A Spicy Resolve of Red Lentil Hummus, And Other Things

Another year has poofed.  The hopes of 2011 have gone up in smoke.  We’ve arrived at a symbolic fresh start.  And I stand at the edge of 2012 emptied handed, with no neatly folded, nicely written resolutions to share.  Each year I simply resolve to live life a little more.  To really feel it.

Last year I baked pie.  Made lace curtains.  Finally conquered madame brioche.  Sent more handwritten notes.  Saw Paul Simon sing “ The Sound of Silence.”  Mastered the charcoal grill. And drank my fair share of dark and stormies.

This year I have a new set of wishes. Listen to more Chet Baker.  Drink rosé on random Tuesdays.  Ease into silence.  Shell more oysters at home.  Conversationally work in the word “honey.”  Not fret about the dangers of homemade mayo.  Remove “should” from my dictionary.  Wear the canary yellow fascinator I bought last year out of the house at least once. Put in a shade garden.  And continue to nurture the traditions I’ve sown.

I’ve been working on these traditions for a few years now.  I reset my wishes in January.  Eat salt water taffy on the Cape in June.  Buy a glass pumpkin every October. And make lentils at the start of every new year.  Like any good Italian should would be well advised to do.  While I don’t participate in resolutioning, I do believe a little luck never hurt a gal.  And this is where the lentils come in.

At the very least, it certainly isn’t terrible to have this creamy lentil hummus around.  It’s a plucky spread with some serious heat and a gracing of roasted garlic.  And its charming orange hue takes very well to some Ethiopian flavors I’ve grown quite found of.  So after a quick whirl, the red lentils are laced with the likes of berbere, a blend of about a dozen warm spices that I found in a little metal tin at the South End Formaggio.  If you can’t track it down, you could tackle making your own.  Or even just add a few of the spices commonly found in berbere; cayenne pepper, paprika, ginger, cardamom, and coriander come to mind.

It’s a lovely little dip to let linger in your fridge.  Will it help with your hopes for 2012?  Probably too soon to tell.  But honey, it’s worth a shot.

Spicy Red Lentil Hummus

Ingredients:

6 cloves roasted garlic (see directly below)

~ 2 cups dried red lentils

6 cloves

2 bay leaves

kosher salt

1.5 tsp berbere spice (see note)

1/2 tbsp chili garlic sauce

Juice of 1/2 lime

2 tbsp tahini

3 tbsp olive oil, plus additional for drizzling

Roasted garlic

You can roast garlic by cutting about 1/4 an inch off the top of a garlic head.  Rub the head with olive oil and cover it completely with foil; bake in a 425 degree oven until the cloves are sweet, slightly browned, and melty (about 45 minutes give or take).  Gently squeeze the cloves out of their skin.  You'll have extra.

Instructions:

In a saucepan, add lentils, cloves, bay leaves, and a pinch of salt and combine with enough water to cover the lentils by 1 inch; cook until the lentils are softened (about 10-15 minutes).  Drain any excess water, remove the cloves and bay leaves, and place the lentils in a food processor along with the remaining ingredients; puree.  Salt to taste and adjust with additional seasoning as needed.  Drizzle with more olive oil (about a teaspoon or so) before serving.

Makes about 2 cups

Notes:

-Berbere is an Ethiopian spice blend that often includes fenugreek, dried chiles, paprika, ginger, cardamom, coriander, nutmeg, cloves, garlic, and allspice.

-This hummus is also fantastic with some crumbled feta on top.

-Oversized homemade croutons proved to be the perfect vehicle for the spread.  Carrots also.  It's spicy, so you'll want something that won't fight with it.

Happy Anniversary, Have Some Beluga Lentils

I surely did not think I’d be discussing lentils at this juncture. But it’s official, this is the one-year anniversary of A Plum By Any Other Name … and I’m about to suggest to cook a seed. I had figured to usher in this event, I’d probably write about something truly impressive. A gorgeous three-tiered cake. Or an effortless plum crostata.

At the very least, I thought I’d have brioche for you, which I finally got up the nerve to make again after a disastrous first attempt that required transport through Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief. I’d like to say the results this time around were glorious, but—while the brioche wasn’t bad and was certainly edible—it wasn’t quite right. So it will likely get reincarnated as pain perdu, which is a step up from being whirled into gazpacho, the fate of attempt #1, but I digress.

