Moudjendra (lentils and rice)

[steorra]

As I mentioned in my first post in this community, one of my major struggles with cooking is coordinating cooking and shopping. This is a recipe I find useful because all its ingredients don't go bad quickly, and therefore are easy to keep in stock, so I can make it even if I haven't planned ahead of time and gone shopping. Other things I find useful about it:
-It's vegan, and so is useful for the times when I need vegan recipes.
-It makes a large pot of food, so there are lots of leftovers which serve well as reheatable meals.
-It freezes tolerably well in single-serving-sized containers.
-Combined with vegetables on the side, it makes a complete meal.

It does have disadvantages; here are some obvious ones. It takes quite a while from start to finish. (It looks like it ought to take about an hour, but it usually takes me at least an hour and a half, and I prefer to budget two hours.) It requires considerable standing at the stove and stirring the frying onions and garlic.

I don't know if it will be appropriate to anyone else's needs, but here it is:

Moudjendra
(Lentils and Rice from Cyprus; adapted from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian)

Ingredients:
2 c. dry brown/green lentils
1 c. long-grain white rice
1 1/2 t. salt
7 c. water

7 T. olive oil
1 medium to large onion
1/4 c. lemon juice
3 cloves garlic

Instructions:
Combine lentils and water in a large pot. Bring to a boil. Turn heat down and simmer for 25 minutes. Add rice and salt and stir them in. Bring to a boil again. Turn heat back down and simmer for 25 minutes more. Mix lemon juice in.

While the lentils and rice are cooking[*], cut the onion in half lengthwise and then slice it into thin slices. Slice garlic cloves thinly. Heat olive oil in a frying pan and add onions and garlic to hot oil. Stir and fry until onion is medium brown.

Pour onion mixture over lentils-and-rice mixture and stir it all together. Ready to eat!

[*] I still haven't figured out exactly when in the cooking process it works best to start on the onions and garlic. If I start chopping them as soon as I put the lentils on to cook, they're done well before the lentil-rice mixture is ready. If I start chopping them after I add the rice to the lentils, the lentils and rice are done considerably before the onions are sufficiently fried. The latter is preferable to the former, but it would be nice to get them done at almost the same time. The details of timing will of course depend on how fast you chop things.

Comments

[vilakins]

I really like the sound of that and I have all the ingredients on hand too. Thank you!

[steorra]

You're welcome!

[kake]

I love this stuff!

I don't know if this is a useful suggestion for you, but it strikes me that the onions-and-garlic could perhaps be done in bulk and then frozen. I haven't tried this with shallow-frying, or with garlic included, but one thing I try to keep on hand in the freezer is a big tub of deep-fried sliced onions — they don't stick together, and you can just throw them into things from frozen.

The reason for deep-frying rather than shallow-frying is that it's really quick and you don't have to stand there stirring, but if you had patience and a big enough frying pan you could do it with shallow-frying. I think if you wanted to do garlic with the deep-frying method it might work better to do it separately from the onions, and not slice it too thinly.

[steorra]

Hmm...
Can you deep-fry in olive oil?

A fair bit of olive oil goes into the recipe along with the fried onions and garlic; I'm not sure how important it is to the outcome of the recipe, but if it is important, I guess if I were to pre-deep-fry the onions and garlic I'd need to make sure some oil got in the pot of lentils along with them.

[kake]

Olive oil isn't the best choice for deep-frying, since it smokes at a relatively low temperature. I use groundnut oil for deep-frying.

However, olive oil also loses a lot of its flavour when you heat it (you can test this for yourself by heating a small amount to frying temperature, letting it cool, and comparing the taste to an unheated sample). So if you want olive oil flavour in a dish the best way is to add a little of it at the very end.

[steorra]

Groundnuts are the same as peanuts, right? (And therefore not an option for me.)
I think canola oil is also often used for deep-frying?

[kake]

Ah, yes, sorry — I forgot you can't eat nuts.

I've not used canola oil for deep-frying, but I have used sunflower oil, and that worked fine.

[pebblerocker]

Those ingredients are just about guaranteed to be around when needed (except the lemon juice, my lemons usually go mouldy quickly) and it's nice and easy to make. When I make rice and lentils I use brown rice, for a better texture, which means the rice cooks in about the same amount of time as the lentils and they can go into the pot together at the start.

[steorra]

I use lemon juice from a bottle, rather than from fresh lemons; the bottled stuff lasts a long time.

This recipe has quite a different texture from a lot of rice and lentils recipes that I've seen - I think because you put in twice as much lentils as rice, so it's really lentils with rice, not rice with lentils. It has a kind of mushy texture. I've made it with brown rice before and added the rice at the same time as the lentils, and it works fairly well, but the brown rice seems to absorb less of the water, so it ends up soupier; if I made it with brown rice more I'd probably figure out how much to reduce the amount of water when using brown rice.

[kyrielle]

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this myself yet (but am planning to).

But would the trick for caramelized onions in the crockpot (using butter or olive oil, your choice, so perfect fit to this recipe) also work with the garlic?

http://www.brownthumbmama.com/2009/09/crock-pot-carmelized-onions.html give or take....