Simplicity Itself: Rice and Lentils

Life has gotten more complicated than I would like.  School started, and six weeks passed in a flurry of lesson plans, lecture notes, and term papers to grade.  The last two days, I've been on fall break and recovering from a previous week of 90 individual student conferences and grading 90 essays, not to mention a week chock full of obligations: individual reading tutoring, gardening tending, and dinner making.

Now midterms are done.  I look up and life has gone by fast.  Too quickly to savor, too quickly to be calm, grounded, or centered.  So swiftly, that it felt like I wasn't even present.

My bookshelf is littered with books like The Simple Living Guide and The 50 Best Ways to Simplify Your Life.  Although I read them, and they do make a lot of sense, I have trouble executing a truly simple life.  It's because I just want to DO so much.  The piles of books to read, the piles of fabrics to sew, the piles of vegetables to cook sitting at the bottom of the fridge.  How does it become too much so quickly?

Systematically weeding the categories of my life down to the essential seems to be the best way for me to balance.  So lately, I've been thinking about the complexity and chaos of my kitchen.  The piles of veggies get canned or frozen or turned into vegetable soups and eaten.  But the urgency of it all is stressful.  I have to remind myself that it is okay of some of those piles of veggies get turned into eggs.  The chickens don't mind eating wilted, soggy-around-the-edges lettuce.  I also remind myself that this vegetable anxiety is seasonal.  This week is the last week we'll receive our CSA box for the year, so the stream of local veggies will ebb to a trickle.  We haven't had a frost yet, so my garden is still producing, but as the days get shorter, it takes the tomatoes longer to ripen. I welcome the slower pace the winter will bring.

My other problem with kitchen complexity is in what I choose to cook in the first place.  Somehow my cooking repertoire has revolved around the 2 hour, 20 ingredient recipe for far too long.  Now I'm concentrating on simpler, easier recipes for awhile.  I don't want to dabble in the occultish realm of recipes requiring frozen tater tots, Miracle Whip, and cream of mushroom soup though.  Instead, I want to focus on quality ingredients (not too many) prepared in just a few simple steps.


The simplest dish that I make on a regular basis is mujadara.  Mujadara came on my radar in two different places last winter.  First, a local coffee shop served it on its lunch menu, and second, Orangette wrote about it here.  While I like the Orangette version just fine, I've simplified it even further.  Rather than cook the onions, then the lentils, and then the rice, clocking in at about an hour and a half of attentive stove time, I cook it all at once in three separate pans.  This dirties more dishes.  (But like Kent says, my greatest talent is dirtying a large amount of dishes in a short amount of time.)  The problem with cooking it all in one pot is that it becomes a finicky, nearly risotto like dish.  And, I have had issues with risotto trying my patience in the past.

I'm not going to give you a recipe here because you don't even need one.  Cook a pot of basmati rice.  Cook a pot of lentils.  (You'll be fine following the directions on the packages of both.)  And, then caramelize 3 or 4 large onions in olive oil.  Mix all together and salt to taste.

Do not be deceived by the simplicity of this dish.  With only 5 ingredients including salt and oil, it seems as if the flavor would be blah, but it's not. The secret is in the onions.  Caramelized onions make this dish spectacular because they are the perfect fall flavor: rich and hearty but still sweet, with a calm mellowness.  Sort of like the weather right now, sunny but punctuated by a chill in the air.  The caramelized onions also play off of the other flavors here: the bright, slightly fruity, nuttiness of the basmati rice, and the deeper, earthier taste of the lentils.

Caramelized Onions

4 to 5 large onions, chopped
1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil

Chop onions and cook in oil over medium heat until they begin to brown.  The goal is to brown them to a deep caramel color without burning them.  So, if they start to brown too quickly, or blacken around the edges, you need to turn the heat down.  Stir occasionally.  Depending on the natural sugar level in your onions this could take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes.

I have come to enjoy the soothing patience that these onions require.  They don't need as much attention as a risotto, (I can still do dishes while caramelizing onions without disaster, which is important in my household!)  I only have to focus on one pan, while the rice and lentils cook away on their own.   

Here's the finished dish, which is great eaten hot, cold, or even at room temperature.  The caramelized onions are incredibly versatile as well.  They are great on sandwiches or tossed with pasta.

