

What do you do with left over dal (lentils cooked with Indian spices)? Simple- make some paranthas (Indian flat bread) with them! One of the easy to make recipes which tastes fantastic with yoghurt.

  

                                                                                                        

Ingredients-

• Left over Yellow dal/lentils 
• Wheat flour
• Salt (according to taste)

Alternatively (if you don't have left over yellow dal) you can pressure cook some yellow split bean/moong dal around 1 cup and cook it simply with Indian spices. Here is a quick recipe for dal- 

Ingredients- Chopped ginger (1/2 tsp), crushed and chopped garlic (3 pieces)- if you are fond of garlic, go for four to five pieces, 1 onion chopped, 1 tomato chopped, 2 green chillies (chopped), cumin seeds (1/2 tsp)

Preparation-
As mentioned above, cook the yellow dal/lentils till they are soft or pressure cook them (for around 3 whistles). In a small frying pan heat some butter and once it melts, add cumin seeds. As the cumin seeds start sputtering add chopped ginger, garlic and green chillies. Fry them for a minute before adding some chopped onions and tomatoes. Fry them for ten minutes. Once it is fried well add salt and corriander leaves. Pour this gravy into the cooked lentils and cook the dal for 2 minutes- Remember your dal has to be soupy.

Now back to my original recipe for parantha-  I had good quantity of left over dal and this is what I did with it- In a big mixing bowl, add around 2 cups of wheat flour and with the help of the soupy dal knead it to a fine dough. Add salt according to taste. Try to avoid using water to knead the flour (the soupy dal should suffice). In case you run out of dal, add water. Once you are finished kneading the flour add a big spoon of oil to make the dough silky and pound it well. The end result should be like this-

For making paranthas take a small ball of dough and flatten it with a rolling pin using a bit of flour so that it doesn't stick to the surface-

Cook this parantha in a frying pan with oil/butter till they become golden brown on both sides-

Enjoy them with yoghurt and pickle or hot chilli sauce!

This is one style of preparing the parantha- there is another way to make this (with stuffing inside). Will blog someday about that as well - watch out for this space! Remember you can do this with any kind of left over dal/lentils -not just yellow dal- you can improvise this recipe by adding chopped corriander and chopped onions to the dough when kneading.