French Beans and Indian Beans In a Sabji

Once you become a mother, you get self appointed to the post of a samurai for your pint sized royalty. You vow to take care of them emotionally and physically. You shower all your love and affection and try to be there when ever they need help. You want to be the guardian angel and you assume your kid is going to do the best because he is your kid. Even when the kid is not out of his crib, he would have reached dizzying heights in his life / career in your vision.
You want to keep them healthy and strong. You keep on searching in all possible ways to know anything and everything you need to know about health. To do so, you (think you) have to make right choices for them. You are going to install right eating habits in them from the child hood. In this mission, you expect your dear kid to eat all those which you consider healthy. It does not matter how many times you had to alter the methods of (your) cooking to make that darn thing edible and appealing to both eyes and palate.
If you are a vegetarian, you consider to feed all the vegetables you come across whether you have eaten them or not previously. Often healthy things don’t taste good and things which fall under delicious and yummy categories are not good. This does not hold good with veggies. They ARE supposed to be good. Once you achieve the task of making your kids to eat whatever on the plate, then you think of improvising, making it more healthier.
If you are like my mom, you add protein to the vegetables. She cooks healthier versions of vegetables by adding different kind of dals. Here is one such recipe. The toor dal, the Badshah of Indian dals are added to the French beans (or just the beans as called in India) to make a healthier, tasty sabji / curry which goes well with rice or rotis. Here is the recipe.

F for French beans - Indian beans sabji ~ My entry for Nupur's A to Z vegetable event.

Ingredients:
French / Green beans, finely chopped - 2 cups
Toor dal - 1/4 cup
Shredded coconut (fresh or frozen) - 1/4 cup
4 -5 dried red chillies broken into bits (or substitute 1 tsp chili powder)
Salt to taste (I used about 1 & 1/4 tsp)
For tadka: 2 -3 tsp oil, 1 tsp each mustard seeds, chanadal, urad dal and cumin seeds, few curry leaves, 1/8 tsp turmeric powder

Method:
* Cook toor dal on stovetop until just done, in a saucepan adding some water. Toordal must retain their shape and should not fall apart when handled. Drain and keep the toordal aside.  Or you can cook in a pressure cooker for 1 -2 whistles. The water used to cook the dal can be saved to prepare soup or rasam.
* Heat oil in a kadai or a pan. Add mustard seeds, urad dal, chana dal, and cumin seeds. When the dals turn reddish and mustard seeds start to splutter, add curry leaves, turmeric powder, red chili pieces, chopped beans and salt. Combine everything using a spoon and cook on low flame, covered.
* Keep stirring in between till the beans are cooked. Then add the cooked toor dal and coconut to the pan. If using chili powder instead of chillies, add it too. Cook for a couple of minutes more with a few stirrings. Turn off the stove.
The subji can be served with rotis or rice.
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