Dal and Turnip Pancakes

I've been meaning for ages to learn how to cook lentils. In the past I've had partial successes but everything has been almost inedibly bland. So I was excited at a challenge which (it seemed) might go well with dal. In the end it was less successful than I hoped for.

The dal I made is on page 433 of Bittman. I made about a batch and a half so I would have lunch sitting around for the week.



In a saucepan combine a diced onion, a cup and a half of red lentils, and four cups of water. Use a mortar and pestle to must together two dried chiles, six cloves of garlic, an inch or two of ginger, four cardamom pods, salt and pepper, and an eighth of a teaspoon of ground cloves, then add that mixture. Cook this at a soft boil until the lentils are soft. For ordinary lentils I think this is supposed to take twenty to thirty minutes; mine have been sitting on my shelf for three or four years and perhaps as a consequence took over an hour. When it's nearly done, add the tomatoes and some butter. Serve over rice and garnish with fresh cilantro (I forgot the garnish, of course).



Note that I omitted the mustard seeds -- my grocery didn't seem to carry them. I thought two chiles would be enough to make up for it (though it ended up being quite mild).



I had originally thought I might eat my dal over the other recipe I worked on, but that did not really go as planned.

The second recipe I made this weekend is on page 355 of Bittman -- zucchini pancakes -- sorta. We were assigned to swap out the wheat and eggs from the recipe. Additionally, Bittman notes that this recipe works well with all sorts of different things, not just zucchini. I'm not a zucchini fan so I figured I would try sweet potatoes, which I adore.

Unfortunately, the grocery was sold out of sweet potatoes. Apparently something was in the paper recently about how good they are for you (and apparently people still read the paper). So I just grabbed the closest things that looked like root vegetables and figured it would probably work.



Here's the recipe I used. I do not recommend that you follow it.

Grate one cup of rutabaga and one cup of turnip. Add in maybe an eighth of a cup of parmesan cheese, a quarter cup of cornmeal, and a quarter cup of applesauce. Mix this together thoroughly with your hands.



Form this concoction into patties (this is a half batch compared to Bittman so it made four instead of eight). You will be squeezing a significant amount of liquid out of each patty. Then throw some butter in a pan an cook them through -- maybe about ten minutes per side.



These patties held together very well. They look nice. They even smell nice, like they might have a pleasant sharpness. That turned out to be an underestimate. I used my housemates as guinea pigs, but between the three of us we couldn't really find anything to put on them to temper the sharpness.

Appropriately enough, I think this recipe would have been really good with sweet potatoes or beets -- some more mild root. But not like this!