Rice and Lentils

This dish is called mejadra. In my youth, I just knew it as rice and lentils. My family would buy it from the deli at Sahadi's, a Lebanese store that's a serious Brooklyn institution. I've tried to make it before, but I couldn't get the onions to come out right. From Ottolenghi and Tamimi's cookbook Jerusalem, I learned that the trick is to dust them in flour and then fry them in a lot of oil. It really works. Like all of Ottolenghi's recipes, it sounds fine but unexciting and then comes out amazing.

I made this using some leftover rice I had, which came out pleasantly chewy. I've written it up the way I did it. To make it properly, follow the same directions but first cook the lentils for only 15 minutes. Then, replace the leftover rice in the recipe with a half cup of uncooked rice. In the step at the end where everything is combined, drain the partially-cooked lentils, add them and 3/4 cup water to the rice and spices, bring to a boil, and cook over low heat.

This should serve two with some extra. It's adapted from Jerusalem, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi.

• 2/3 cup green or brown lentils
• 2 onions
• 2 tbsp. flour
• 1/2 cup neutral oil
• 1 tsp. whole cumin seeds
• 2 tsp. whole coriander seeds
• leftover rice, or 1/2 cup uncooked rice
• olive oil
• turmeric, allspice, and cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp. sugar

Cook the lentils in plenty of water with salt until done if you're using leftover rice, or for 15 minutes if you're not.

While it cooks, slice the onions thinly and mix them up with your hands with the flour and 1/2 tsp. salt. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, cook the onion with the oil in two batches. Stir and regulate the heat so that the onion turns golden and cooks in five to seven minutes. Put aside with a slotted spoon onto paper towels and sprinkle with more salt.

Wipe your pan clean and toast the coriander and cumin seeds for a few minutes. Add the olive oil, spices, and cooked rice. Fry the rice and try to break up any clusters. Then drain the lentils leaving some water behind, add them to the pan, add the sugar, and cook for a few minutes. Mix in half the onions, and serve topped with the other half and with some yogurt.

Sourdough II: The loaf lives

So, you've cultivated some yeast and now you want to make some sourdough? Well, be careful. Lots of people seem to hate bread called sourdough, so call it naturally leavened bread or something like that. Your bread will be very sour if you let it rise very slowly at a low temperature, but barely sour otherwise, and your deceit will surely go unnoticed. (For example, I have no idea which of my local bakery's breads are sourdough and which aren't. You have to look on the ingredient list and check if yeast is listed to know.)

I've cobbled this bread recipe together from a few sources, including Sandor Ellix Katz, Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking, and a bread seminar I took one weekend in college. (Yes, I took a bread seminar. It was during passover, too.) I use about 75% white bread flour, 20% whole wheat bread flour, and 5% rye. In the recipe, I've just written flour.

This recipe is for two large loaves. After step 2, I take half the dough and put it in the refrigerator. Then I take it out a few days later, let it come to room temperature for a few hours, and bake it.

There are three basic steps. Here's quick summary:

1. Mix up a preferment of starter, flour, and water, and let it sit overnight. This is supposed to give the yeast a chance to multiply and to give a deeper, fermented taste.
2. The next day, combine the preferment with more flour and water and some salt. Knead and let rise.
3. Form a loaf and bake.

Step 1

• 1 cup starter
• 240g (1 1/2 cups) flour
• 40g (scant 3 tbs) water

Mix up the starter, flour, and water. Cover and leave overnight, or however long is convenient. This is your preferment.

Step 2

• 840g (5 1/4 cups) flour
• 445g (scant 2 cups) water
• 1 tbs salt

Mix up the flour and water in a separate bowl. It might be a bit too dry to quite come together. Let this sit for thirty minutes. This supposedly helps break down some of the gluten, which makes it easier for it to reform itself in a grid.

Mix in the preferment and the salt. With your hands, combine everything and start kneading. It will be really sticky at first, but don't give up and don't add any flour. After a few minutes of kneading it should start to feel a lot less wet. Knead it for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, after which the dough should be pretty and smooth. (I might even try to make the dough a little bit wetter next time.) Form a ball, put it down, and cover.

Now you want to let the dough rise. Instead of punching down the dough at any point, which the experts seem to frown upon, do something called turning: pick up the dough, gently stretch it out a little bit, then make a ball by folding the four sides up towards the center. Then flip the dough over and put it back down. After you've done this, the dough will magically seem smoother and more dough-like, more capable of stretching without tearing. I think it's ideal to do this a three or four times as the dough rises, but I'm always away when this is happening, so instead I usually just do it once at the beginning, 15-30 minutes after I stopped kneading and started to let the dough rise. You could also try doing it at the end, thirty minutes before you want to shape the dough.

Dough that has risen.

Step 3

How long you let the dough rise probably depends on the temperature. My best loaf happened when I kneaded in the morning, let the dough rise during the day, and baked it in the evening. So, try something like eight hours of rising, maybe more if your apartment is colder than 68 degrees and less if it's warmer. But you should probably just do whatever is convenient for you, since that's what I did, and it seems to work okay.

When you're done with the rise, cut the ball of dough in half. Put half in the fridge, unless you want to bake a huge amount of bread, and form the other half into a ball. Let this sit for an hour, and while your dough is resting, turn your oven to 450 degrees and put a dutch oven in to heat up for 20 or 30 minutes. When you're ready to bake the bread, take the dutch oven out and sprinkle it with coarse corn meal. Form the loaf into a ball and put it in. Sprinkle flour on top, and slash very shallowly with a knife in whatever pattern you'd like. Bake with the lid on for 35 minutes, and then off for 15-20 minutes. Remove the bread and let cool.

