The Most Interesting Part of My Day

When you look around and realize that the most interesting thing you’ve done during the day involves Murphy’s Oil Soap (even if the dining room table is extremely clean now), you feel like maybe something a little nice for lunch is in order.

Since this is pretty much a summary of my day, I looked to a new cookbook I got recently. I’ve long been a fan of Bill Granger through my subscription to an Australian cooking magazine called delicious. and I have two of his cookbooks (biils food and bills open kitchen). About a year and a half ago I read of another one that had been published in Australia, bills sydney food. I looked and looked for this one, but with no luck. Finally, about two weeks ago on a trip to Elliot Bay Book Company, I stumbled on it. It wasn’t cheap, but I had to complete my collection.

Thank goodness I bought it, because this morning when I realized I wanted to make a nice lunch, Bill had just the recipe: Spiced Lentil Salad with Prawns and Mint Yogurt Dressing. As I’ve said, I’m of the opinion that lentils are a wonderful transition food from summer to fall. Today was a dreary, gray day with lots of yellowy brown trees, and some rain. Also some sick kids.

Did I mention that? Three of my kids have high fevers—103+. They’ve had them all weekend. The fourth one seems interestingly immune to whatever it is that the others have. I started making this recipe at 10:30 this morning, and finished up about 1:30. That’s not to suggest that there’s anything time-consuming about it. Quite the opposite—it’s really a pretty quick fix. Cook and dress lentils, cook shrimp, make dressing, assemble. But when you’re interrupted every 10 minutes to give a baby a bottle, change a diaper, change a DVD, or dispense Motrin (did you know children’s Motrin comes in cherry, grape, and bubble gum flavors??), things tend to drag out a bit.

So this recipe had the autumnal lentils I love, plus some flavors that have hints of summer in them—shrimp, mint, spring onions. The shrimp, bathed with olive oil and turmeric, have a bright yellowy orange color that can either be reminiscent of summer, or a reminder of the bright leaves outside that today are dripping with raindrops.

My lentils took longer to cook than the recipe directs because they were old. Instead of taking 15 minutes to cook, they took more like 25. I also omitted the green chili that it called for because I don’t care for things that are too spicy, and because I didn’t want to take the time to chop it. I left out the blanched green beans, again on the grounds that I was hungry and wanted to eat before Thomas the Tank Engine was over.

I made the dressing in my mini chopper, which worked beautifully. I used nonfat yogurt, which was OK, but I think it would have been even better with whole milk yogurt, or even that extra thick Greek yogurt that’s available now. Once the fish sauce and lime juice are added it would be a nice creamy dressing.

All in all, a bright sunny lunch on a rainy day filled with taking care of children, cleaning the dining room table, and little else of interest.

Spiced Lentil Salad with Prawns and Minted Yogurt Dressing
From bills sydney food by Bill Granger

1 cup du Puy lentils
¼ cup finely slices scallions
½ cup olive oil
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
1 green chili, finely chopped
Sea salt
Fresh ground pepper
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
¼ cup cilantro leaves.
1 tsp turmeric
20 raw prawns, peeled and deveined, tails intact

To Serve
1 cup baby spinach leaves
3 1/3 oz green beans, blanched and refreshed
Mint yogurt dressing

Place lentils and 1 ½ cups of water in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Drain the lentils.

Place warm lentils, scallions, 4 Tbsp of the olive oil, vinegar, chili, salt, pepper, ground coriander, cumin and cilantro in a bowl. Stir to combine, and set aside.

Place remaining olive oil, turmeric, salt and pepper in a bowl and stir to combine. Add prawns and stir to coat with oil.

Heat a non-stick frying pan over high heat for 2 minutes. Add prawns and cook until just opaque, shaking pan frequently.

To assemble salad, divide lentils among 4 plates, top with baby spinach leaves, green beans, and prawns. Finish with a drizzle of yogurt dressing. Serves 4.

