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Some tire of lentils

7/21/2014

 
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Enjoy this photo of my pretty breakfast. It has nothing to do with this post.
PictureSauteeing onions and peppers for the "chili."
Life has been complicated-- more complicated than lentils-- and I haven't brought myself to do a cooking post in a couple of weeks.  I have not yet lost that anchor, however.  Four lentil recipes, a pasta dish, and a pile of pickled vegetables later, I owe at least a few words on the subject.  At first I typed, "I owe you..."; but, alas, there is no guarantee of a you, dear reader.  I owe myself.

At the time of writing, my girl and two others are climbing through the trees, attached by clips to a series of high wires.  I am on the ground; not because I don't love ropes courses, but because I suppose three 13-year-olds most likely don't want Mom along.  I am required to stay and "supervise," however, although what could I possibly do besides be available to drive someone to the hospital?  To my surprise, there is WiFi out here among the trees, but I don't know the network key, so I am reduced to writing the old-fashioned way.

Now, lentils.  Since last we spoke, there's been Tex-Mex Vegetarian Chili, Lentils Topped with Garlic Mushrooms (this is similar but not quite the same), Red Lentils with Cumin and Scallion, and Anatolian Red Lentil Stew with Wheat Berries and Chickpeas (not available online).  

The "Tex-Mex" Chili was a mystery to us.  It contained some ingredients that might be considered Tex-Mex, such as onions, green pepper, jalapeno, cumin, kidney beans, tomatoes, cilantro, and cornmeal.  It also contained some ingredients that seemed decidedly not: paprika, thyme, sage, and-- most of all-- lentils.  It was tasty, but we didn't feel we were eating chili-- overwhelmingly, we felt like we were eating Indian lentils with a slightly chili-esque flavor.  (Hence, its presence in the lentil section.)  

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mushrooms, garlic, parsley
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lentils.
PictureLentils with Garlic Mushrooms: finished product.
The Lentils with Garlic Mushrooms were great, mostly because I love mushrooms.  There were plenty here, a whole pound, happily stirfried in loads of olive oil and garlic.  Anything Topped with Garlic Mushrooms would be heaven.

The Red Lentils with Cumin and Scallion were fine, a bit thin and soupy, the way Jaffrey seems to prefer her red lentils.  The seasoning-- which was, as advertised, merely cumin and scallions, plus a little cayenne pepper-- was tasty, but the most interesting part of this recipe was that I made ghee.  To make ghee, you simply take some unsalted butter and melt it over low temperature in a pan.  Continue to heat until the liquid looks clear and the milk solids separate out.  Strain (Jaffrey instructs to strain through three layers of cheesecloth; I realized at the last minute I didn't have any cheesecloth, so I used coffee filters.  This was not the most efficient method).  While the process was simple, it appears that making ghee well is less simple.  My "clarified" butter, once brought back to room temperature, is still not quite clear.  Perhaps I didn't heat it long enough.

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Ghee, still warm.
PictureBowties with sugar snap peas and ricotta.
The last recipe, the Anatolian Red Lentil Stew, for which alas I have no link, or photo either, was also the most interesting.  First one boils (separately) smallish quantities of whole wheat berries and chickpeas.  Then one fries up some onions and eggplant, adds lentils, seasonings, and water or broth, and cooks the lentils until soft.  Puree everything in the lentil pot so that the eggplant melds into the lentils, resulting in a profoundly creamy orange stew.  Then add in the wheat berries and chickpeas (providing interesting textural variation), and dress at the end with lemon and parsley.  Delicious and very rich-tasting.  

None of these dishes needed much more than bread and/or salad to become a meal.

I also made two recipes of Deb Perelman's these past two weeks.  One, the Bowties with Sugar Snaps, Lemon & Ricotta, was a funny bland dish that my daughter didn't care for (she dislikes ricotta), and my husband and I couldn't stop eating despite its, um, subtle taste and indifferent texture (I managed to overcook the sugar snaps despite taking care not to do so).  There was something vaguely addictive about it: the carbs and cheese coalescing into a mild, filling comfort food, laced with vegetables for reduced guilt, like a tuna noodle casserole filled with frozen green peas.  I think I'd just as soon eat tuna casserole, though.

I also made Perelman's Pickled Vegetable Sandwich Slaw, which was simple to produce, and completely delicious atop roast beef-and-cheese sandwiches with additional lettuce, tomato, and mayo for maximum sandwich goodness.  It makes enough for plenty of sandwiches, so we are still eating it.  I had it on an egg sandwich this morning.  The jars also look pretty in the refrigerator.  Highly recommended.  The vegetables used are flexible: my family hates cukes, so I used carrot, napa cabbage, red, yellow and anaheim peppers, a little jalapeno too, and kohlrabi.  The kohlrabi in particular was a nice touch.  

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Vegetables for slaw. Even though the slaw was beautiful, none of my photos do it justice at all.
We're done with lentils now, moving on to mung beans.  For reasons that are boring to explain, I actually already made some of the recipes in the legume section of this book last year, so it will appear (to anyone with a copy and following along, ha) that I am skipping some.  Even so, my daughter is complaining that we are having lentils "every day for months on end" (not true! twice a week! it wasn't months!); so, it is probably for the best that I'm not doing them all in a row.