The more important message here is that one thing I was certain I wanted for this blog was a list of go-to recipes. Recipes that would be like old friends. Recipes to keep in your back pocket, knowing even if you didn’t see them regularly, they’d be there if you needed them. So while I’ve failed at brioche (again) and have slacked in the celebratory dessert department, I’ve found a lot of great recipes that have enriched my life.

Enter: beurre maître d’hôtel and beluga lentils. Consider it a recipe for the Rolodex. It’s transformative and yet easy going enough for any occasion. It’s heavenly on fish, and carrots, and chicken, and pretty much anything that can take a little butter. Eating food graced with its presence is like getting to spend spring in Paris. In fact, it’s a celebratory dish in its own right, a feat that the French manage to pull off quite regularly.

The recipe itself is from Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. It was originally published in 1960 with David, a British cookery writer who lived in France while studying history and literature, stressing the glory of simple French food. And so I can’t think of a better way to usher in year two than with her—who I hear was a bit of a wild woman—and a simple recipe that plays very well with others. Consider it a new old friend. (And a bit more reliable than brioche.) The brioche will come one day, I’m sure. But for today, lentils are where I am at.

And if there is one thing I’ve learned this past year, it’s that if you can take the heat, stay in the kitchen. You won’t always find the food that you've imagined, but if you keep at it what you'll find is well worth the wait. And so it’s been a wonderful first year, lentils and all. Thank you for coming along.

Beurre Maître D’Hôtel (parsley butter)

4 tbsp butter

1.5 tbsp chopped (very very finely) parsley

A few drops of lemon (the juice can also be used below)

Rinse a bowl out with hot water, add your butter and parsley (which David stresses should be very finely chopped) and work together with a fork, adding a few drops of lemon until well combined.

Lentilles Maître D’Hôtel (lentils with parsley butter)

Adapted from Elizabeth David

1.5-2 cups beluga lentils

Kosher salt

1/2 cup chicken stock (plus additional if cooking the lentils in stock instead of water*)

Juice of half a lemon

2 tbsp chopped parsley

For the lentils, spread them out on a plate or sheet pan and pick out any pebbles or grit you find. Soak the lentils in cold water for about an hour.

Drain them and put them in a pan with about 4-5 cups of water (or stock). Salt your liquid and bring the lentils to a boil and then simmer until the lentils are tender but not mushy, adding more liquid if needed. This took about 30 minutes for me, but it will depend on the freshness of your lentils. Once your lentils are cooked, drain any leftover liquid.

Return the lentils back to your pot, add 1/2 cup of stock and simmer the lentils again until the stock is absorbed. (If the lentils are in danger of getting mushy, just drain the excess liquid.) Put about 3/4 of your parsley butter (the remainder destined for something else wonderful) and lemon juice into the lentils and stir until it has just melted and forms a little sauce. Sprinkle with additional parsley. Taste the lentils and add additional salt and/or lemon, if necessary. "Serve at once in a hot dish," per David.

Notes:

-While any lentils could be used here, ideally you'll want a lentil that retains its shape when cooking, like French Puy lentils. Though, if you can find beluga lentils they are stunning and hold up to their regal namesake.

-You could certainly cook the lentils in stock. *Honestly, I can't remember whether I used water or stock, though I have a sneaking suspicion I used a non-committal ratio of half water half stock.

-I admit I've previously sort of scuffed at sorting through lentils. This time, I figured I'd listen to David. And it made me wonder just how many pebbles I've swallowed in my past.

-I had to add a quote from David about the butter here. "We all know how to make parsley butter. But do we always do it really well or know its many uses?" Well, you don't say!

Luck Be A Lentil

My family was one big walking Italian cliché over the holidays. We had 3 pies, 2 trays of cookies, and a bowl of red grapes for dessert ... for 12 people. We discussed making homemade ricotta for ravioli, as we sopped up leftover red sauce with Italian bread. We debated Aunt Marion’s meatball recipe: parsley or no parsley? We drank Chianti.

