Chana masala w/ roasted curry leaf rice

I made these recipes out of Raghavan Iyer's extraordinary cookbook 660 Curries. The chana masala is restaurant quality.  I used dried chickpeas soaked overnight and boiled for an hour and a half.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the recipe is its use of cumin seed in two ways -- roasted whole and unroasted ground.  Iyer's book has a passage in which he marvels about how a single spice can take on many different personalities.  In the finished dish here, one can readily distinguish between the flavors of the whole roasted cumin seeds and the ground cumin powder.

The rice, like so many of Iyer's rice recipes, is fantastic.  It's seasoned with sauteed mustard seeds and a powder made from roasted curry leaves, lentils, and dried red peppers (all ground together in a spice grinder) along with unroasted asafoetida and turmeric.  It's indescribably delicious.