Lentil Lundi

Whilst grocery shopping on Saturday morning Jen proclaimed, "We should eat more lentils." This sounded like a good idea to me, however, I stated that there'd have to be some theme to this. So I proposed that tonight, on Monday, we would start the very first in a series called Lentil Lundi!

Okay, let's be honest, this will probably be a series of approximately one (1) blog entry. But still, the idea was enticing enough.



Since I wasn't working today I cooked up a big pot of lentils and just let them sit on the stove for a while.



While they sat I cooked up some onion, chili pepper, and tomato in a little butter with some cumin seeds. I guess technically I could have used ghee but I just didn't want to. There are certain ingredients in cooking that I just don't like to recognize as legitimate and ghee is one of them. I understand the point of ghee, I just don't like the idea of getting it when I can just use some oil or butter in place of it.

I like running a lean pantry. Lean with the exception of the seventy-five odd jams, jellies, tapenades, and mustards I accumulate in an average year.

I added a little chili powder and fresh tomato to the cooked vegetables before adding in the cooked red lentils.



I served up a salad of the leftover roasted celeriac and beet with a squeeze of lime, olive oil, salt, and pepper mixed with fresh cilantro leaves. I was content to leave it at that but Jen suggested rather forcefully that I add in some sliced avocado. It didn't really go with the salad but, hey, I'm not one to turn down avocado in any situation.



To accompany this makeshift dal I decided to make some naan. I would have loved to have planned this better and just bought some naan but not having that foresight I was forced to make some from scratch.

Along with ghee another thing I don't like doing is measuring things so I just put in an amount of flour, water, yogurt, yeast, salt, and oil into a bowl, mixed it up, let it sit for a bit then scooped it in portions onto the pizza stone fresh out of a 500 degree oven.



They puffed up a little too much when I put them on the stone to bake. Next time I think I might make the batter a little more wet and spread it thinner on the stone. That's a simple fix, I'll just increase the liquid content in the recipe!

Oh yeah. No recipe. Maybe there is something to this whole recipe thing after all.

Pan Roasting Skills Competition

As January comes to a close I'm hoping that the general malaise I've been in will go with it. January has historically been a bad month for me. In 2008, just before this blog started, I was pretty sure I was going to die twice -- once from flu, once from food poisoning. This January may have been slightly better than that one but not by much.

Today was spent mostly lounging about, partly going to the grocery store because eventually one has to eat.

This morning, as I was eating breakfast and reading the New York Times I came upon a ton of root vegetable ideas from Mark Bittman. Most of these ideas were, in Mark Bittman style, fairly simple and involved taking a single root vegetable and roasting it. Today, in my current state, this seemed like a perfect idea for dinner.



I roasted some beets, a whole celeriac, a sweet potato, and some Russian Banana and French fingerling potatoes with nothing but olive oil, salt, and pepper.

I got a piece of Norwegian salmon, seared it in a pan, and also roasted that more as an accompaniment to the vegetables than as a main course.

So here you have pan roasted salmon, pan roasted beets, pan roasted fingerling potatoes, and I guess baked sweet potato and celeriac. This got me to thinking. What is the difference between pan roasting and just roasting? Roast turkey is done in a pan but often referred to as simply roasted turkey. Potatoes are baked. Why? I don't really know.

I think it's because it sounds cool. Pan roasted. It sounds somehow more intricate than regular plain roasting and certainly better than baked. Who wants a baked chicken when you could have a roasted chicken? Who wants a roasted chicken when you could have a pan roasted chicken? And who wants a pan roasted chicken when you could have a wood fire roasted chicken?



To go along with tonight's overly-roasted meal I also made a salad of baby greens, whole basil leaves, sliced red onion, and the remainder of some fig and tahini dressing from the fridge.

I had hoped tonight we would watch the NHL Skills Competition but this is one of the two or three nights out of the year that we are sad we don't have cable. That saddness quickly vanished after discovering that there are about fifty episodes of No Reservations that remain unwatched on Netflix.

The one regret I have is the insufficient amount of beer in 2012 despite my overflowing fridge and "beer cellar." I'm hoping that in the next couple of weeks I will return to normal and begin to continue my blistering pace of consuming approximately five beers a week. Soon will come the day when I can return to the beer-drinking ranks.