My mother even saved the red and white string I used to wrap gifts because it reminded her of the stuff they used to package old fashioned baked goods—which she'd walk to fetch for her grandmother—at Harrison Bakery, in Syracuse. (Which, truthfully, I bought because it reminded me of the string used to tie up boxes of cannoli at Modern Pastry in the North End—Boston’s version of Little Italy.) In short, we all but broke out singing "Dominick the Donkey."

But it really hit home just how Italian my family was when I broached the tradition of making lentils on December 31st each year. Italians believe that eating lentils on New Year’s Eve provides luck for the year ahead. Since lentils are shaped like little coins and are often green in color, it’s said that they signify good fortune: a legume-backed insurance policy of sorts. And so growing up, my mother would make us lentil soup at the start of every year.

This year at the Christmas table, my grandmother piped in to say she still made lentil soup, as did my aunt, and my mom’s cousin: a tradition that my great grandmother brought over from Italy, 98 years ago.

I learned that long before I was born, it was also tradition for my grandmother to (try) to avoid the lentil soup if there was garlic in it (she doesn’t like it). My great grandmother would then enact her deny, deny, deny garlic-in-the-soup policy until someone inevitably found a large chunk. (I imagine she must have felt like her hands were tied, being handed a garlic restriction: why bother to cook at all?) She’d shrug, wrinkle her nose, and act confused as to how—precisely—the garlic got there. But she knew exactly how.

And how can you mess with a stubborn tradition like that? Though, in the interest of full disclosure, staying in on New Year’s Eve to make lentil soup—instead of drinking champagne and wearing an obnoxious amount of sequins—sounded downright depressing this year. So for good measure, I made sure to get my lucky lentils in on the eve of New Year’s Eve at Addis Red Sea, an Ethiopian restaurant in Boston’s South End. You just can’t take any chances when it comes to an entire year of prosperity. And the lentils they served were all I had hoped for: spicy and a refreshing change of pace, just what I wish 2011 to be.

But being a bit of a traditionalist—and a bit superstitious—I made sure to whip up a pot of lentil soup this week. Just in case. It couldn’t hurt to have a little added insurance; a little extra lentil currency to ensure good fortune and most definitely, unabashedly, some garlic in the coming year.

Italian Lentil Stew

1/4 cup olive oil

1 large yellow onion, diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp fresh thyme, minced (divided)

1 bunch carrots, diced (about 2 cups)

8 cups chicken stock, homemade if possible

2 cups lentils, preferably Puy

2 tsp fresh rosemary, minced

1/2 tsp allspice

1/2 tsp red pepper flakes

2 cups canned diced tomatoes, with slightly more tomato juice and less diced tomato

Kosher salt and pepper to taste, season throughout soup

Heat a large saucepan or dutch oven on medium heat and add olive oil. Add onions and cook until translucent, about 5-7 minutes, adding a pinch of salt as the onions cook. Add garlic and half your thyme and cook 2-3 minutes more. Add diced carrots and stir until combined. Add another sprinkle of salt and bit of pepper and cook carrots until they begin to soften, about 5 minutes more. Add stock, lentils, rosemary, allspice and red pepper flakes and cook for about 15-20 minutes. Add tomatoes/tomato juice and rest of thyme. Let cook for 10-15 minutes more and taste to adjust for seasoning. Continue to cook until lentils are soft but still retain their shape, about 10-25 minutes more.

Makes 9 cups

Notes:

-The cooking time of the lentils will depend on the type of lentil you use and how old the lentil is. Adding an acid will also increase the time it takes to cook the lentils. So if you are in a hurry it may be best to forgo the tomatoes, as much as it pains me to say so.

-I am a sucker for Puy lentils. Technically, they are French. And I love them. They hold their shape wonderfully and have an almost nutty flavor. They are also charmingly dark green with little blue specks and were originally grown in the volcanic soil of Le Puy, France.

-This is definitely a recipe where you can take some major creative license. Don't dig the pine of rosemary? Use oregano. Or sage. Or whatever else you'd like. Though, it definitely helps to salt as you go with a recipe like this, adding it only at the end may make it taste more salty and not necessarily more flavorful.

-This makes a thicker, hearty soup/stew. You can always add more broth if you'd like to thin it out.

-Adding parmesan cheese will only help your cause.