Basic Tomato Lentils

Too often I find myself having forgotten or lost a good recipe. And I often play around with the recipes that I do have on hand, but soon forget just what it was that helped my dish transcend from ordinary to extraordinary. So sad.

An easy remedy to that is to keep track of what I'm doing in the kitchen. Since I have an amazing capacity for losing recipes written on note cards, I thought I'd go digital and throw some of my notes up on the blog where I know they are always (assuming the Internet does not disappear anytime soon!) be at hand.

Lentils are great. They (have the potential to) taste good, are apparently very healthy, and are dirt cheap. Over the last few months I've played around with a number of lentil recipes that have varied from wonderful to dreadful. This evening I wanted something simple and fast and found this basic recipe for one good serving:

• Small onion (chopped)
• 2 cloves of garlic (chopped)
• 3 tablespoons of olive oil (not chopped)
• 1/3 cup lentils (used brown because they're easy to find in US markets)
• 4/3 cup water (liquid)
• 1 can tomato sauce (sans the can)
• 1 bay leaf (lightly crumpled)

Boil water. Add everything but the tomato sauce. Reduce to simmer, partially cover, and cook for 20 min. Add tomato sauce. Cook for another 10 minutes. Serve nice and hot.

First problem I ran into is how is a "can" of tomato sauce. If my memory serves me that is neither in the queen's measure nor metric. There seems to be some unwritten rule about using the "small" (8 oz) can in these situations.

Second problem came when I added the tomato sauce. Everything smelled great before, and then it smelled like tomato sauce after. I've nothing against tomato sauce and love pasta as much as the next fellow married into a Italian family. But I had my heart set on lentils. The only remedy I could think of was to Indian-ify the dish with an additional:

• 1 shake whole cumin seed (always a good addition)
• 1 small shake masala (I wonder what Sarah is up to these days)
• Enough ground red pepper (gotta have some burn)

That seemed to fix things up. The final dish was a bit salty for my taste on account of the tomato sauce. Next time I may try simply adding fresh tomatoes. And I may try removing the bay leaf. But generally pretty good. I served this up with my fried spinach (rinse, lightly shake dry a bit, throw in pan with olive oil, salt, pepper, and fry on medium high flame until just limp), apple and cheese.

Not too bad for a slow night.

E-Books, Feedbooks, and Doyle

This evening I neglected my studies and finished reading my first e-book. The novel of choice was "A Study in Scarlet" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and is the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories. A delightful read and, amazingly enough, my first Sherlock Holmes story.

When first looking at the Kindle I was concerned by the small text space. I worried that reading from an area this small, only a tad larger than an index card, would prove bothersome. But not so! The width is great (at least for the font size I enjoy) for reading, not too wide and not too narrow. The shorter page length left ample room to hold onto the e-book while reading and flipping a page couldn't be easier. As someone who often reads while eating, it is a blessing not having to keep the book open by constantly shifting weights around the pages or by contorting the thumb and pinky of one hand around a paper back.

I was fortunate to discover Feedbooks the night that my Kindle arrived. Feedbooks has done a wonderful job typesetting many out of copyright and public commons books. They provide these in an easy to access manner directly from the Kindle. Simply navigate the Kindle web browser to http://www.feedbooks.com/kindleguide to download the guide to books they have available. You can then use this guide on Kindle to download books of interest. The Feedbooks Kindle help page provides a more complete description of this processes. My one recommendation is to use the table of contents for the Feedbook guide as this provides easy access to some nice lists of books, genera listings, and an author index.

I've now about 60 more classics lined up to read with highlights including more Doyle, all of Burroughs's mars books, and epic poetry by Milton.