Tuesday Night: Indian

We had some eggplant that really needed to be used. So last night we made two things from Dakshin. The main course was "Eggplant Rasavangy" and Andrea made a "Mixed Vegetable Curd Salad".

In order to be able to make the eggplant thing on a weeknight, I prepared the lentils in the pressure cooker (instead of waiting 1.5 hours for them to cook on the stovetop). My pressure cooker instructions claim that lentils take 6 minutes at pressure. I either screwed up when I started the timer (badly) or that is way too long for the red lentils I used yesterday. When I opened the pressure cooker, I found a paste inside. Still, I think that's ok for this dish; it thickened the sauce beautifully.

After having made a few things, I feel like I'm beginning to get the hang of this style of cooking (confusion about types of dal aside): the various stages are starting to make some sense in how they fit together.

We really have no way of knowing if these things are turning out "right", but both of us are pretty damn happy with what we end up eating, so that's just fine. :-)