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I’m beginning to think I should call my husband the Grad School Gourmet. For a poor grad student back East, he ate pretty surprisingly well. Instead of packets of instant noodles, he’d buy giant bags of beans and rice to get by. He usually ate these lentils and rice with a little fresh tomato on the side. Back then, a fresh tomato from a bodega was a bit of a luxury. Years later, when he first made these lentils for me, it went with tzatziki, tomato chunks and a carrot-raisin salad. The thing is, the recipe was never written down, so while I figured out the rest of the meal, the lentils were exclusively OJ’s domain.<\/p>\n
I have finally cracked the code. Victory is mine!<\/p>\n
The dish bears some resemblance to a pilaf or even biriyani, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it Indian. With onion, garlic, cumin and coriander, along with pinches of cinnamon, allspice and cloves, it could be Pakistani-inspired, perhaps even Moroccan. \u00a0OJ doesn’t even remember how it came together. So without a firm tradition to dictate right or\u00a0wrong, I went ahead and dolled it\u00a0up with a little preserved lemon and pomegranate arils for a bit of brightness. Preserved lemons are salt-cured and are available in jars (Trader Joe’s is one source). They\u00a0can be made at home<\/a>, though it requires time, as much as 3-4 weeks of time. Either way, just those couple of small additions\u00a0really transforms this from a simple bowl of lentils and rice, plenty tasty on its own, into something that looks restaurant-worthy.<\/p>\n\t\r\n\t
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