Cheap food|Onion and anchovy tart

Last night’s dinner

This is one of my all-time favorite things to make.  It’s also one the husband’s all-time favorite things to eat.  When you add in the fact that this tart really isn’t that expensive (and if it’s done in steps, it’s not too fussy either), there’s a win-win…win, I guess.

You’re going to have to make puff pastry to make this tart.  Please don’t be afraid.  It’s not that hard.  The recipe included here isn’t even “real” puff pastry.  The main thing to remember is that all pastry likes to be cold.  The goal is to make lots of really thin layers of flour and butter by rolling the pastry out and then folding it on itself, and then rolling it out again.  The reason the fat (butter) needs to be cold is so it will keep together as a layer of fat, rather than just mixing into the flour (which is what it will do when it’s soft).  When you think about it, it makes perfect sense – if you have cold butter, it’s a mailable solid that you can flatten.  If you have warm butter, then it’s time for lobster and artichokes or maybe some nice toast.

Anchovies are not everyone’s thing.  We love them.  If you don’t, that’s ok.  Make this anyway.  Skip the anchovies (it’ll be cheaper).  Or just use a couple.  It doesn’t matter.  The main reason to eat this tart is the onions and the pastry.

To encourage the pastry-timid, here are some photos of the tart.

Side note: If someone would please write a nice letter to Santa and put in a good word about me and mention that I need a decent SLR camera, that would be really grand.

tart before baking

lone last piece*

And now, the recipes…

Fakeout Puff Pastry

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) plus 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, frozen
5 to 6 tablespoons ice water

Sift together flour and salt into a chilled large metal bowl (or a plastic one if you don’t have a metal one – it’s not that big of a deal). Set a grater in flour mixture and coarsely grate frozen butter into flour, gently lifting flour and tossing to coat butter (grate all the butter into the bowl, then toss it together).

Drizzle 5 tablespoons ice water evenly over flour mixture and gently stir with a fork until it’s mixed in.

Test the dough by gently squeezing a small handful – it should hold together without crumbling apart. If necessary, add another tablespoon water, stirring until just incorporated and testing again. (If you overwork mixture or add too much water, pastry will be tough.)

Put the dough on a cutting board (or your counter if it’s smooth and clean) and smoosh and pat it together to form a 5-inch square (roughly, no rulers!), then pull some plastic wrap around it tightly (to help it hold together) and chill, about 30 minutes. The dough will be lumpy and streaky and won’t really hold together all that well.

Roll out dough on a floured surface with a floured rolling pin into a 15- by- 8-inch rectangle (roughly).  This is not going to look pretty and it’s totally ok to need to push some of the little lumpy bits back into the pastry.  I have a pastry scraper and during the first two rollouts, I use it a lot to sweep everything that tries to escape and push it into the side of the dough.  You can also use a scraper (or heck, you could use a ruler I suppose, so maybe nix the no ruler rule) to help shore everything up and make it into a pretty rectangle because, let’s face it, those years in therapy didn’t help you get over your ridiculous need to be perfect. Arrange dough with a short side nearest you, then fold dough into thirds like a letter: bottom third up and top third down over dough. Rewrap dough and chill until firm, about 30 minutes.  It’s still going to be pretty lumpy and streaky.

Arrange dough with a short side nearest you on a floured surface and repeat rolling out, folding, and chilling 2 more times. You need to let the dough chill at least 30 minutes each time!  If you don’t, you will end up with a lot of roux, which is good stuff, but much better for white sauce.  Brush off any excess flour, then wrap dough in plastic wrap and chill at least 1 hour.  Now the dough should be fairly smooth and uniform, not lumpy and streaky.

At this point you can either use the pastry within three days (if you don’t, you will have gray pastry, which is probably still delicious but looks disgusting) or you can store in the freezer, probably indefinitely, as long as you put it in a freezer bag.  If you do decide to freeze it, take it out of the freezer about an hour before you want to make whatever and let it start thawing.  When it gets soft enough to unfold the flaps (it will still be quite frozen and you’ll need to wedge something like a dinner knife between the flaps to get them apart), do that and let it get get more thawed out (this will speed thawing).  Once it’s soft enough to roll (but still very very cold), fold it back up and roll it out once more, to the thickness you want (usually about 1/4 inch).  No matter what you do, DO NOT LET IT GET TO BE ROOM TEMPERATURE OR YOU WILL CRY WHEN IT’S BAKED AND THERE’S NO CRYING IN BAKING!

