Bank holidays are all very well but that does mean that lots
of us have to get 5 days’ work done in 4. Plus with sickness and holiday in our
team it’s been a really hectic week. When I’m feeling busy one of the things
that drops off is proper shopping. With hindsight it would have been a good
idea to organise Mr Big Supermarket to deliver us a top up but as it was the
kitchen was fairly poorly stocked. Tonight’s tea was therefore going to have to
feature mainly store cupboard ingredients.
A while ago I’d made a rather tasty rice and lentil dish and
tonight seemed a good time to revive this. It’s a very simple recipe. The main
drawback is that it requires 3 pans: 2 more than I would like but since we got
a dishwasher this bothers me less. It also requires some multi-tasking.
I usually like to make excess portions of dinners; either for
the next day or to freeze for emergency reheat meals. But I’m always worried about
rice since everybody seems to think that it’ll give you food poisoning if
reheated. And I am nervous about rice as it is. So for a change I was planning
to stick fairly closely to a recipe, but since my recipe was for 4 people I
would need to take care that I remembered to divide everything by 2.
Pan 1:
The rice is cooked up with onion and spices. And really
after I’d thinly sliced my onion that was the most taxing part of the
preparation out of the way. Once the onion is cooked off nicely you’re supposed
to add 1 ½ tsp of ground cinnamon and 1 ½ tsp of ground nutmeg (halved on this
occasion). But I have some aging cinnamon sticks (a random purchase from the
2011 Devon County Show) so used a couple of those instead. And rather than
getting all my ingredients ready before I started I went to add the nutmeg only
to find it wasn’t with the rest of the spices. I am yet to find my perfect
spice rack so in the meantime all the spices etc are stored in a shoebox. After
enlisting the help of my husband, Matt, who always knows where everything is,
the nutmeg was located next to the popcorn (at the opposite end of the kitchen
to the spices). Unwilling to measure this I just grated until it looked and
smelt about right. Then you add the rice. I used a mixture of basmati, wild and
some sort of red rice (all our dried ingredients like this are in plastic canisters
so the packet that would tell me exactly what it was was long gone). And then
the stock / water. Cue narrow avoidance of adding too much fluid by the
omission of dividing the original recipe’s volume by 2 – luckily I realised
before it had gone in. And then you just cook it until all the water is
absorbed.
Pan 2:
Boil some green (puy) lentils until cooked. (I think that a
combination of red and green lentils would probably work ok.) Drain the
lentils.
Pan 3:
Make a tomato sauce. I suppose that you’re supposed to use
fresh tomatoes but I’m sure that tinned are nearly as good. Today’s sauce also
contained a small pepper (going a bit wrinkly), some chilli flakes, a teaspoon
of yeast extract (it makes loads of things taste brilliant), some tomato puree
and some pomegranate molasses. The pomegranate molasses is even older than the
cinnamon sticks, 250ml having been purchased for a specific recipe in December
2008 that required 1 ½ tbsp (for the scientific amongst you I’m sorry about my
mixing of units). We are still looking out for opportunities to use it and this
was just one of those occasions. Oh, and some black pepper. Today I proved that
our new “artistic” pepper mill (long story) is resilient as well artistic; the
kitchen floor may have been covered in peppercorns but the peppermill was
unscathed after I managed to drop it from a height of about 3 feet (just to mix
up the units even more). Boil it all up and keep warm.
To serve you mix the lentils into the rice pan. I needed to
reheat a bit (the lentils not the rice obviously bearing in mind my food
poisoning concerns) due to partial multi-tasking failure. The tomato sauce goes
on the side. The recipe also says to serve with a cucumber and yoghurt salad. I
had neither of these but did have an out-of-date pot of tzatziki which I had acquired
during a fleeting trip to the shop one lunchtime. It didn’t taste out-of-date
and filled the role very nicely.
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