Lentil Stew

So, I had this jar of dried little French lentils sitting in the back of my cupboard. Before I moved to Arizona a year and a half ago, it was sitting in the back of my food shelf in Washington. I'm pretty sure it traveled around to at least three different places of residence with me over the years. Anyway, I rarely cook with lentils.

It may be because they do not share the American culinary ubiquity of, say, black beans or pinto beans or chickpeas. Lentil burritos? No. Refried lentils? No. Lentil hummus? No. But I'm actually inclined to believe that my reluctance to use them originates in my childhood.

We had dried lentils in our pantry, too. They were in an old cylindrical plastic food container, opaque with scratches, with a yellowed snap-on lid. A little paper label on the front read, in my mother's handwriting, "LENTILS." I don't know how long they'd been there (probably about as long as my French lentils stayed unused in my own supply).

It was afternoon. I felt adventuresome, and I wanted candy (bear in mind, not that it changes the story, but I was about 5 or 6 years old at the time, and my parents weren't the type to freely give candy to their offspring). Bored with my usual crime of grazing on pinches of flour out of the container, disillusioned by my recent experience trying to eat baking soda (it looked like flour), and probably running dangerously low on tubed decorative icing nabbed from the spice cabinet, I remember distinctly that I decided to broaden my horizons a bit.

"Lentils," I wondered. I didn't know what those were. I evaluated the shape of a lentil. It was notably comparable to the shape of an M&M. But lentils were smaller, and relatively colorless. "Flour has no color," I thought. "Flour tastes good." As it often does, my sense of exploration overcame my trepidations. I took a small handful of lentils, and I ate them.

The texture was unpleasant. Hard, stale, and simultaneously crunchy and chewy, they had no satisfying give when masticated. The lentils tasted like old, musty rags. I remember making a face and thinking something along the lines of, "yuck," as I grabbed a second handful and swallowed those whole. Positively gag-inducing; certainly no better than the first bunch and likely a little worse. I remember tossing back another handful and a few more individual lentils before deciding, with great disappointment, that this venture was better abandoned.

I don't remember what went on for the rest of that afternoon and evening, but I do recall with clarity the feeling of nausea. The continual aftertaste of musty rags. A dull, building headache. Rolling discomfort in my stomach, and the wrenching quease that never brought relief. I tried to bring them back up to no avail. I didn't want to tell my parents because, well, it's embarrassing when you intentionally eat a bunch of dried lentils and then feel shitty. Besides, I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to snack on dried goods out of the pantry.

(Looking back over this experience, it seems apparent that, as a child, I had some sort of eating disorder.)

In any case, lentils have never really enchanted my adult self like other legumes. I got the French lentils during some crazy scheme I had one day to have available in my own personal store, every type of dried legume on which I could get my hands. You know, just in case I needed them for something.

After about four years (read: a few weeks ago) I decided to finally cook up my lentils and serve them in a coconut-squash soup. I was excited, because it sounded good, and it's soup season. This is all really beside the point, because it took about 2 hours for the lentils to mostly cook, and the soup didn't really turn out that well.

I don't like giving up on myself, though. I got more lentils (regular ones, this time) and made a soup in which to put them, using neither squash nor coconut milk. It turned into a stew, but whatever. It's amazing when it's cold out. And cheap, which is good when you're living more in the red than you've ever lived before.


LENTIL STEW

1 cup dried lentils, rinsed and picked and then cooked
cooking oil
3 stalks celery, all chopped up
3 carrots, all chopped up
1 onion, all chopped up
2 lbs potatoes, all chopped up (1/2 inch cubes is great)
5 cloves garlic, all chopped up
1 tbsp oregano
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
2 bay leaves
few leaves kale or spinach or other green, all chopped up

1. Cook the lentils in 2 cups of water until the water is absorbed and the lentils are thoroughly hydrated and not at all crunchy. This can take anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour, depending on how old your lentils are. Stir every so often toward the end, and add some sea salt to taste.

2. While the lentils cook, toss the carrots, celery, and onion in a little cooking oil in the bottom of a stockpot and put it on medium-low heat. I was going for a sweetening-of-the-onions effect, but I didn't consider the fact that the carrots and the celery were hanging out too and they got kinda bored in the pan. That, and I didn't even have a whole onion to work with like I'd planned. Just half. So... that didn't really do anything. Make sure to stir them every so often.

3. While the vegetables are cooking, you can cut up the potatoes. I like red potatoes. You can leave the skin on, and the texture is nice, and they don't fall apart too much.



Look. Look at that relative uniformity.

4. Maybe, by the time you're done chopping, the vegetables will have relaxed rather a lot in their pot. They cooked in there nice and slowly for about 20 minutes. Maybe more. I don't remember, to be honest.



5. Toss the garlic, oregano, thyme, paprika, salt, and red pepper flakes into the cooking vegetables and let that cook another minute or two.



6. Add the potatoes to the pot, and cover with water. I think I added about 6 cups total. Add the bay leaves. Give it a bit of a stir, cover, and turn the heat up to medium-high to bring to a boil.



7. After it's boiling, reduce heat to medium-low again and cover the pot just partially. Let it simmer away until the potatoes are tender, then stir it every few minutes for 10-20 minutes more, so some of the potatoes break up and thicken the stew. Yeah. Then it gets good.



8. Dump in the lentils. Stir it up a final time, and taste for salt. Add if necessary. You can add your green bits at the end. I leave them out altogether and drop them in when I'm heating up individual portions for leftovers. They should really only be hot for 5 minutes or so. Otherwise they go rather limp and become somewhat gray. Not appealing.

Cooked lentils are easier on the stomach than are dried lentils, come to think of it. They're a lot more palatable in general. There's nothing to fear from lentils in a stew, anyway... especially this one, since it's amazing. Slightly spicy, but it's cold out so that's warranted.

That's really all I have. Go forth and consume more expensive things in my stead.