Wipe with a damp cloth

7/14/2014

 
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Have you ever been blithely rinsing off a mushroom, only to have an accomplished home cook rush over in a kind of panic to stop you?  Cookbooks will tell you to wipe those mushrooms "with a damp cloth," washing unnecessary and undesirable.  If you have followed that instruction, of course, you will realize that mushrooms are covered with bits of soil and loose skin that will roll up together into impossible sticky dirty shreds when you wipe them with a damp cloth, and then you'll have to keep rinsing out your cloth, and surreptiously swiping the shreds off with your wet fingers, and perhaps finally giving up and rinsing off a mushroom or two in the sink when no one is looking.

The other night I had a whole pound of mushrooms to clean, and not a lot of motivation.  I began to wonder whether the conventional wisdom-- which had only reached me in perhaps my late twenties or early thirties, before which I had washed and enjoyed mushrooms without an awareness of my sins-- was really true, or was perhaps just a snobby affectation separating the "real cooks" from the amateurs.  A quick internet search shows many, many people quietly disputing the necessity of keeping mushrooms uncontaminated by water.  Cooksinfo.com calls the idea that you shouldn't wash mushrooms "a persistent myth," and points us to a discussion on cheftalk.com in which food writer Harold McGee says:

I was skeptical about the mushrooms-absorb-water idea and so did the soaking experiments with standard white mushrooms for “The Curious Cook” back in 1990. I’ve since tried a number of others, and if you make sure to shake the water out of the nooks, fresh mushrooms absorb little if any water. I’d also say that since they’re already around 90% water, a little more or less isn’t going to make much of a practical difference in the subsequent cooking.
If you don't believe me, also see here, here and here.

Also note that the NEW conventional wisdom, for those who have accepted that washing mushrooms is OK, is that "a quick rinse" is the way to go, but definitely not a long soak, as then the mushrooms really would absorb excessive water.  Since a quick rinse is pretty much the way I wash all vegetables except greens (or things that need to be scrubbed, like potatoes), I don't care much one way or the other.  However, the last of the three links above gives experimental support to the hypothesis that this new conventional, quick-rinse-only wisdom is also bunk.  
Ten minutes is up. So now we extract the mushrooms from the first bowl of water, and allow them to drain very, very thoroughly, for at least 30 seconds. In the meantime, I'm going to reset for another 10 minutes, and man the scales.
    Now, if you remember, we started with 4 ounces of mushrooms, and now we have 4.2 ounces of mushrooms. That means that after a 10-minute soak in cold water, these mushrooms only sucked up ... well, right around a teaspoon of water. [...] I'll be very interested to see what another 10 minutes brings.
    So another 10 minutes has elapsed. That means this next set of mushrooms has been in the drink now for 20 minutes. We're going to let that drain thoroughly before hitting the scales. And of course, we will set our clock one more time for 10 minutes.
    Now we see that what once was 4 ounces of mushrooms has now ballooned to 4.25 ounces of mushrooms. Very curious. Now if we can use the last batch as any kind of indicator, that means that the extra 10 minutes of soak only brought in another 0.05 ounces of water. [...]  We now, of course, extract the third batch of mushrooms, drain and weigh.
    After a 30-minute soak, these 4 ounces of mushrooms now weigh 4.15 ounces. Now I am willing to accept that differences in the individual mushrooms may have resulted in this batch soaking up less than the 20-minute batch. But what's important is that basically, after 5 minutes, these mushrooms stopped soaking up water. All of them soaked up what is essentially a teaspoon of water. Very, very interesting.
    [...]
    Before we hand down the verdict on this whole mushroom-washing thing, I think that we should see if there's a difference between soaking in cold water and giving them a good spray.
[...]
After all, this is how most of us who would wash mushrooms, would wash them at home. Great. Drain, then we weigh.
    After a cold blast of water, our 4 ounces of mushrooms weigh 4.2 ounces. Exactly the same as the mushrooms that soaked for 10 minutes. Curious.
    So as it turns out, mushrooms do soak up a little, teeny-weentsie bit of water, but it doesn't matter whether they get a quick spray or a 10-minute soak, or really, even a 30-minute soak. They just don't take in much water. So I don't know about you, I'm going to wash my mushrooms, and I'm going to consider this myth smashed to bits.

Water

7/9/2014

 
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The Pioneer Pet drinking fountain in white ceramic.
We got our cat Elsie from the shelter at the beginning of April.  Since that time, she has made it a point of consuming barely enough water to stay alive, but no more.  Her litterbox is strangely underutilized.  Her drinking habits are bizarre.  To wit: she approaches her water bowl cautiously, paces around it in a circle, and then begins shoving it with her body so that the water rocks in it wildly and splashes onto the floor.  At this point, maybe-- maybe-- she will duck her head into it and lap a few quick laps up the side of the bowl,  just where the rim of the water meets the dish.  Maybe not, though.  Oftentimes she ends up shoving the bowl multiple times, watching the water splash and then calm as though it is not doing what it is supposed to, dammit, and then stalking away in frustration without drinking a drop. I tried putting the water in a bunch of different dishes, but it was always the same.

