lentil dosas

I’ve been wanting to make these ever since I spotted them in one of my bread books, but I’ve never been organised enough to do it - they’re remarkably simple, but you need to start them 32 hours in advance, according to the book.

Take 3/4 cup of long grain rice (I used Basmati, as we had no long grain), 1/4 cup of red lentils, and combine in a bowl with 1 cup of warm water.

Cover with clingfilm, and leave for 8 hours.

Then, blitz the contents of the bowl in a food processor, and return to the (rinsed out) bowl, recover with the clingfilm, and leave for 24 hours.

Then stir in some salt, ground black pepper and 1/2 tsp (ish) of turmeric.  The recipe said to add fresh coriander; we didn’t have any, but I did lob in some grated fresh ginger.  It claimed it would make 6 x 6″ dosas, but I made them a bit smaller for ease of scoffing - just heat up a heavy based frying pan, add some oil, and cook them like drop scones or whatever.

They were utterly delicious - we ate them with some leftover black-eyed peas in tomatoes that I cooked up at the weekend to accompany our (home made) chicken dansak.  We shall be having them again!

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asparagus and feta risotto

There are some foods we only eat when they’re in season in the UK, and asparagus is one of them; thus we tend to rather gorge ourselves on it at this time of year.  Although we are back on a veg box, we couldn’t resist a big bunch of the glorious green stuff while we were mooching along Gloucester Road last weekend.

As my regular reader (waves to Giles!) will know, we like risotto - for two people, 5oz of risotto rice and 1 pint of liquid (and yes - I know I should go metric on this, but it’s easy to remember), and you’re away.

So - chopped up a red onion and sautéd it in some olive oil, while I chopped half the asparagus into manageable lengths, and cooked it for five minutes.  The liquid was the juice of half a lemon, about half a pint of apple juice, and topped up to the pint with water.  Usual process - add rice bit by bit, add stock till rice plump, rinse and repeat.  Before the last add, I hurled in the asparagus, and a dash of salt and pepper.

At the end, I stirred in half a block of feta cheese.  Fab.

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egg fried rice and bits

using up: cold pot roast beef, spring onions, pepper, cucumber, broccoli

I love egg fried rice - we always have it when we have a Chinese takeaway.  Not that we’ve had a Chinese takeaway in years, but we always did.

I don’t know why I’ve never made it before - partly, I guess, because you have to have cold, cooked rice, and I never thought about it in time (like the indian lentil bread I want to make, which needs starting two days before I think “Oh, that’d be nice”). However, last week, I was organised and cooked some rice, and we had egg fried rice with a thai veg curry.  It was lovely, so I resolved to do something more interesting.  And yesterday lunchtime, I cooked some rice!

So - I cut up some (not much) of the leftover pot roast beef into slivers.  Finely chopped three cloves of garlic, and sliced a knob of fresh ginger into julienne strips.  Chopped three spring onions, one red pepper, about a third of a rather tired cucumber.  Beat two eggs in a mug with some sesame oil (about two teaspoonsful, I would say).  While I was doing all this, I steamed a few broccoli florets.

Heated some groundnut oil in the big wok, and put in the garlic, ginger, pepper, spring onions and cucumber.  Stirred round till cooked, added juice of half a lemon, broccoli, cold beef.  Stirred around till they were warmed through.

Poured in egg, and stirred it round with a chopstick - it felt more authentic, somehow. As it started to set, I added the rice, then stirred it all together furiously with a dollop of soy sauce.  It was lovely - we shall have it again!

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rice is nice

We eat far more rice than we do potato - it doesn’t need peeling, for a start.

We bought a 20kg bag of basmati, and I noted the date so we could see how long it took us to eat through it. And it was 9 months and 3 weeks. There’s only two of us, too …

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Yesterday we started a 10kg one, as Bristol Sweet Mart had no 20kg bags. Be interesting to see how this one goes.

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