Start with cooking your rice because it can cook while we prep everything else. Once your rice is boiling, turn the heat down and simmer on a low heat for about thirty minutes.

While the rice is cooking slice one large zucchini into cubes about one-quarter-inch small. Pre-heat one tablespoon of olive oil in a large skillet. Once the oil is hot, insert your ground hamburger and attack it with your spatula while salting and peppering until you have small chunks of slightly browned hamburger. Before the ground beef is completely cooked, dollop your stone ground mustard into the pan and give it a good stir.

Next, toss in all that zucchini we diced earlier. We won’t be draining the ground beef fat because we want to fry the zucchini and the rice in the juices. Splash some Worcestershire into the skillet and give your food a couple of good tosses. Don’t be afraid to dash in a bit more salt and pepper.

By this point your rice should be almost fully cooked. The technique I use is to pour rice into a small pot and then cover it with double the amount of water and then simmer it on the oven, covered, until all the water boils away. Just before the rice gets fluffy and when there is just a bit of water left is when I insert my ingredients for flavoring the rice. This time we are putting curry into the rice.

After approximately five minutes from the last step, dump all the rice into your skillet and keep the heat on high. Just five more minutes of cooking and stirring and just a pinch more salt and we will be done. In the last minute of cooking I sprinkled in some orange zest and mixed it into our dinner.

I think I changed point of view throughout the last few paragraphs from first person to second person and then back to first person again but I’m too lazy to go back and re-write it so don’t let it confuse you too much.

One rule that I follow is to always cook an extra portion in case an unexpected guest arrives. I live by this rule. I wouldn’t suggest it to those who don’t know how to eat leftovers, however.

You can tell when my pantry is getting low and these are my most favorite times to cook because it forces me to use up items that I normally don’t get around to using. I also come up with creative combinations that are usually not so bad. Today was no exception.

I started boiling some rice. About one and a half cups of medium grain rice. This should cook to about three cups. While this was cooking, I starte some butter in a frying pan after quartering a few white pearl onions. I love to prep while food is cooking. It is sort of a juggling act. I used extra butter in the pan, like one tablespoon and a half because I wanted the curry to have something to stick to.

I found a hot pepper in the fridge from Carl’s Jr and thought it would be a good idea to chop that up and throw it in with the butter and the onions. These peppers are quite spicy and flavorful so be careful with how much you use. One is plenty. A little teeny tiny one. After cooking the onions, butter and hot pepper for a moment, I dumped in about two teaspoons worth of curry powder. I could be wrong, I just eyeball the stuff.

Then I pulled out the large can of pineapple bits that I have been saving to cook with some rice. I drained these well because I didn’t need the juice to cook anything with. There was plenty of butter in the pan. Pineapple and curry are a great mix.

Right about this time the rice was done cooking. I just placed it on top of the pineapple-curry mixture and let everything stew together for a few minutes and gave it a few stirs with some sea salt to bring out the rest of the flavors.

For only using three major ingredients and two minor ones, this meal turned out pretty decent. Took me, maybe, thirty minutes at the most. Cooking with an empty pantry always produces food that you don’t have on your regular menu.

p.s. Some sweet basil and a splash of coconut milk would have been perfect with this. That would have taken this meal to the next level.

*update – I think that I will use a red bell pepper next time along with some basil to add color to this dish. It was a bland yellow, but yummy.

keld's lentil soup

Christmas eve I had some friends over and took this opportunity to make some lentil soup that I had heard about from The Amatuer Gourmet. This recipe was perfect because I had exactly two cups of lentils left that I probably wasn’t going to get around to cooking later.

I also had some steaks that I pulled out of the freezer two days prior to this so I figured I may as well dice that up and throw it into the soup as well.

I will have to warn you. I do not measure ingredients and I will not be able to provide exact measurements. These recipes that I share are just suggestions.

First thing I did was start boiling some lentils. I’m one of those people who doesn’t use a timer. I probably should. Hell, I could even look at the clock once in a while. However, I prefer to cook until it’s done. I don’t know how to explain this concept but maybe I will talk about it more in the future.

While the lentils were boiling, I diced up five slices of bread. These I tossed in just enough olive oil to cover them slightly. Before tossing them in the oil, I whipped up the oil with some crushed garlic I had. Croutons would be perfect on top of the soup. Baked them at 350 until they were done.

Before the lentils were finished, I took about three tablespoons of butter and started sauteeing half of a large white onion. This was a very large onion. I sliced it into bite size pieces about 1/4 of an inch by 1/2 of an inch. Once the onions started cooking I placed two steaks, 6oz each, into the same pan. The plan here is just to brown them enough on each side so that we can dice it into smaller pieces while leaving the onions on the heat to become tranceluscent.

Unfortunately, the steak I had available was low quality. Even if it is not low quality steak, I highly recommend that you heavily salt and pepper the steak about one hour before use. I did not have time for this so I just fried in butter. After slicing the steak into cubes, I threw the chunks into the butter and onions.

I have dried herbs so I used them at this point. If they were fresh, I would add them at the end of cooking. Here, to the onions and steak I added some cayenne pepper, crushed red pepper, generous helping of curry (which I added more later during the soup cooking part) and a bunch of cumin seeds.

The lentils were done cooking at this point so I drained them and set them aside. After a few more minutes I dumped a 28oz can of crushed tomatoes into a pot along with the onions, spices and steak. This is when I added two capfuls of vermouth into the soup. Yum.

After a couple more minutes I used the empty can to pour the same amount of water into the mixture. Next, I poured in the lentils. We are almost done. While this was coming to a simmer, I rinsed and destemmed some fresh chard. After slicing this into long strips, I placed the chard on top of the soup and salted it a bit.

Just a few more minutes of simmering and I pulled the soup off the heat. Top with croutons and if you have a dollop of sour cream or yogurt available, that would make this dish divine.

Total preparation time was only about thirty minutes. This was a quick meal and my guests were impressed with how quickly the meal was prepared. I must warn you that this made a lot of food. We could have served about 8-10 people.

For dessert we had dark chocolate from IKEA with dried cranberries.