Onion and Anchovy Tart So Good The Husband Ate Three Pieces

This is also more or less, Julia Child’s recipe from “The Way To Cook,” page 393**

Are you ready for this?

4 cups of thinly sliced onions
3 Tablespoons of oil (or use butter if you really feel like you need some more)
A bit of salt
A bit of white wine for deglazing
Gruyere (fancy pants, expensive but very yummy Swiss cheese) or Parmesan cheese – about 4 Tablespoons
A tin of anchovies

Cook the onions in the oil in a large frying pan with a lid over med-high heat until soft and sweet, about 25 minutes.  Stir them a every couple of minutes at first, then cover them almost all the way (leave a little gap for some of the steam to come out) and let them really cook.  When you have dark brown stuff on the bottom of the pan, you know you’re doing it right.  Every few minutes, scrape all that stuff into the onions.  Right before you’ve finished cooking them, pour some white wine (maybe a quarter cup) and use that to get up all the good brown stuff.  You’ll know the onions are done when they are caramel colored and kind of taste like candy (for onions – it’s not going to taste like an actual caramel).

Crap!  I forgot the salt.  I always do that.  Sprinkle the onions with salt at the beginning.

Let the onions cool before using in the tart (or you’ll melt the pastry and remember what we said about crying?).

To put the whole thing together:

Roll out the pastry to make a disk about 8 or 9 inches across (I take a dinner plate and turn it upside down on the pastry and then cut around with a small sharp knife).  At this point, it’s a good idea to put the disk back into the freezer for a few minutes, just to get the butter hard again.  Grate enough cheese to cover the disk (about 3 or 4 tablespoons – I just use a hand grater and do it until it’s covered), leaving maybe 1/4 inch around the edge (it doesn’t need to be perfect, so don’t fuss about it – you’ll see why you do this in a minute).  Cover the cheese with the onions.  Decoratively arrange the anchovies on top (spell out your sweet thang’s name if you want) – we are crazy for anchovies, so I use more or less a whole tin.  Use however many you want, or ditch them and don’t, or use something else.  The anchovies aren’t the point (unless you’re us).  Use a fork to crimp the edges up (see the photo above).  Basically, you sort of push the edge up and then smash the “bend” down with a fork to make the edge stay up.  Photo explains it.

Bake this thing at 425 for about 30 minutes in the middle of the oven.  If you have a pizza stone, bake directly on that.  If not, put the tart on a cookie sheet (heavy duty if you have one, if not, don’t worry about it).  Be careful and check on it – you don’t want to burn the onions.  Also, the last time I made this, it puffed up a lot in the middle, but it goes down once you take it out and it cools a bit.  If it doesn’t, just stab it – it’ll be fine.

Let cool to room temperature and cut it up!  We like to eat this with a green salad and a lot of red wine.

That’s it – it’s really not hard at all.  If you make the pastry disks in advance and freeze those (instead of the “letter” of pastry), you can have this thing done in no time and you can do it on auto-pilot while you’re doing other things, like enjoying the company of your favorite person in the world or listening to Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.  Or both at the same time.

Cheers.

*I managed to get this shot off just moments before the piece of tart was devoured.
**When you get all brave and comfy with pastry, you can try Julia’s recipe for the real deal, puff pastry.  It’s also not that hard, but a bit more finicky and time consuming.  But when you do make it, you’ll bake it and you will not believe that you made anything that can do what it does or taste like it does.  It’s extremely cool.

The end of underrated blogs?

A fine chap named Chuck Westbrook has suggested an idea for increasing readership of under-read blogs that’s so genius, it kind of looks like a pyramid scheme…

Before you run in fear, check it and join in the fun.  Every two weeks, a new blog.  Broaden your horizons.  Do a good blog deed.

Cheers.

