Category Archives: lentil

Say happy new year with lentils!

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I’ve been reading up on foods that are considered lucky eating for New Year’s Eve. Seems that legumes and greens are consumed throughout the world in various guises. Fascinating! Green french lentils are deemed especially lucky in many countries. As it happens, french lentils and greens are among my favorite foods!! Fancy that! And round foods are also seen as fortuitous, for a variety of reasons. I happened to have a big box of large white mushrooms, so I decided to stuff them with a mixture of french lentils, greens, and cheese. And I made a sauce with the lentil-cooking broth and the leftover lentils. Yummy!

This morning we had pancakes in the shape of a circle, because circular foods are universally considered serendipitous as well.

And here’s Grace Cathedral Hill, a beautiful song by the Decemberists. It’s about New Year’s Day, and it’s a lovely story of a day when nothing in particular happens, but everything feels significant. I love those days! And one of my favorite parts (of course it’s food-related) is when they’re both a little hungry so they go to buy a hot dog. It’s not the best meal you ever had, but you remember it, and it becomes important, and it fills you up when you need it.
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Slow cooked urad dal and black-eyed peas

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urad dal and black-eyed peas

My son got a couple of science experiment kits for christmas. I got a slow-cooker. I’ve never had one before! I like the idea of trying to figure out how to use it without reading too much about it. I feel just like a 6-year-old with a box full of mad experiments to try!!

The first thing I thought to cook in the big beautiful black stoneware pot was Urad Dal. I bought some this summer at an Indian grocery store. They’re beautiful, tiny, black ovoid lentils. They need to cook for a loooooong time, on a looooooow heat. And then they turn out delcious! I matched them with black-eyed peas, because they both have an earthy flavor, and because I liked the little black beans with white spots, and the larger white beans with black spots. I seasoned them with allspice, ginger, cardamom, coriander and basil. Bright and sweet – to go with the earthy. And I cooked them in butter, because Dal Makhani, the traditional urad dal dish, is cooked with butter, yogurt and cream, and I wanted to give a nod to that. Turned out yummy! I cooked it for 6 hours on high, and I think it would have been done an hour earlier, but I wasn’t home. Very tasty with basmati rice and cauliflower in a spicy cashew-almond sauce. It’s not the prettiest dish you’ve ever made, but if you stir in some chopped tomatoes and cilantro at the end, it will have a bit of color and fresh flavor.

This was fun to make in a slow cooker, because I could leave the house with minimal fear of burning it down. But I’ve also cooked urad dal on a low burner for 5 hours, and that’s worked, too. So if you don’t have a slow cooker…don’t despair.

Of course it’s got to be Slow and Low by the Beastie Boys. That is the tempo!!
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Roasted red soup

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Red pepper red lentil soup

There’s something pleasing about making a soup from similarly-colored ingredients. It frequently seems that foods of the same color taste good together. I’ve made a white soup, and soup meagre, which is a green soup, and now…we have a red soup. It’s comprised of roasted red peppers, red lentils and roasted tomatoes. It actually turned out to be a rusty/rosy color, because as we all know, red lentils are never actually red. They start out sort of salmon-colored, and cook up nearly yellow. Anyway…it’s a tasty soup. Smoky, a little acidic with red wine and balsamic vinegar, and bright with basil and oregano. I added a dollop of pesto as a garnish, for contrasting color, and because the flavor goes so nicely! In the summer this soup would make a wonderful use of tomatoes and peppers from your garden. In the winter, it makes a quick and easy meal with roasted reds in brine, and a can of fire roasted tomatoes. It’s still evocatively summery, though!

Here’s the Decemberist’s lovely Red Right Ankle.
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French Lentil Soup topped with caramelized mushrooms & shallots & sharp cheddar crisps

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French lentil soup

Mushrooms and shallots and crisps, oh my!

Beautiful, tasty french lentils don’t get mushy. If you cook them properly they retain a little crunch, so this isn’t the porridge-y lentil soup that you might expect. The lentils, carrots and potatoes float in a delicious, herb-infused broth. And I love mushrooms, especially in combination with french lentils, but I don’t love the way they get a bit slimy in soup – I like them crispy and flavorful. So I decided to roast them with shallots until they’re very crispy, and use them as a garnish. And to top it all off, I made little lacy crisps of sharp cheddar, which melt into your soup. Eat it with a good loaf of ciabatta and you’re all set!

Here’s the Rudies with Devil’s Lead Soup
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Malcolm’s supreme spicy croquettes

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My Malcolm is a temperamental boy, and I’m not always the most patient mother. When we try to work together on a school project, it doesn’t always end well. But when we cook together, we make quite a team. Over the summer, Malcolm invented a sauce with roasted red peppers, roasted beets and roasted tomatoes. He smelled every spice in the cabinet, choosing the perfect mix for his sauce. It turned out delicious! Smoky, spicy, slightly sweet. He named it “Malcolm’s supreme spicy sauce.” This weekend, he had the idea of turning the sauce into cookies. I suggested we make croquettes, using his signature spice mix, and we added some pureed moong dal. The result was something between a croquette and a cookie, like nothing I’ve ever tasted. But it was a wonderfully tasty dinner! We dipped it in a tart-sweet tamarind sauce, and ate it alongside cauliflower puree and spinach sauteed with garlic and mixed with goat cheese, tomatoes and pesto. And a salad of course! Malcolm ate 4 croquettes, and Isaac tried it, and ran crying from the table, saying, “I tried it and I liked it, but I want something I knew I liked, like pasta or rice!” Ah, yoots.

Spinach, pesto, & goat cheese

Here’s one of Malcolm’s favorite songs, K’naan’s Bang Bang, which gets extra points for using the phrase

Hotter than a pepper-crusted Samosa.

I want a pepper-crusted samosa!!

Recipe coming up…
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Butternut squash/red lentil soup…

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…with a berbere spice!

Roasted B-nut Squash

Berbere is a spice mix found in Ethiopian food. This isn’t the real thing, it’s a simplification and an approximation, but it is tasty and does go well with red lentils and butternut squashes.

Here’s the meltingly beautiful Tezeta, by Mulatu Astatke to listen to while you stir your soup.

Mulatu Astatke – Tezeta
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French Lentils

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raw lentils

French lentils! They’re so pretty when they’re raw, and so tasty when they’re cooked. They have a wonderful nutty, almost meaty flavor, and they retain their shape, and a pleasantly non-mushy texture. I have a basic method to cook them, and then they can be eaten as is, or tossed in a salad, or with pasta, or stuffed into a pie (in fact this is one of the staple ingredients that finds its way into many different pies). Save the cooking liquid for broth.

the ubiquitous shallot, garlic & herbs

recipe after the … jump!
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