Sourdough I: Starting your starter

If making your own bread isn't enough anymore and you want to make your own yeast, continue reading. I used to make no-knead bread. It's great, but I needed to put something extra in it---rosemary, caraway seeds, walnuts---to give it some flavor. My sourdough doesn't need this.

Sourdough starter with bubbles from yeast.

The first step is to catch some yeast. I followed Sandor Ellix Katz's instructions.

• 2 cups flour (I used a mix of white, whole wheat, and rye)
• 2 cups water

In a jar, mix the flour and water. Stir vigorously, cover with cheesecloth or a cloth napkin or other porous material. Stir at least once a day. After two or three days there should be bubbles produced by the yeast (there will always be bubbles when you stir up the starter, but these are irrelevant). Add 1-2 tbsp. of flour to the starter every day for 3 or 4 days and keep stirring. The starter should get thick, but if it becomes so thick that it's not really liquid any more, add a bit more water.

After these days of feeding, you'll need a bread recipe (coming soon!). When you use the starter, leave a little bit behind and replenish with equal parts water and flour. If you're using the starter a lot (say, every week), you can leave it out and feed it a spoonful of flour every day or so. If you're using it less, put it in the fridge. Let it warm up and feed it a day before you want to use it. In the fridge, you should still feed it once a week or so.

Quinoa and Tofu

Quinoa and tofu sounds like a parody of bad vegetarian food. Let us rescue it from the scourge of blandness by loading it up with all the new summer vegetables and seasoning heavily. Lindsay and I did this together, and out of it we got a terrific dinner, a few lunch portions, and the pleasure of using up some of our CSA vegetables (I'm talking about you, aging chard).

I used some dry, marinated tofu from our friendly local tofu factory. I marinated it some more anyway, so it seems reasonable to start with a typical block of tofu, press out as much liquid as possible, and then marinate that. It would be nice to serve this dish cold, but I didn't plan ahead, so I put it in a bowl in a bigger bowl of ice water to cool it down to room temperature quickly.

Pretty red and yellow tomatoes, no?

• 1 cup (dry) quinoa
• 3 blocks of dry tofu from Northwest Tofu, or most or all of a normal packet of tofu, in rough cubes
• 2 large tomatoes, cut roughly into cubes
• 1/2 cucumber, cut into cubes
• 1 large spring onion (or normal onion), with green part (or with some scallions), chopped
• 5 chard leaves, stems separated, coursely chopped
• 1/2 lemon
• 1 tbs. peanut oil
• salt, pepper
• marinade for tofu (see below)

For the marinade, you don't need to be at all precise, and I wasn't. Here's a very rough estimate, but substitute freely and use your own judgment:

• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 tbs. peanut oil
• 2 tbs. rice vinegar
• 1 tbs. mirin
• 1 tsp. sesame oil
• lots of grated ginger
• a bit of onion, minced finely
• 1 clove green garlic (or normal garlic), minced finely
• star anise, coriander, cardamom, or other spices of your choosing

Put the marinade over the tofu and let it sit out for an hour or so, giving it an occasional stir so that all of the tofu gets to spend some time immersed in liquid. Cook the quinoa with 2 cups water and some salt. Heat up the peanut oil over medium heat in a pan and cook the onion for a minute or two with a bit of salt so that it loses its edge but maintains its crunch. (I hope that as I age, I lose my edge but maintain my crunch.) Remove from heat into a large bowl. In the same pan, cook the chard stems, adding a bit of water, and after two minutes add the leaves and some salt, turn of the heat and give it a stir or two until the leaves wilt. Add to the bowl with the onions. Let these things cool or take action to make them do so. Then add the quinoa, the tofu with its marinade, the cucumber, the tomatoes, and the juice of a half lemon. Add some pepper, add more soy sauce or vinegar or whatever if necessary, and serve.

Barley!

The weather here has turned warm. The last laggardly trees finally have some leaves. And yet the only culinary signs of spring are some pretty heads of lettuce. Instead of strawberries and asparagus, I'll give you a recipe made up entirely of dry things that have been sitting in your pantry for months.

Poor barley! Everybody's pantry contains rice--probably several varieties, even--but nobody's contains barley, except maybe in the form of beer. Plain boiled barley is every bit as good as plain rice. It takes about twenty minutes longer and you should use three times as much water as barley. This recipe is a bit more elaborate, but not very. It takes an hour or so and serves four. And it makes better leftovers than rice.

• 1 cup barley
• 2/3 cup dried mushrooms
• 3 cups water
• 1 large onion, chopped roughly
• 1 tsp. plus a bit more salt
• 1 tbs. duck fat or olive oil

Bring the water to a boil, turn off the heat, and put the mushrooms in it. Let them re-hydrate while you chop the onion. Choose a pot big enough to hold all the ingredients and heat it over medium-low heat. After a minute, add the onions and some salt, and cover the pot. Cook for about ten minutes, stirring every two or three minutes and making sure the onions don't burn. After these ten minutes, add the oil or other fat and turn the heat to medium-high. Cook the onions until they are very brown, stirring nearly constantly to keep them from burning. (I heard that cooking onions initially without fat causes them to carmelize more quickly, but I don't really know if it's true. If you don't believe in this, then just cook with fat from the beginning.) Add the barley and cook for another minute, stirring. Add the mushrooms along with the water to the pot. Add the tsp. of salt. Cover, bring to a boil, and then turn the heat down. Cook until the barley is tender, 30-40 minutes. You may need to add more water.