I am blogging after a big long gap. All this while however, I was not away from food. I cooked many new dishes and also cooked the same ones many times over. I was plain lazy, sometimes busy and most of the times too hungry to click pictures and upload on the web.
I must have cooked Dhanshak at least 5-6 times in the last few months and I still don’t have a single picture of the final dish. With the realisation that taste is all that matters, I am going to share the recipe with the work in progress pictures I have.
‘Dhan’ means grains and ‘Shak’ means vegetables. Dhanshak is a pure non-vegetarian, Parsi dish cooked with Lamb, lentils and vegetable. Ironically, I tasted it the first time in a Gujrati household as a pure vegetarian food (i.e. without the lamb).
There are 3 preparatory parts to the recipe;
1) Marinate the meat (lamb / chicken).
2) Cook lentils and vegetables together in a pressure cooker
3) Prepare the spice paste
Ingredients;
A. Marinate;
½ Kg of Lamb / Mutton / Chicken – with bones
½ tsp Turmeric powder
1 tsp alt
B. The lentil and vegetable mixture;
1) Lentils
½ cup Tovar dal (Split red gram)
1 tbsp of whole Green Moong dal (green gram)
1 tbsp Urad dal (white lentil / Black gram skinned and split)
1 tbsp Whole Masoor dal (Brown Lentil)
2) Vegetables
1 medium Potato
1 medium Tomato
3/4th cup of Methi leaves (Fenugreek)
4 sticks of Spring onions
½ cup of Dudhi / Lauki (Bottle Gourd)
C. The Spice paste;
2 medium size Green chillies (not too dark in colour)
1 ½ tsp Ginger Garlic paste (blend together ginger and garlic in equal portions)
4 cloves
1 tsp of Pepper corns
1 tbsp Coriander seeds
½ cup of Fresh Coriander with the stock
D. Tampering and Miscellaneous;
1 sliced Onion
Juice of a Lemon
1 tsp Cumin seeds)
¼ tsp Cinnamon powder
½ tsp Cardamom powder
4 tbsp of Ghee / Clarified butter
Procedure;
- Wash chicken / lamb clean. Apply turmeric and salt and let it marinate for about 30 mins.
- In a bowl, wash all the lentils together- B 1).
- Peel potato and pumpkin. Wash and roughly chop all vegetables – tomato, potato, pumpkin and spring onions.
- In a large tin, add washed lentils (2), chopped vegetables (3) and methi leaves. Add 2 glasses of water and let it pressure cook for about 15-20 minutes. Lentils take longer than vegetables to cook. Make sure that the lentils are fully cooked.
- Once the mixture cools, grind to a fine paste.
- While the mixture cools, prepare spice paste by grinding all the ingredients (C) together in a blender.
- In a separate bowl, heat ghee, add cumin seeds. Let it crackle. Add sliced onions and cook till limp. Add cinnamon, cardamom powder.
- Add spice paste and meat and let it cook with the lid on till meat is nearly done. (You can add a little water – half a cup or so to help the meat cook)
- Once meat is nearly cooked, add lentil and vegetable paste to it. Mix well.
- Add salt to taste and some water if the mix is too dense. Cover and simmer for 5 mins.
- Top it with a dollop of ghee while serving.
While Dhankshak tastes the best with Lamb/chicken, you can try it without meat. Reduce the quantity of spice paste to half. Serve with steamed brown rice or lachha paratha. Makes it a perfect Sunday lunch.
You can also enjoy it as a stew in winters. Reduce the spice paste to 1/6th of the quantity and make the dish more watery. Serve with Brune.