And on that day it will be the most glorious day.

What Pinup Models from the 1940s Would Eat if They Arrived Here in a Time Machine

It's amazing what a light rain can do to the roads of New York City. The West Side Highway, which under normal conditions is barely tolerable, turns into a slow-moving mess which is made even worse by the fact that they still allow people from New Jersey on the road.

Write your representatives, people. This madness has to stop!



There was little time to cook after getting home. Jen expressed her interest in having a "meaty pasta dish" so I took the soup from the other night, cooked it down, tossed in some blanched broccoli rabe, a little tomato paste, some fusilli, butter, and Parmigiano-Reggiano.



I also made garlic bread with some fresh Italian bread, mashed garlic cloves, salt, pepper, olive oil, and some paprika.



For beer I picked another Christmas gift, this Niagara's Best Premium Blonde Ale from The Syndicate Restaurant & Brewery (formerly Niagara's Best Beer Ltd.) in Niagara Falls, Canada. This beer was unique in that it was one of the least carbonated beers I've ever had. There was no discernible head whatsoever. There was a slight sourness. I'd expected it to be a little sweeter, sort of like that sweet lady on the label. She didn't look sour. She looked like a sweet heartbreaker from the 1940s.

A sweet, cream ale-drinking, Niagara Falls going-over-in-a-barrel, pinup model heartbreaker from the 1940s.

Skyward Sausage

I haven't done all that much cooking lately. However, I have had a lot of time being stuck in the house and whenever I have a day at home I like to make stock.



We had a tremendous amount of leek tops in the freezer. We still do but we used to too. I used these along with some bones from a roast chicken to make a chicken and leek stock.



I know it seems a little farfetch'd but I felt there was enough leek in the stock that it warranted top billing in the naming of the stock.



We haven't been grocery shopping in over a week so it was a little tight what I could actually make for dinner. I did make this sausage and fennel soup with olive oil, crushed garlic, onion, carrot, celery, fennel, sausage, and a little of my farfetch'd stock.





To accompany the soup I served a crusty baguette, a light salad of arugula and mixed greens with a little lemon and olive oil, Gorgonzola Mountain, and a D'anjou pear who was just two weeks away from beginning to collect social security.



Last night I started playing the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. To keep with the night's Nintendo theme I continued on my quest after dinner. Jen is always delighted to watch me play a new video game, something that admittedly hasn't happened for about four years. While she enjoys herself her main concern is that it might be boring for me to sit there and play while she watches.

I don't think Jen understands how video games work.

Hand Pies For Tiny Hands

Jen was stranded in Denver last night. I'd been planning to make her some treats for her late night arrival but instead I stayed where I was stranded: on my back with a heating pad. She finally got in around 6:00 this evening so I needed to put something a little more substantial together for dinner.

Since I haven't left the house since Thursday it was slim pickin's. So it was that I turned to our freezer and fridge to see what I could squeeze out for an emergency meal. I'd hoped Jen would have been home today to run out and get a few things but sadly our food supply has diminished to new lows.





I made the most out of the roast chicken turned creamy chicken stew. I folded it up into some puff pastry dough to make little hand pies.



I guess if they're little hand pies then they're more like finger pies. Much like the pies foretold in the Beatles classic Penny Lane.



.I only made them this size because that was the size of the largest cutter we had. I balled up the remaining dough, rolled it out, and made one more proper-sized hand pie.



I also found one remaining veal saltimboca in the freezer which I thawed out and cooked up on a hot plate in the oven.



I also thawed out all the remaining pancetta and shrimp in the freezer, wrapping them up, and cooking them alongside the veal.

So I stayed in the house all day watching both championship football games where the teams are playing to see who is in the World Series or something. This is extremely unfair. I'm sure there are people out there who would kill to switch places with me, even taking on my illness, just to be able to have this opportunity that is so wasted on me. That's a real shame because I would be all over taking someone up on that tradeoff to be done with this and not able to see the football game.

I need to go to the doctor tomorrow so I have to leave the house at some point. My hope is that he will look at my back and say, "Aha! I see what the problem is!" Then he'll fiddle with a few knobs or gears or levers and I will be back to normal. Yeah, that would be pretty great. I'm pretty sure that has a good chance of happening.

That's how doctors work, right?