yum!
A blog about food
Plentiful Lentils
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yum! is such a fun outlet—I love sharing my recipes with everyone. I have a knack for incorporating food into every conversation, so imagine my pure delight when another foodie joined the Sun Valley Magazine team. Our shiny new editor Michael Ames shares my gusto for cuisine and seems to enjoy talking about food as much as I do (if not more!), so I am super-excited to have him share some of his culinary masterpieces with us. (LL)
Lentils look good in jars. There’s something about the uniformity of so many tiny pebbles piled up behind glass walls. I’m reminded of those grade school contests where you guessed how many jellybeans were in the jar. Someone else always won, but everyone shared the spoils.
My friend Shaun has huge jars of pink lentils on his kitchen shelves. He literally has gallons. They are the biggest jars I have ever seen. I think he custom-orders them. He could hide a regulation-sized NFL pigskin in his lentils if he wanted, which he wouldn’t (Shaun’s a vegetarian).
How many lentils does Shaun have? Hundreds of thousands. The cosmic billions and billions? The point is, he’s got plenty. The only question is: What on earth do you do with them?
Shaun uses his plentiful lentils mostly for dal, a Hindu word for legume, or a dish of stewed and spiced, usually light-colored and quick-cooking lentils. I’ve enjoyed Shaun’s sub-continental fare many times, but I wanted to try something different. Last fall I saw a bag of French green lentils, sometimes called puy lentils or lentils du Puy, at Spinelli’s Market, in Denver’s Park Hill. I had never seen lentils like these: the skins were speckled black and the lens-shaped legumes seemed harder and cleaner than their split-pea brethren. They looked like a bag of miniature river rocks, or brindled seeds that might grow into pit-bulls (Just add water!).
At home, I poured the lentils into a perfect-size mason jar (Shaun says: Jars of lentils must be kept as close to full as possible. This ideology results in a constant game of musical jars, an unending waterfalling of lentils into smaller and smaller containers. At Shaun’s, the steady sssssshhhhhhhhst sound of dried lentils pouring into glass jars is a soothing symptom of lentil obsession.)
On my counter, in their tiny mason jar, the French green lentils looked great—such a perfect fit, I hesitated to use them at all. But when the time came, I turned to a trusted recipe resource, Saveur magazine, and found a French-country approach. I used some local Italian pork sausage and carrots and onions from Idaho’s Bounty, our local foodshed co-op. Combined with the lentils, the vast majority of which are grown in eastern Washington and northern Idaho, this meal turned out fresh, local and fulfilling in every way.
(click next to check out the recipe)
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Reader Comments:
I never would have used lentils this way as I always go for soup, but I had the pleasure of tasting this when Michael brought it into the office—SO yum! The southern in me would have served it over rice (because EVERYTHING is served over rice!), but I can't wait to try this at home.
Welcome Michael, I never knew there were so many kinds of lentils. The addition of sausages to beans is also in the southern tradition and bacon makes everything better. I saw some really good looking sausages (with tasty sample bites) at the Hailey farmers market last Thursday. Yes, we here in the South would definitely put this bean-sausage combination over rice. We may use steamed long-grain rice that had been seasoned with parsley and green onions while cooking, par-boiled rice, or nutty brown rice or any of the other varieties that line our grocery store shelves. My favorite brown rice is Louisiana-grown Brown Jasmine Rice grown by Cajun Grain in Kinder Louisiana. I always look forward to seeing my farmer friend from Kinder at the Red Stick Farmers market in Baton Rouge. There's nothing like home grown rice and sausage to make a dish even that much better. Of course, if we had it, we'd add boudin. Yum!
Wow, a guest blogger on my favorite site! This could only be made more awesome by the delectible recipe. The only lentils this girl comes in contact with regularly is Red Beans and Rice, and unbelievably, you can actually tire of eating them. Thanks, Michael! (And like my favorite foodie lil' sis, I'd probably put it over rice, but only because down here it seems a sin not to...)
Okay, I must express my utter amazement that our Mom is not only on a computer volutarily in the summer, but BLOGGING. Go, Judy. She forgot to add that she has a crush on the Kinder rice farmer, but it may be because his grains are very fragrant and delish.
As this recipe involves sausage, I am quite sure my meat-and-potatoes husband will be trying it out. Or at least begging me to. And who knows, maybe my picky, chicken-and-ketchup eating 3 year old will actually ingest a vegetable?!?! Perish the thought.