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Lentil experiment (and something with potatoes)
I don't cook; I apply heat to piles of completely random ingredients with no rhyme or reason behind it at all.
I found some dried lentils in the grocery store, so on a whim I bought some. I washed them & put them in the crock pot along with some dried barley, a big pile of water, and everything I could find that smelled good. Joy of Cooking says simmer for four hours so I figure four hours in the crock pot ought to do it.
I'll be fascinated to see how the water to other stuff ratio turns out. Different sources varied enormously on this. I may have what looks like a pile of veggies for a dinner plate or I may have water with a few things piled at the bottom of it. I'll have to check part way through.
I have a little stick blender for turning it into soup when it's done, but with the barley in there maybe I'll skip that step. Looking at the spices I chose, I probably should have skipped the barley. Oh well.
Stuff:
2.5 cups dried lentils
1/4 cup dried barley
8 cups water
small handful dried minced onion
hefty spoon of curry powder
couple shakes of turmeric
couple shakes of garlic powder
couple shakes of black pepper
tiny pile - maybe a scant 1/4 teaspoon - of ginger
teaspoon or less of salt
Now that I've thought of the stick blender, I want to get out the second crock and do potato-leek. But I'd have to go back to the store for leeks, and it's raining like whoa, and my feet still hurt from the first trip. Au gratin it is. I *will* make something better than and nearly as easy as that $1.29 box of mix... even if it takes me many tries. I am determined. (And potatoes aren't costly.)
I found some dried lentils in the grocery store, so on a whim I bought some. I washed them & put them in the crock pot along with some dried barley, a big pile of water, and everything I could find that smelled good. Joy of Cooking says simmer for four hours so I figure four hours in the crock pot ought to do it.
I'll be fascinated to see how the water to other stuff ratio turns out. Different sources varied enormously on this. I may have what looks like a pile of veggies for a dinner plate or I may have water with a few things piled at the bottom of it. I'll have to check part way through.
I have a little stick blender for turning it into soup when it's done, but with the barley in there maybe I'll skip that step. Looking at the spices I chose, I probably should have skipped the barley. Oh well.
Stuff:
2.5 cups dried lentils
1/4 cup dried barley
8 cups water
small handful dried minced onion
hefty spoon of curry powder
couple shakes of turmeric
couple shakes of garlic powder
couple shakes of black pepper
tiny pile - maybe a scant 1/4 teaspoon - of ginger
teaspoon or less of salt
Now that I've thought of the stick blender, I want to get out the second crock and do potato-leek. But I'd have to go back to the store for leeks, and it's raining like whoa, and my feet still hurt from the first trip. Au gratin it is. I *will* make something better than and nearly as easy as that $1.29 box of mix... even if it takes me many tries. I am determined. (And potatoes aren't costly.)
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So you're starting with entropy, and adding heat to increase the entropy, obeying the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. ;-)
Not big on lentils, myself, but the base looks good - like it might work as a soup stock for a number of things.
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I am verrrry big on lentils... when I won't have other people near me. (The bit about one's body "getting used to it" is hooey.)
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I am verrrry big on lentils... when I won't have other people near me.
I should consider the same with broccoli. :-)
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I was seriously wondering there... *giggle*
A suggestion
First, put the dried lentils in water, and boil for 10 minutes. Then pour off all the water through a strainer, and rinse the lentils really well in cold water. Rinse out the pot, too, and then start over with fresh water. Now you can cook it to its completion. Most of the gas-producing chemicals will have been washed away. Works for me, anyway!
Re: A suggestion
Re: A suggestion
The chemist says: the stink-o-genic chemicals are called lectins. They are strange sugar molecules that somehow turn into gassy gas when in the human digestion. A person will get more able to digest them over time, but there's a limit to how much better one will get. I bet there are some bacteria that one needs for good lentil digestion, and without those bacteria, it's just going to be gassy as all heck.
Unless you do as suggested above... I use that every time I cook lentils and it WORKS. It works like whoa, but you must rinse carefully and remove the weird foamy stuff that will come up in that first boil. That stuff is mostly lectins, which are released into the water so you can get rid of them.
