After all the heavy eating over the last two months, starting with Thanksgiving and all the way through New Year’s, the usual heavy comfort foods just don’t seem appealing at this time. And with this snow and cold, I haven’t been able to motivate myself to go to the gym. So I definitely need to eat healthy at least, my body is craving healthy food. But I don’t want to eat salads and raw veggies when we’re in the deep freeze!

What I have been craving is dal (also known as lentil soup). Bangladeshi home-style dal is quite a bit different from the dal in Indian restaurants. It’s fairly light in comparison. It’s warm, nutritious and healthy, and Delicious! The perfect food for snowy cold January, when you want comfort food but you also want to avoid packing on even more pounds after the previous weeks of indulgence.

My dal recipe is basically my dad’s, with a couple of minor modifications. My dad used to make fantastic dal. He rarely ever cooked while we were growing up; since we had a cook who made very tasty food, neither of my parents needed to cook, they would cook only when they were in the mood to make something special. Dal is a simple side dish that we’d have as a staple every single meal, and it was hardly “special”. So I never got to eat my dad’s dal until my mom got sick a few years ago and was going through chemotherapy.  The rest of us would cook healthy nutritious food for her, and my dad started making his dal then. It was simple, but so utterly delicious. My method of cooking dal had been different, and I prefer my dad’s.

I’ve only made a couple of modifications to his recipe. I use ghee instead of oil; if you’re having dal every single day, ghee is too rich, but if you have it only once in a while, a teaspoon of ghee adds wonderful flavor and aroma, and it’s ok health-wise. I also add black mustard seeds at the tempering stage, I like the taste and texture it adds to the dal. The two dry red chilies added during tempering don’t make the dal spicy; by charring them slightly you get a subtle nice smoky flavor.

My dad used to add fried garlic at the end, whereas I added garlic cloves at the beginning. The taste is quite different with the addition at the end, and I’ve used my dad’s method here. If you don’t like garlic, you can skip it, or add at the beginning (you won’t really be able to taste it then, but since garlic has so much nutritional value, it’s better to at least include it at the beginning).

Lentils are highly nutritious, packed with protein, fiber, and essential vitamins and minerals – folate, iron, manganese, thiamin, B6, phosphorus, etc. It has selenium, which isn’t found in most other food (selenium helps prevent inflammation and may have cancer fighting properties). So, basically – dal isn’t just comforting and delicious, but it’s also good for you.

I like to cook with the small yellow lentils, labeled as moong dal (or mung dal) in Indian grocery stores; it’s split and dehusked mung beans. I prefer the smoother consistency of the cooked dal produced by moong dal (and my dad used to cook with it because it was better for his diabetes). Traditionally, Bangladeshis use the small red lentils, known as masoor dal, so you can use that instead.

As I mentioned, back when I was growing up in Bangladesh, dal was always on the table at lunch and dinner as a staple along with rice (we would also have a couple of vegetable dishes, a meat, and a fish dish in addition). Now here in New York as an adult, I can’t make that kind of a feast-like spread regularly. When I have time on a weekend, I’ll make dal, plus a veggie or meat dish, and have it with rice. But if I want to make it on a weeknight, sometimes I’ll have it with just rice and a Bangladeshi style omelette – simple, healthy, easy and fast, and the combination totally hits the spot! And then there are those days, when I’ll just have it as soup, and skip everything else. It’s always good, no matter what you accompany it with.