Dal Makhani cooked in Chinese home with Dutch oven

My Dal Makhani that smells and looks more like baked beans for Western breakfast

I learned this dish in at-Sunrice culinary school from an Indian chef. Click here to see how he taught us. It's called Dal Makhani meaning lentils stewed with butter and tomato. The cooking method and process is simple and straightforward but the preparation for the ingredients was something else. You can see from the recipe here that there are almost 20 ingredients in this dal. Especially for someone like me in a Chinese home where such ingredients are not common, I procrastinated on this dish just thinking of the massive mise en place needed. Until today.

What you see here are just half of the ingredients needed!
Clockwise from top left: Kidney beans, bay leaf, channa, urad, cumin,
Kashmiri chilli powder (more for colour than kick), tomato paste, ghee
(which I didn't use in the end), cloves, cinnamon sticks, cardamon, fenugreek 

The beans are soaked overnight and boiled for a good 2 hours.
My beans were soft but not disintegrated enough.
They smelled good during the boil.

I used my Dutch oven and I tried to do a step-by-step photography and my camera almost ended up in the stew. It almost became Dal MaCanon! 

The beans are still very much in its individual state. Maybe this may look more like authentic dal tomorrow
when I reheat it. The taste is not too bad, except I may have used a little too much tomato paste and it smelled like oxtail stew and looked like baked beans.

I think garnishing is particularly important in Indian cuisine where everything tastes great when they're all mashed together. Here, I pick some fresh basil from my garden.

Need another attempt on this dish and I should be ready for Diwali. Meanwhile, read this on the numerous benefits of Indian herbs and spices and see if you'll be more tempted to try this recipe.