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That's hilarious. I would ask to put that into my quote file, but the truth is, I do cook. But it does apply to a lot of people!
By the way, I tried to join the
Thank you!
Whoops
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Mm, good question. If that's their criterion, then the question is where to show up to meet them. Sadly I don't get out to stuff much. Their gatherings are a long drive away from me. One potential way to find ways to meet is LJ-friending the individual organizers and getting to know them that way. I suspect you're connected via several mutual LJ-friends already.
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And how do you find out stuff like "Carrot and celery both are very nice aromatics to go with lentils and barley."? I remember reading a cookbook once that started out saying "What if you don't already know that tomato and basil are soulmates?" That's me. There are basic texts to tell me when a chicken is done or how much water it will take to cook a cup of barley, and there are piles of specific recipes, but nothing I know of has charts linking numerous combinations of ingredients so I can read across the LENTIL row and find CELERY and CARROT with smileyfaces. I bet it's a secret cabal. That's it. You just have to apprentice to a master wizard for several years, and no one reputable will publish a grimoire. ;-)
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If you'd like sometime, I could give you a couple of evenings of really basic 'stuff that goes together and how to make it work' kinds of instruction. I've done that for other friends, and now they actually consider themselves 'cooks' (and it's true, they really are).
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School just started, so I'm kind of up to my eyeballs right now, but after I get settled into a proper routine we can talk about when we can do this.
It's fun!
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Seriously, start by asking folks who know about this stuff, take their suggestion and then try it out. Then tinker with it. After a while, if you pay super close attention to the smells and tastes of things, and if you monitor the smells and tastes of things as you work on them and they change during the process, you too will have the spooky magic ability.
It's sort of like developing a palate for wine, a process I find mysterious but pleasurable. Uses some of the same senses too, in similar ways.
Back to the lentils - lentils with chicken and carrots and a tiny hit of rosemary... OMG, foodgasm city. Best thing in the universe. Lentils love carrots. Carrots love chicken. In -this context- lentils love rosemary. And we all dance and sing with joy!
One more lentil/bean tip. Don't salt them at ALL until the dish is almost ready to eat. Salting earlier toughens up skins and makes things not cook through, which is horrid. This also goes for adding salty things like capers, parmesan rinds, bacon, ham, what ever. Learn from my experience here, which was Not Entirely Happy.
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Parmesan rind is a wonderful thing to add to minestrone soups! Yum.
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Couscous is a great thing to have around to add to casseroles that turn out to have too much liquid, especially if you want to keep the discrete ingredients rather than blending everything into a thick soup. Just throw some couscous in for the last few minutes of cooking, and they'll sop a lot of the liquid up. Even if you already have barley in it, couscous would work fine -- especially if it's whole wheat couscous.
Lentils are not just Indian -- lentil soup is popular in Jewish cuisine also, and probably a number of others.
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Mmmmm, couscous -- I am eating some of that right now, as it happens. It's great stuff for my style of kitchen experimentation. Put a bunch of whatever-you-feel-like in water, boil, add couscous, voila! :-) (Today: onion, rosemary, Parmesan cheese. Needs salt.)
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Onion + green peppers + celery = Creole "holy trinity".
These are usually sweated or sauteed first in oil, for a higher cooking temperature. Garlic is always good with either :-), though I usually put it in after the others have cooked for a while (it burns more easily). If you go as far as browning the onion, you get a much deeper, sweeter flavor out of these aromatics.
Browning reactions are good in general -- this is another secret to good cooking! Just boiling stuff together is nice, but if you brown some of the ingredients by sauteeing them in oil, searing them on a dry pan (for red meat), or roasting them in the oven, you get even better flavors. I often do this with lentils and barley; I start by sauteeing the mirepoix, then add garlic, then add dry lentils and barley and keep stirring. (Keep stirring!!! It burns easily.) Eventually the barley gets a brown tinge, and then you add the liquid to cool everything off and cook things for real.