My first reverse engineering recipe experience took place on Tuesday 4/5/11. I developed this method of meal planning recently as explained on my website Remembered Meals. I'm just now getting around to posting the results because, funny, work and other things crowded out my time. My personal goal is to log these as they occur, but goals are just guidelines anyway.
Tuesday is my day to cook lunch at the hip young company where I work with 5 others. Two people each share cooking duty Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Tuesday is my day and I share it with Marty. On Thursdays we work from home. On Fridays, everyone eats leftovers, but since I just work 30 hours a week (and I am ever-so grateful to be able to do so), I'm not there on Fridays. None of us are full-blown vegetarians but we eat vegetarian lunches. It's cheaper, and fruit, vegetables, legumes, and grains are the preferred food of most everyone.
I like lentils and had about a cup and a half left over from 2 weeks prior, when I made Lentil Nut Loaf from the venerable Laurel's Kitchen by Laurel Robertson. I searched in my Google Books cookbook collection for simply "lentils" and received about 50 hits, some with views of the recipe, others with just a page number. But it's wonderful to be able to go to tmy own physical bookshelf, open a book up a specified page, and see a recipe with that ingredient in it!
After about 20 minutes of checking out various recipes, online and in books, I decided to use a recipe in Biba's Italy by Biba Caggiano and make some serious adjustments. The recipe was Zampone Sausage with Braised Lentils.
I didn't have overnight to soak the lentils, so when I got to work at 9 a.m. I put them in a pan with water to cover plus some, and brought it to boil, then turned it off. We aim for a noon lunchtime, so at 10:30, I chopped 2 cloves of garlic (recipe called for 1), one onion and 3 carrots (recipe called for 1.) Note that the recipe called for a pound of brown lentils and I had half that. I wanted to "fill out" the amount with other things. I wasn't going to include the meat and I did not have any celery or parsley, and I did not use butter, either, though I had some. I sautéed the garlic, onion, and diced carrot in about 3 tablespoons of olive oil for at least 12 minutes. Then I drained the lentils, reserving the liquid, and put them with the sauté. To that, I added a "grabbed" amount of dried rosemary leaves all crushed up in my fingers. It was probably about a teaspoon and a half. I let all that cook together a couple of minutes and then put the lentil soaking water in and a large (28 oz) can of stewed tomatoes. It still looked sort of dry so I added enough water to cover it by half an inch. I then seasoned the mix with generous sprinkling of cayenne pepper and 3/4 teaspoon of salt (more or less.) I covered it and let it bubble for 35 minutes or so. It was still pretty wet, even though the lentils were edible by then, so I cooked it another 25 minutes with the lid off.
OMG, it was delicious, "if I do say so myself!"
My cooking parter, Marty, was unable to cook with me that day so I fleshed out the meal. I made the slaw with half a head of cabbage, 1 peeled diced apple, 1/4 cup of raisins, 1/4 cup of chopped pecans, 1/4 cup mayonnaise, and a sprinkling of celery seed (about 1/4 tsp.) A pot of brown rice seasoned with vegetable bouillon cubes "held" the lentils.
It was a fine meal.
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