3/20/02
Another cooking adventure tonight: Bese Bele Olianna! The Julie Sahni cookbook translates it as "Mysore cinnamon-scented lentil and rice casserole with vegetables and cashew nuts," and says it's a "famous vegetarian specialty from Bangalore." It's one of the most complicated things I've ever made--the cookbook lists 23 ingredients, one of which is bese bele powder, a toasted spice-bean-and-coconut powder that itself has ten ingredients. I'm also rapidly learning that I don't trust a lot of things about this particular book. For instance: don't ask me to use a 5-quart pot, and then tell me to put in 6 cups of cooked rice, 3 cups of lentils, 4 onions, 3 potatoes, the better part of an eggplant, a cup of tamarind water, etc. (I was smart and went for the 10-quart pot.) Don't tell me that urad dal will take "about 3 minutes" in very hot butter to turn light brown--20 seconds is more like it. And so on. Also, I spent about an hour hating myself because I couldn't find the tamarind pulp I'd bought a couple of weeks ago (eventually I found it, and felt a lot better). It came out really well anyway, but I'm not sure if what I ended up with is what it's supposed to be.