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Really delicious! We loved this with either plain yogurt or cottage cheese and a side of cooked greens (broccoli rabe, but any would work) we needed to use.

I added black mustard seed & ginger, a can of diced tomatoes, & topped with cilantro (since I had all of these on hand). After transferring the onion/chili/spice mixture to the soup pot I sauteed the tomatoes in the empty pan to coat them with the spices caked onto the pan surface.

I love dal with coconut milk. We make lots of different versions of dal (I can't get enough of lentils), but the coconut milk one, which I reverse-engineered from a meal at a Sri-Lankan restaurant, is the most decadent and the most delicious.

We don't use ghee when we make dal with coconut, because it really doesn't need it. Sometimes we heat a bit of the coconut cream until it becomes oil, and use that to fry the onions in. The crucial thing with dal, as with all Indian dishes, is frying the heck out of the onions. Wait until they're well and truly brown, and some of them are black -- it's worth it. Also, toasting and grinding whole cumin makes a huge difference.

Mmm.