Mint Yogurt Dressing
1 cup yogurt
2 Tbsp lime juice
2 tsp fish sauce
4 Tbsp finely chopped mint

Place all ingredients in a bowl and whisk to combine.

Love Lentils

Now that Fall is officially here, with grey rain, grey water, and piles of grey clouds, I’m reading many odes to Fall foods. Squashes, pumpkins, apples, pears. All of these are wonderful, and add a splash of color to days that are now noticeably shorter and darker (and grey—did I mention grey?). But I’d like to chime in with a personal favorite Fall food, a quiet, unassuming little legume that generally neither brightens nor adds color. Lentils.

Lentils do come in red, of course, but they are not the lentil of autumn to me. Autumn lentils are green or brown. Like the tree leaves that just turn brown, they provide a neutral canvas for all those splashy bright fruits and vegetables. On a bed of colored leaves, a pumpkin competes for our attention. On a carpet of brown ones, it dazzles.

One of my favorite ways to eat lentils isn’t necessarily confined to Fall, but it certainly makes an excellent lunch. Cooked lentils with a little chopped red onion, served with baby rocket and some really high quality Italian tuna (in olive oil, please—no spring water in this dish). The whole is dressed with a simple mustard vinaigrette that unifies everything and gives it a spark. After my twin boys were born, I think I ate this for lunch for three weeks in a row. The lentils were easy to make in large batches, and would keep well in the refrigerator. One can of tuna would provide four servings. It was easy to put together when they were down for one of their many naps (most of which only seemed to ever last twenty minutes—just long enough to get to that last bite).

This dish was inspired by something we had at an Italian restaurant. We used to live near a busy intersection, but it hadn’t always been a busy intersection. The addition of an overpass had pushed what was once considered a sophisticated and elegant restaurant onto a little triangle of land, surrounded on three sides by busy highway, and flanked on the fourth side by an old and dumpy Giant Food store. On a night we didn’t feel like cooking, we tried the now-fallen-from-grace Italian restaurant for dinner. The only thing worth eating, we found, was a lentil salad that they served on their Antipasto Bar. My husband had about four helpings of it. We never did know how the restaurant stayed in business, because the rest of the food was truly deplorable, but perhaps the constant stream of mid-1970s model Cadillacs and Buicks that were always in the parking lot explained it: people who had loved the place when it was sophisticated and elegant still clung to it, remembering it as it used to be.

Lentil soup is another comfort food. I like it with Indian spices like garam masala. I make it sometimes with pancetta, or regular bacon. Before we had kids, my husband and I used to host a holiday party every year, and we liked to have a pot of soup (or two) in the slow cooker so people could have a little cup of soup to warm them up when they first arrived. One year it was lentil soup with Indian spices, and there wasn’t a drop left at the end of the evening. The logistics of serving the soup were never very fancy—just little Styrofoam cups and plastic spoons, but it was always welcome.

Both lamb and flank steak seem to have a natural affinity for lentils too. Many times I’ve ordered a rack of lamb in a restaurant that came with lentils. Once, when I was a tourist in the town in which I now live, we had lunch at one of Tom Douglas’s restaurants, Etta’s in Pike Place Market. He served a trout that came with lentils, and although I don’t really think of fish and lentils together (other than perhaps salmon, which almost doesn’t even seem like fish to me anymore because it so often seems to be treated like meat), this particular dish was excellent.

I’ve never tried lentil puree, although I’m very fond of white bean puree. Somehow lentils are so small and innocent, it just seems mean to puree them. On the other hand, in soup I feel like they should be pureed. They make a nice creamy soup, but it’s possible to make it very low fat (that would be in the versions with no bacon, of course).

Lentils are filling, friendly to cooks because they’re ready so quickly, good hot or cold. Fall is a perfect time of year for lentils, when you can’t decide between soup or salad because the weather is cold and rainy one day, sunny and warm the next. They’re great as a co-star, or as a supporting player. This may just be a lentil soup weekend. It’s supposed to rain.