Wednesday, March 25, 2009

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.

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