Adventures in Cooking
Jan. 20th, 2014 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
in_the_blueWhat do you do when you have some really good-looking kale, but you know you don't want it raw in a salad again? If you're me, you go recipe surfing on the web. When I found a recipe for spicy lentils with sweet potatoes and kale, I decided that had to be dinner.
Of course, I had no sweet potato and no uncooked lentils, so I went to the nearest grocery store, which is always a little bit of an adventure on its own. It's the least consistently stocked market I've ever frequented, and I wouldn't frequent it at all if it wasn't the one closest to my house. Of course, they had no sweet potatoes. But they had a bunch of varieties of yams. I am well aware that the two foods are not even related other than by their good looks, but I knew that yams would probably make an okay substitute (what supermarket worth its salt doesn't have sweet potatoes?).
Confession number one: I've never cooked yams before. Go me.
Confession number two: I've always used canned (cooked) lentils before.
Look, I busted two long-standing no-cook-em rules in one meal! YOU GUYS. This dish is so good. Plus, it smelled absolutely delicious while it was cooking. The combination of bay leaf and rosemary made my whole house smell like a Moroccan bazaar.
I did make two other changes to the recipe. First, I doubled the celery (two whole stalks, living large!). Second, instead of softening the vegetables in oil, I used vegetable stock. There's not much reason to add fat to this dish that way, and I've found it never impacts the flavor a whole lot if you're only using the oil to get your veggies started.
So what did I learn, besides the fact that this was so good I had to crow about it to all of you? Lentils take a long time to cook. A seriously long time. No wonder the chefs on Chopped always grimace when they have them as a secret ingredient. Trust me, though, this dish is a complete statement of yam.
Tomorrow I'm going to do a root vegetable stew (wish me luck: the store was out of celery root so I'm substituting daikon radish instead. I have no idea if this is going to work but at least they're texturally kind of similar?).
Of course, I had no sweet potato and no uncooked lentils, so I went to the nearest grocery store, which is always a little bit of an adventure on its own. It's the least consistently stocked market I've ever frequented, and I wouldn't frequent it at all if it wasn't the one closest to my house. Of course, they had no sweet potatoes. But they had a bunch of varieties of yams. I am well aware that the two foods are not even related other than by their good looks, but I knew that yams would probably make an okay substitute (what supermarket worth its salt doesn't have sweet potatoes?).
Confession number one: I've never cooked yams before. Go me.
Confession number two: I've always used canned (cooked) lentils before.
Look, I busted two long-standing no-cook-em rules in one meal! YOU GUYS. This dish is so good. Plus, it smelled absolutely delicious while it was cooking. The combination of bay leaf and rosemary made my whole house smell like a Moroccan bazaar.
I did make two other changes to the recipe. First, I doubled the celery (two whole stalks, living large!). Second, instead of softening the vegetables in oil, I used vegetable stock. There's not much reason to add fat to this dish that way, and I've found it never impacts the flavor a whole lot if you're only using the oil to get your veggies started.
So what did I learn, besides the fact that this was so good I had to crow about it to all of you? Lentils take a long time to cook. A seriously long time. No wonder the chefs on Chopped always grimace when they have them as a secret ingredient. Trust me, though, this dish is a complete statement of yam.
Tomorrow I'm going to do a root vegetable stew (wish me luck: the store was out of celery root so I'm substituting daikon radish instead. I have no idea if this is going to work but at least they're texturally kind of similar?).