Gnocchi update

A few days ago, I made one of my kitchen arch-nemeses, gnocchi, with much success and froze a batch.  Making good on my promise to report back on the should-be-simple-and-cheat-yet-surprisingly-difficult-and-infuriating lumps of potato and flour, I’m happy to say we ate the frozen gnocchi last night and the “cooking first then freezing” technique worked extremely well!  If you use this technique for storing gnocchi, be sure to drain them well (which can be tricky since they want to all stick together once they dry out) and spread them on a cookie sheet without letting them touch each other and freeze completely before transferring into a freezer bag or other container.  When you’re ready to eat them, just heat some oil in a non-stick frying pan, and fry ‘em up.  They’ll cook pretty quickly, so have your saucy-sauce ready to go.  It’s like having your own frozen food, only better!

Cheers.

It’s too hot to bake

That’s right.  I said it.  It’s too hot to bake.  It’s almost the end of October and the high today is 97.  That’s 3 short of 100.  In October.

I think there is a place on earth where it’s snowing right now, but I don’t know where that is.  If you live there, would you send me some snow?

If I were going to bake, I’d bake a fantastic onion and anchovy tart with puff pastry.  If you make one, let me know.

Cheers.

No bad news (and no baking today)

Listening on Sunday to the radio I heard a spiritual that I’d guess is called “No Bad News” (that’s the chorus).  One of the lines the soloist sang, with such heart it made the blood rush to my face and the hairs on my neck stand at attention, is still with me three days later -  “if you look at every day as a gift you can’t refuse….”  I’m not big on religion but I’m a big fan of spirituals.  That line was exactly what I needed to hear.  Things are tough now.  There’s a lot happening that can make a person feel pretty crappy even if there is relative wealth, health, a good loving relationship, enough to eat and a roof.  Hearing a choir singing on the top of their lungs that every day is a gift that can’t be refused, no matter what happens, – that helps.

Cheap food|Recipe part 2!

A few days ago, in an effort to share the little I know about cooking cheap (I’m still learning here), I posted a recipe for Easy Lentil Dal made with pink (or red) lentils.  Ever the experimenter (remember, we’re cheap around here), I tried the same recipe this morning with brown lentils (I had a half cup that’s been sitting around forever) and I am surprised to report that I like them even more than the red lentils.  They are meatier (sorry vegan* friends) and a little less like…ok, this is a bit gross, but a lot of Indian cuisine reminds me of (extremely delicious) baby food.  The brown lentils definitely lessen that quality.  And best of all – they’re cheaper.  Go brown!

The only thing that’s different between using the brown lentils and the red is the cooking time, which should be increased to about 40 minutes total.  I definitely recommend the mashing with a spoon bit from the other recipe with the brown lentils.  Makes much more of a difference.  In fact, if you like it thicker, add another 1/2 cup of lentils to the mashing bowl than the recipe calls for.

Onward.

Trying to keep this short (right) – I’ve had two major cooking disappointments since moving to the glorious sprawl that is LA Metropolitan.  One was a fresh pasta that I labored over for hours.  Long story short, I slid all the pieces into the cooking water and they all stuck.  The only thing that’s caused me to actually throw food, aside from this pasta, is gnocchi.  In restaurants, I love it.  At home, it drives me batty.  It’s just potatoes and flour, how hard could that be?  Plus, it’s just potatoes and flour, which means it’s FREAKING CHEAP.  The last time I tried to make it, I used Julia Child’s recipe, absolutely certain that it would turn out.  Julia had never failed me.  Never say never.  To call the little lumps of hell that took me hours to roll out “mush when cooked” is an understatement.  So when we had some potatoes in the kitchen that were about to go off and I said “oh I’ll make gnocchi!’ the husband and I looked at each other like “really?”

Happy to say, I found a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated online yesterday afternoon and ended up with this:

The photos a bit crap, but you can see little gnocchis in there, covered in pesto and cheese.  Amazing!

I swear I’m not a secret blogger for Cook’s Illustrated (although I’m looking for a job, so if someone wants to hook me up with that gig, I’m there) – I just can’t seem to screw up one of their recipes.  This one was so simple and I have no idea why it worked while the others didn’t (one of the downsides of the online Cook’s is no 1,000 words on the trial and error used to get to the technique).

