Quick Bites: Tuna with Lentils

Ooooh lentils! This must be a healthy recipe!

Yes, it is, coincidentally. Uh, are you sure you’re at the right blog?

This is not a healthy cooking blog. Not that everything I make is dripping with cheese, butter or animal fat mind you, but I choose not to limit myself to ‘healthy’ as a parameter for the foods I discuss, create and/or present on the blog. Which is why I have recipes for marshmallows, corned beef, and flourless chocolate torte.

But I digress.

Lentils sit in your pantry until one day you chance across a recipe for a lentil salad or some other lentil-focused dish, when you take out the package of lentils, dust it off, and proceed with the recipe somewhat automatically.

Well, enough is enough already. Start thinking, will you? There is nothing mystical about them. They cook very much like rice, nice and simple. Lentils, unlike their larger legume cousins, do not require soaking beforehand. So once you get a pot boiling, dump in the lentils and let them cook away. One caveat: not all lentils are the same. Red lentils turn to mush, there’s no avoiding it. And so unless I’m looking for that texture, I tend to stay away from them.

Today’s lunch started with the lentils, my favorite, actually, the small mottled Lentil du Puy. I then seared some tuna marinated in olive oil, salt and pepper, and sauteed some of the cooked lentils with red peppers, onion and smoked paprika. If had any cilantro, I would have been happy to use it. