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Winter Creamy Lentil Stew: variations on a theme

 

Lentils are super food. Whole. Nutritious. Loaded with nutrients. Great for those with restricted (diabetic or heart disease) diets. Great legume to keep your blood sugar down. Filling. Inexpensive. Flexible--goes with what you have on hand in the refrigerator. Accepts herbs and spices from many of the world's great culinary traditions: Latin American cumin and oregano, Indian curry spices, and French-inspired dishes with herbes d'Provence.

Here, I use a single bag of brown lentils, although them come in grey, yellow, orange, green, and black. You can use what you have on hand.

Start by washing and picking through them, as nothing ruins a delicious plate of lentils more than a stone in your mouth.

Place the wet lentils in a stock pot or heavy bottomed soup pot with a chopped onion and some chopped garlic. Use what you are comfortable with. Use a bit of olive oil just to glaze the bottom of the pan--getting the onions to a soft brown.

You can now add slices of carrot, chopped celery, and/or potatoes. Use what you have.

I like to add some chopped butternut squash because it creams nicely when it cooks down.

Adding six cups of water at this time will give you a rather insipid or tin-like flavor, so I always use a 50-50 mix of cold water to homemade vegetable stock.

Cook until the lentils are soft and creamy for a nice vegetarian dish.

If you want to go whole hog--totus porcus--then add your pre-cooked beef chunks and a hand full of chopped mushrooms. This adds a hardy taste to the lentils.

I tend to go with a spicy version by adding some of the following mixtures--both early in the cooking (before I add the water and stock) and at the end of the cooking, to top it off and refresh the taste that was lost in the cooking process.

Options:

--Long Trail Ale, cumin, Mexican oregano, and crushed coriander. This makes more of a classic chili-style dish.

--Smoked paprika (not the regular type, but the Spanish Pimenton, or smoked type, with its pronounced smoky flavor) and chorizo. In this case, I do not add the winter squash.

--Madras curry powder up front, and finish it with coconut milk. Serve the lentil stew over brown rice for a complete meal.