Last note – I fried these.  That’s how I like my gnocchi.  I think they would have been a bit gooey if I hadn’t, but that could be due to having used a lot of flour.  My recommend for this recipe is to do what it says and test the gnocchi in a small pan to make sure you’ve got the flour/potato ratio right.  I think the less flour, the better.

(No More Tears**) Gnocchi from Cook’s Illustrated online

To insure that gnocchi are the right texture, bring a small saucepan of water to simmer while mixing the dough. Roll a small piece of the dough into the rope shape. Cut off a small piece or two from the rope, shape them into gnocchi, then drop them into the simmering water. If the gnocchi are too mushy, put the dough rope back into the potato mixture and add in another tablespoon or two of flour. It’s better to take the time to test one or two gnocchi than to ruin the whole batch. Also, be careful not to overwork or overknead the dough; you simply want to incorporate the flour into the potatoes. Avoid cooking the gnocchi at a rolling boil since violently churning water makes it difficult to determine when the gnocchi are floating. Even gently boiling gnocchi may bob temporarily to the surface, but don’t lift them out until they float.

INGREDIENTS

2 pounds russet potatoes (or other baking potatoes), washed
1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour , plus more as needed
1 teaspoon table salt , plus more for cooking liquid

INSTRUCTIONS

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Bake potatoes until a metal skewer slides easily through them, 45 minutes to 1
hour, depending on size.

Hold potato with a pot holder or kitchen towel and peel it with a vegetable peeler or paring knife; rice peeled potato into a large bowl. Peel and rice remaining potatoes. Cool until potatoes are no longer hot, about 15 minutes.

Sprinkle 1 1/4 cups flour and 1 teaspoon salt over warm potatoes. Using your hands, work mixture into a soft, smooth dough. If dough is sticky (which is often the case), add more flour as needed, up to 1 1/2 cups total.

Roll about one-quarter of dough into a long 3/4-inch-thick rope. If rope won’t hold together, return it to bowl with remaining dough and work in more flour as needed. Repeat until all dough is rolled.

Cut rope of dough into 3/4-inch lengths. Holding butter paddle or fork in one hand, press each piece of cut
dough against ridged surface with index finger to make an indentation in center. Roll dough down and off ridges and allow it to drop to work surface (or don’t). (Gnocchi can be placed in a single layer on a baking sheet and refrigerated for several hours. Or, baking sheet can be placed in freezer for about 1 hour. Partially frozen gnocchi can be transferred to plastic bag or container, sealed, and frozen for up to 1 month.)***

Bring 4 quarts of water to low boil in large pot. Add 2 teaspoons salt or to taste. Add about one-third of the gnocchi and cook until they float, 1 1/2 to 2 minutes (about 3 minutes for frozen gnocchi). Retrieve gnocchi with slotted spoon and transfer to warm, shallow serving bowl or platter. Repeat cooking process with remaining gnocchi. Gently toss gnocchi with sauce (pesto, butter and sage, tomato, etc.) and serve immediately.

Cheers.

*And vegitarian friends too – it’s just more fun to say “vegans.”
**From me anyway.
***I actually skipped the refrigeration step, but I won’t in the future.  For freezing, I cooked half of my gnocchi in the boiling water, drained, and put them on a cookie sheet in the freezer.  When they were frozen, I put them in a zip lock (freezing this way prevents them from freezing into one big clump).  I’ve done it this way before and should be able to take them right out of the freezer and fry them up.  I’ll report back.

Oatmeal Snack Cake|Recipe

Yay for Oatmeal Snack Cake!

I’m very excited for two reasons – one, because after the husband pleading with me for ages to make him an Oatmeal Snack Cake from the May/June issue of Cook’s Illustrated (yeah, that’s right, I’m on it), I finally did and it is fantisimo!  Really good.  And it’s also cheap like us!  As long as you don’t mind eating a lot of Oatmeal Snack Cake to use all the ingredients (trust me, you won’t.  This is a damn fine piece of cake).  The second reason I’m over the moon is because, being lazy, I didn’t feel like typing the recipe, so I found it online at the fabulous Bitten Word (It’s actually The Bitten Word, but that didn’t make sense).  These guys subscribe to all the food p–n (do I really need to do that??) the husband and I used to get before we realized how cheap (and kinda lazy) we are and canceled the subscriptions.  The guys generously make recipes from the mags and share both their thoughts and the recipes.  That is cool.

