Name: Dal with Coconut Milk
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Sri Lanka
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons minced shallots or red onion; 2 to 3 dried red chiles; 1 cup canned or fresh coconut milk; 1 tablespoon minced garlic or garlic mashed to a paste; 1 teaspoon salt; 6 to 8 fresh or frozen curry leaves; 5 cups water; 1 cup masur dal, washed; 1 teaspoon ground coriander; 1 tablespoon vegetable oil

Preparation info

Serves
4

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Mangoes & Curry Leaves

By Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

Published 2005

About

Masur dal (the little red-orange one that cooks quickly) is the most common dal used in Sri Lanka, popular with everyone. While there is a wide variety of dals and legumes for sale in the market, the others don’t have as big a role in the cuisine here as they do in India.

This particular version of masur dal is modeled after one that I used to eat almost every day, long ago in a little Tamil restaurant in Kandy. For a light lunch I would stop in and order dal and bread (a not-so-bad