Hamburger, homemade buns, orange lentils, fried napa cabbage

Masoor dal. Here is a recipe I pulled off the internet:

* onion
* margarine
* cumin
* turmeric
* clove
* cayenne
* salt
* pepper


No to margarine. What is the point? I am amazed they still make that. Anyway, do you recognize what this recipe needs?

Guess.

* Fenugreek! Of course.

I did not want all that stuff to darken the handsome orange color so originally I kept all that separate from the orange lentils but then I caved and combined them.

When these lentils soaked they looked like they have a little root that is trying to come out and you know what that makes me want to do. Plant them. 

The lentils were combined with the butter and spice mixture which could as easily been all cooked together. The lentils never actually boiled. The water boiled but not the lentils. They soaked covered while I mucked about with other things. I never even tested to see if they were done. Apparently there is a wide margin for goofing around.  

Red bean hamburger bun.

This is third portion of the dough prepared earlier for the pizza and for the baguette. The dough was one day old then, it is three days old now. It looked to me to be enough for two hamburger buns but after they were baked I saw there could have been at least three. So that is quite a lot of utility for one simple batch  of careless dough. Two cups of water and three rounded packed cups of unsifted flour and a very loose scraping together. No real mixing involved starting out.

The dough was hardly kneaded at all back then and that showed in the baguette's crumb. Tsk. They wouldn't like that at the bakery college but it did make very nice sandwiches. So I kneaded this last portion now to make up for my sloven past, and to prove I mean it I gave this third and last portion a boost of flavorful and nutritious bean sludge. I discovered that yeast likes beans and that beans perform very well in bread. I learned this by adding leftover bean dip to bread dough expecting the worst but getting very good results by surprise. These beans here were processed to powder and added to hot water and then boiled for seconds which formed a paste that was spread over the dough then rolled and then thoroughly mixed in and kneaded. It is a very soft dough.

Apologies for the huge file size, but it is nineteen photos in a stack.

1. cold aged dough

2. red beans

3. red bean to powder

4. powder mixed with hot water

5. powder water zapped again to boiling

6. aged dough turned out

7. dough covered with bean paste

8. flattened dough rolled up

9. dough roll stretched

10. dough roll folded

11. dough roll compressed

12 dough roll stretched again

13. dough roll folded again

14. dough roll compressed again

15. dough kneaded

16. dough divided

17. dough transferred to baking tray and covered (not shown)

18. hamburger buns risen

19. hamburger buns baked. 

Would you prefer better pictures? 

That is it for the hamburger bun. The hamburger is 95% lean which is way way WAY too lean for me but it was on sale, so I added as much olive oil as the ground beef would hold. 

Does that sound odd? 

The thing is, I just experienced a sudden weight loss. Three belt notches, if that means anything. My pants are hanging by the cuffs arranged by waist size on a pole running the length of a walk-in closet. There are a lot of pants hanging in there and more on the shelf above. If the pants were piano keys then the last month would be like playing the scales down the line of waist sizes to the very end. Plink plink ... plink.  Last week I weighed at college-level weight, which is the time when I stopped growing in height and where my present-day pants waists end hanging on the closet pole.  Yesterday I dropped to just above High School weight which is alarming because I grew two inches after High School. And that was weighing myself yesterday sopping wet, I just stepped out of the bath. I do not have any High School weight level pants around here. I wear the smallest waist pants sold in men's shops and tuck in two layers of shirt. It sounds insane when I say it but I am down to size 30 waist /36 length. Soon it will be 29/36. Do you realize what that looks like? When I sit on my wallet I tip to one side as if sitting with one side on a brick. The backside is gone as far as I can tell. Now it is just loose baggy pants seat back there. I kept wondering what all that folded fabric is that I am sitting on. It was so annoying. Now it's pathetic. So something has got to give. I want that weight back, it took my whole life to earn it. 

I resolve to stop this downward trend and reverse it.  

The hamburger is large. I already ate half of it and I am going to eat the rest of this thing if takes all night. 

Arugula salad with lentils

Fresh baby arugula and baby spinach combined with apple and cucumber and with seared asparagus. Topped with goat cheese and green onion and cooked lentils. 

In which breathtaking salad-assemblage eclat is demonstrated to produce a fresh lunch so profoundly brilliant that grown chefs weep. They weep with joy that such things are possible, and they weep in dismay that their own talents fall short. 

Man, oh Man, this salad is delicious. I am squirming inside with irrepressible childlike delight. Too bad this salad will never be duplicated precisely due to it's improvisation. Still, one can come close, in fact if one were interested they could make a fortune, a FORTUNE!, I tell you. Here, have it. It's yours. 

The salad is inspired by these attractive bins of lentils seen in the bulk section at Whole Foods. I saw them before but dismissed them as silly. But then they caught my eye again and I thought, "Well, aren't you purdy little things?" (A declarative formed as interrogative with an assumed Western thinky-thought accent. In these small ways I amuse myself.) I bought a big pile of them so you will see them again. The orange lentils are next to the yellow lentils which are cute too, but I used those already. Yellow is brighter, but orange is more unusual. It was a tough call. Orange lentils or yellow lentils. I ignored the green lentils and the French lentils and stood there before the two bins of brightly colored lentils arrested in weighing the matter. Shoppers passing through considered me an idiot. I could read their minds. 

If you steam asparagus then you end up with limp green sticks. Those are no fun. If you sear asparagus all around then you end up with shriveled diminished limp sticks. Those are no fun either. Solution: Sear the spears, or spear portions on one side only to produce a single strip of sear. Halt the searing action by splashing a small amount of water into the hot pan and slam on a lid so that the spears finish cooking by steam.  This can be done in reverse. Butter is 20% water. You can heat a pan, toss in a pat of butter so that it sizzles immediately, follow with asparagus spears, quickly clamp on a tight lid, shake the pan to create a single layer of asparagus spears inside the covered pan. Now you are cooking blindly. The water contained in the butter will steam the asparagus, the fat in the butter will help sear the spears. Do not touch the pan until you intuit the spears are done. See? Forward or backward with the water, either way, it doesn't matter. 

It is the dressing that makes these vegetables irresistable. You cannot buy any dressing so extraordinary. You must make it. Ordinarily for a thing like this I would start off with soy sauce and have that count for the salt. But soy sauce is dark and it produces a darkly colored dressing. I wanted to avoid that today so I eliminated the soy sauce. Fish sauce is also dark, but much less of it is used. Fish sauce will also contribute a salty sensation. So then, in amounts to suit yourself:

Dressing

*  Sake. Japanese rice wine. In place of vinegar. It is a harsh substance that must be moderated with something sweet.

*  Sweet mirin. If not mirin then honey, If not honey then sugar. If not sugar then fruit preserves. If not fruit preserves then ... oh, you get the idea, something sweet to knock the edge off that sake.

*  Fish sauce. Fermented anchovy, that, like anchovies themselves will impart salt flavor and satisfying umami then disappear entirely into the background. Used sparingly there can be no objections and yet diners will wonder, "What manner of sorcery is this that causes a dancing party on the surface of my tongue?" 

*  Freshly grated ginger and freshly grated garlic together in equal amounts. 

*  Pepper, but no salt.