So, with only minimal amounts of further blathering, here it is:

Oatmeal Snack Cake from Cook’s Illustrated (May/June 2008) via The Bitten Word (modified even more by me)

For the Cake
1 cup (3 ounces) quick cooking oats
3/4 cup water, room temperature
3/4 cup (3.75 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1/4 cup (3.5 ounces) granulated sugar
1/2 cup (3.5 ounces)* light brown sugar
1 large egg, room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the Broiled Icing
1/4 cup (1.75 ounces) packed light brown sugar
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
3 tablespoons milk
3/4 cup sweetened, shredded coconut
1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional**)

Preheat oven 350 degrees, with rack in the middle position.  Spray an 8×8 inch baking sheet (I used a small rectangular pan and it worked just fine) with nonstick cooking spray and line the pan with two pieces of foil, each of which has been folded in half lengthwise.   The bottom of the pan should be covered with overlapping pieces and the foil should hang over two opposing sides of the pan***.  Spray the foil with cooking spray.

Combine the oats with the water in a small bowl until the water is absorbed.  In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon.  In a third bowl (if using a standing mixer, use your mixer bowl), combine the granulated sugar, brown sugar, and butter and beat until combined, about 4 minutes.  Add vanilla and sugar and mix until combined, about 2 minutes.  Add the flour mixture and beat the ingredients together briefly, just about a minute.  Finally, add the oats and mix until the ingredients are combined, another 15-30 seconds. If using a stand mixer, fold a few times with a rubber spatula to make sure everything is combined.

Pour this batter into the foil lined pan.  Using a spatula, smooth the batter until it is even across.  Tap the pan bottom on the counter a few times to make sure the bubbles are out.  Bake 30 to 35 minutes.  The cake can be tested by inserting a toothpick into the center.  If the toothpick comes out clean, it’s ready to come out of the oven.

While letting the cake cool, turn on the broiler of your oven and move the oven rack down so that 8-10 inches are between the element and the rack (my broiler is not very adjustable and was closer to the cake – worked fine, just keep an eye on it!).  Whisk together the icing ingredients in a bowl.  Once the cake has cooled slightly, pour the mixture onto the cake (I found that it takes a bit of work to get the icing spread all over the cake).  Broil the cake for up to 5 minutes, until the top is golden.

Let the cake cool completely.  Once the cake has cooled, using the foil overhanging the pan to remove the cake and place it on a serving platter.  Using a knife or wooden spoon, push the cake off of each piece of foil.  Cut and serve!

Cheers.

*I know I won’t shut up about the scale, but one of the reasons it’s so amazing and awesome is that you can just measure brown sugar and don’t have to try to pack it into your tiny 1/4 cup measurer with a freaking spoon.  I hate when I don’t know if I have enough brown sugar for something, and pack it all in there only to find out that I don’t.  Lame.
** Optional????
***I used one piece of foil and it worked just fine, but then, the cake didn’t last long enough for us to be concerned about getting it on to a serving plate.  The main thing is to have the foil hanging over edge of the pan so that it can be lifted out of the pan.

Butter converter|Helpful stuff!

For those of you with a scale (or a specific weight of butter, which is a little odd without a scale, but I’m not judging), here’s a helpful butter converter for…converting your butter?  From volume to weight.  From Traditional Oven.  Check it.

Cheers.

Crap! I missed World Bread Day!

How did I manage to do that?  Apparently, yesterday was the third annual day to celebrate bread around the world via blogs, and I MISSED IT.  And yes I meant to use all caps and yes I know I’m not supposed to.

Well, water and bygones and split milk and all.  Nonetheless, I have a lovely loaf that I made and am posting in honor of World Bread Day 2008, which was organized by the amazing Zorra.   This post was originally titled “True (bread) confessions.”  I think it fits nicely in the spirit of World Bread Day, showing the good and the bad of baking your own loaf.  The recipe used here is “Cook’s Illustrated Almost No-Knead Bread.”

Happy one-day-after-the-fact World Bread Day to you!