The Dangers of Faux Risotto

Last January, I swore off risottos. Not eating them, mind you. I solemnly swore I would never make another risotto again. The problem is, I love risottos. I love the way each individual rice grain is so creamy it's as if it melted just slightly before reaching my mouth. As much as I love risotto, it's just not worth it to me to stand over a hot stove for an hour, stirring until my arm goes numb. I am not normally one to take short cuts in the kitchen, but risottos are the one thing I believe the input in effort is not worth the output in taste. That's why, I will always order the foie gras with porcini risotto EVERY TIME I eat at Andre's in downtown Boise.

Even though I had made the no-more-risotto-making rule, when I saw a recipe for "Artichoke, Asparagus, and Mushroom Quinoa Risotto" in the July issue of Bon Apettit, I added the ingredients to my shopping list without hesitation. It wasn't a true risotto, I thought, and besides, quinoa cooks quicker than aborio rice, this will be a breeze. It turned out to be a breeze with a tornado in the middle.

This recipe is problematic for several reasons. Let's start with the ingredients. It calls for an 8oz package of frozen artichoke hearts, which WinCo does not carry. This called for a trip to the evil empire known as Albertsons in these parts. For $3.89 I bought a square block of frozen artichoke hearts. The best part about this whole dish, in fact, came from the back of the box of artichokes. I quote from the frozen vegetable company: "we believe passionately in Quality and that Quality of Life, Family and Friendships are the only reasons for our existence."

Unfortunately, pukishly pale green artichoke hearts with a plastic-like, flavor akin to those wax lips I used to get as a kid around Halloween time did not make me believe my quality of life had improved. I would have been better off buying a can of marinated artichoke hearts for half the price. Then there was the Manchego cheese the recipe calls for. My discretionary cheese fund for the next six months has been tapped out by a rather extravagant imported cheese tray we had during our graduation celebration last month. I couldn't bring myself to pay $20.99/lb. for Manchego. I substituted Pecrino, which might have been a tad sharper and salter than Manchego, but still had the good muskiness of a sheep's milk cheese.

So, now let's get down to the cooking disaster. I sauteed oyster mushrooms in butter and olive oil with garlic without incident and set them aside. The mushrooms were sitting innocently on the counter, and as I opened the cupboard above them to grab the quinoa, somehow, the bag had come open. Quinoa exploded over the counters, floor, sink and into the reserved mushrooms. Quinoa, for those of you who haven't cooked with it, is really quite good. It's about the size of couscous and has a nutty flavor and a texture similar to tapioca, but firmer and less slippery. But, when a bag of quinoa gets loose in your kitchen, it looks like some one grabbed a GIANT bean bag, gutted it in the middle of your kitchen and decided to throw its entrails around like confetti. Not pretty. I have swept the kitchen floor three times and vacuumed the entire house, and we are still crunching grains of uncooked quinoa under our feet.

So, I had no choice but to cook the mushrooms with the rest of quinoa to the skillet. Instead of adding them at the end. Did you say skillet? That's another problem with this recipe, it calls for using "a heavy large skillet." I used my 10-inch saute pan that is deep enough to hold two quarts. And it nearly overflowed, making all the strenuous stirring even more difficult. Loose globs of quinoa kept flying over my stove and floor as a stirred. If you boil quinoa, like rice, it'll take about 20 minutes to cook. If you try to turn it into faux risotto, expect it to take forever, somewhere around 45 minutes. It was also quite angry at me by this time. As soon as the liquid got low, the quinoa would spit and hiss like a phone line full of static.
The moral of the story is this don't be fooled by faux risottos. They are every bit as time consuming and arm-wrenching as the real deal.

But, the thing is, the dish was actually quite good. The asparagus and artichokes added a hint of sweetness to the pungency of the cheese and the earthy nuttiness of the mushrooms and grain. Also, it's quite healthy, and it will be perfect for frumpy teacher lunches. The recipe called for 1/2 a cup of dry white wine and I, of course, drank the rest of the bottle during the 45 minutes I was stirring. Maybe my judgment was skewed. (And no, I was not intoxicated before the quinoa exploded.)

With a faux risotto such as this, nothing would have been lost had I simmered the quinoa in broth and wine like rice. There would have been no texture compromise, and it would have been a hell of a lot easier. So while I like this combination of ingredients, the technique can be simplified.