The vet had opined that she "wanted a fountain."  I was a little resistant to that idea: another electrical appliance?  For my pet?  Come on.  Next we'll be taking her for acupuncture.  But, as the hydration problem dragged on into the summer heat, I decided it was finally time to cave.  Who knew what drinking apparatus Elsie might have become used to during her childhood in another, fucked-up home?  Perhaps she didn't even recognize a water dish as being a normal means of obtaining water.  So I purchased the device pictured above.

She was curious immediately, and hung around the fountain peering at it and listening to its music (my apartment now sounds like a babbling brook at all times), but did not dare to drink out of it for the first 24 hours.  I had to get out the Bowl of Frustration again so she would not just up and die.  But, finally, she took a timid lick.  And the rest is history.  I'm off to buy another bag of cat litter.

a lentil, a lentil, a burnt peach tart

7/9/2014

 
The poem referenced in the title is one that has stuck in my head for years and years, ever since I read it in... a cookbook?  And indeed, looking back now, it's in the introduction of this very cookbook, Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian. 
A Woman Cleaning Lentils

A lentil, a lentil, a lentil, a stone.
A lentil, a lentil, a lentil, a stone.
A green one, a black one, a green one, a black. A stone.
A lentil, a lentil, a stone, a lentil, a lentil, a word.
Suddenly a word. A lentil.
A lentil, a word, a word next to another word. A sentence.
A word, a word, a word, a nonsense speech.
Then an old song.
Then an old dream.
A life, another life, a hard life. A lentil. A life.
An easy life. A hard life, Why easy? Why hard?
Lives next to each other. A life. A word. A lentil.
A green one, a black one, a green one, a black one, pain.
A green song, a green lentil, a black one, a stone.
A lentil, a stone, a stone, a lentil.

— Zahrad

I've reached the lentil section now in her cookbook.  It's been a week full of stones, but there is something about cooking lentils that is simple, comforting, and wholesome.  Also, it is very difficult to screw up.  We began the week with Lentils Topped with Gingery Spinach and Yogurt-- take some basic lentils cooked with onion, garlic, and chili pepper, then layer on a big handful of spinach you've sauteed with ginger, then a dollop of sour cream (in my case), and a sprinkling of fried onions on top.  My husband doesn't like sour cream, and my daughter doesn't like onions, so we each had a different version.
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Lentils with Gingery Spinach, three ways. This was a solid and tasty dish.
Then there were several days where cooking just didn't work out.  My daughter wanted to go out for sushi to celebrate her all A's report card (how dare she?).  Work was so busy and long on the 4th of July that I came home exhausted, changed into my pajamas at 6:00 pm, and ordered perhaps the most disgusting Chinese delivery I have ever had (sorry, Grand China.  It was so bad that we actually ended up throwing much of it away the next day, when we realized that the leftovers were not going to improve in freshness or taste).  Saturday night was similar-- I literally cannot remember what we ate for dinner, only that I changed into my pajamas again.  So that left Sunday, when I finally got my act together, rather late in the game (6:00), to finish both recipes for the week.  This time we had "Lentils in a Sauce" (could there be a less elegant name?- the person at the link has renamed them "Moroccan Lentils in a Sauce")-- actually a quite delicious recipe that involves putting a bunch of ingredients in a saucepan and boiling.  While I found the lentils needed a bit more water than called for, I was very happy with the results.  We ate them with black olive bread from Giant, and some stir-fried carrots and summer squash.  
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Yes, I DO do almost everything on my red cutting board.
I wish I had taken a picture of the squash before it was cut-- my coworker Mrs. Choi brought it to me from her garden, wrapped in a plastic bag, and slipped it to me before our shift began, urging me to put it into my purse quickly, because she had not brought enough for everybody.  It was a very tasty squash.  The carrots were just ordinary.

For dessert, I made this peach tart.  I burned it around the edges because I was still busy working through an argument with my husband and forgot to take it out of the oven.  

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Still good.
Nevertheless, the recipe was quick to put together, and tasty with whipped cream.  Only the peach sauce got scorchy in spots, not the crust, so almost all of it was still edible, and we liked it.  One note: the crumb topping contained almost all sugar, and very little flour, so as a result most of it sunk in and blended with the peaches.  If I make it again, I will reduce the sugar and add more flour, in hopes of retaining some actual crumbs.  The crumbs are my favorite part of fruit desserts!

Oh, and Monday we had eggy pancakes topped with fruit from the farmer's market, black raspberries and cherries and peaches and blueberries, yum.

Sticking to my cooking schedule is often one of my few crucial anchors in the midst of chaos.  When I let even that go, you know I am adrift.
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    Whodunit

    The author is a waitress, home cook, and foodie who has trouble sticking to a subject.  She currently resides and works in the Maryland suburbs of D.C..

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