True (bread) confessions…

I could write about bread indefinitely.  I love bread.  I love the way it feels, I love the way it smells…sorry – vague (and fairly naughty) Bill Hicks reference.  Bread is my food.  And lately, thanks to my (last-one-to-the-party) discovery of no-knead bread, I’ve been shamelessly bragging on my bread attempts but I have to be honest…while the bread has been turning out like this

It’s only the top the top of the bread.  The bottom of the bread is an entirely different story.

The bottom is…it’s just ugly.  There’s too much flour and the parchment paper sticks to the bottom.  This photo is even a bit of a cheat – I’ve scraped off almost all of the flour and most of the paper.

No-knead dough is very wet (which is what I think makes for the big lacy holes in the crumb that are so yummy – wait, how can nothing be yummy?) – that’s the reason that so much flour is required to keep it from sticking to the paper.  Any ideas how to keep any of it from sticking without adding flour?  Any genius ideas on something I can use here instead of flour altogether?

Cheers.

Cheap food|Recipe (warning – there is no mention of baking in this post)

It’s morning (it was when I wrote this) and I’m still in that time where I can somehow justify just messing around instead of getting anything productive done.  Scrolling through the ever-growing list of blogs I’m following (what HAPPENED to me??), I came across this idea on Awaken Your Superhero:

[In the midst of all the panic about the economy]…Maybe you make Enterprise PR Software or underwrite private student loans, but that shouldn’t stop you at all from offering a money-saving recipe that your grandmother taught you [on your corporate blog].

And I thought “I don’t make Enterprise PR Software (don’t know what that is), I don’t underwrite anything, and my grandmother never taught me any money-saving recipes, what can I do?”  And then I thought, “I have a baking blog and maybe one or two of the six people reading would like a money-saving recipe that we make at home!”  A while back (well before the economy went into the toilet), we switched up the way we eat, mainly due to the fact that we are a. extremely cheap and b. extremely cheap.  One way we’ve “economized” is to…oh, it pains me to say this because I can just see my mother jumping up and down in a fit of being right…stop eating meat.  Not entirely, but not nearly as much as we used to.  It’s just too expensive.  What is not expensive is lentils.  Not even the fancy expensive kind is (are??) expensive.  About $4 for a big bag of red lentils that will last at least four or five meals for one or two people.  And they are really nutritionally sound*.  And…here’s the most important part…they’re really really easy and good.  If they weren’t, we wouldn’t bother eating them.  We’re cheap, but still not cheap enough to eat stuff that tastes like crap.

Easy Lentil Dal

1 cup red (or pink) lentils
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric (Aw merde!  I just did a spell check and I’ve been mispronouncing “turmeric” my entire adult life.)
1 teaspoon salt
4 cups water
2 tablespoons canola oil
2 dried red chilies
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Rinse the lentils and pick out any weird stuff (like rocks).  Drain them really well and put them in a med-small sauce pan.  Add turmeric and salt and water.  Bring to a boil, skim off the foamy part (although I don’t know why you need to do that – if you skip the skimming and nothing bad happens, let me know).  Lower the heat to a simmer and cook for about 15 minutes, covered.

This is where the recipe gets all crazy and threatens to be complicated.  My expert sources say you should take a half cup of the lentils and mash them with a spoon.  I think you should just take a big ol’ whisk and stir.  The lentils will break up just fine if you’re using the red ones.

Simmer uncovered for another few minutes and let it get thicker.  Meanwhile, heat the oil and cumin in a small frying pan.  After about two minutes (seeds are toasty but not burned!), add the chilies and cook for another 30 seconds.  Take the pan off heat, maybe add a little more oil to cool it down (just a little), add the cayenne pepper and stir.  Add this to the lentils**.  Add the lemon juice and gently stir.

Last note – this stuff will thicken up as it sits around, and I think it gets better as it does.  It’s pretty thin when you first take it off the stove.  If you want to make it to eat now and like it thicker, try taking away one cup of water and let me know what happens.

Cheap yummy eats.  And yes mom, no meat.  It’s even vegan.  Dig it.

Cheers.

*There’s like 30% of your daily fiber and protein in one serving of lentils.  You have to look that up yourself.  I’m done.

**The original recipe also calls for adding half the oil and cooking more, and then half the oil on the top as you serve.  Too complicated for me, but as you like!