Some quick cooking notes

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For the sake of remembering, I want to jot down two foods I made this past weekend: curried lentil patties and beet borscht. I have never made borscht before, but wanted to use beets for something since the local Sun Harvest had some for an awesome price. I kinda browsed over 8 or 9 different borscht recipes online to get the general idea of what went into the soup, then I took off and started ad-libbing. It came out pretty well...a nice, deep, violet color, and a rich beet taste. Here's the basic rundown:

BORSCHT

• 8 medium beets, peeled and chopped
  
• 2 white onions, peeled, halved and sliced
  
• half of a small red cabbage, shredded
  
• 4 red potatoes, peeled and chopped
  
• 1 qt vegetarian "beef" stock
  
• 1 qt vegetarian "chicken" stock
  
• 2 qts water
  
• 2 bay leaves
  
• juice from 1 lemon
  
• hell of a lot of black pepper
  
• some salt
  
• maybe 2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
  
• maybe 1/2 cup sugar
  
• 1-2 Tbsp fresh dill, chopped

Basically, I tossed everything except the cabbage into the pot, brought to a boil, and then simmered for half an hour. Add the cabbage, and simmer another 15 minutes. That was it. Super fucking easy, and it came out well. Tastes awesome cold with a dollop of sour cream in it.

As for the lentil patties, those were something of a spontaneous creation whilst trying to make some sort of tasty lunch out of the ingredients I had laying about. I remembered a small restaurant where I had some lunch in San Francisco. I had duck confit served over a bed of curried lentils with a dijon mustard sauce. Well... I don't much eat duck anymore, but I did have lentils in the house. And dijon mustard. A soupy plate of lentils didn't sound so exciting, though, without some tooth to it, so I decided to make the lentils into falafel-like patties. It came out awesomely:

CURRIED LENTIL PATTIES

• Maybe a cup of lentils? More?
  
• maybe 1 tsp red pepper flakes
  
• some whole mustard seed
  
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
  
• 1 tsp olive oil
  
• 1-1.5 T pach phanon spices
  
• olive oil for brushing
  
• pretty good amount of spelt or other flour for binding

Put everything except the flour and brushing oil into a saucepan with enough water to cover. Cook, covered, until the lentils are done and have soaked up the water. The pach phanon spices are a blend of five Indian spices. I don't know if you can get it pre-mixed, but it's easy to make. It's equal parts cumin seed, fenugreek, aniseed, mustard seed, and kalunji. I just made a huge batch of the stuff with bulk spices a while back and store it in tupperware.

Once the lentils are done, let them cool and begin adding in the spelt flour. Add this slowly. You want enough to bind the mix so that you can make patties, but not enough to make bricks. Form into patties, place on a greased cookie sheet, brush with oil, dust with a bit of sea salt, and broil for... oh, I dunno... it was 5 minutes or so until they browned. Then flip and repeat the brush/broil for the other side.

For the sauce, I reduced some veggie stock in a pan and added some dijon mustard and walnut oil after that was done.

These came out really well. I might add some fresh ginger to the lentils next time... or some red onion. Or both. For the leftover patties, I didn't have any more of the dijon sauce, so I made up some chipotle mayonnaise instead. That tasted even more awesome and gave me an idea to make these patties into burgers of sorts. A curried lentil patty on a nice whole grain bun, with red onion, tomato, spicy chipotle mayo, and a couple of sprigs of cilantro sounds crazy awesome.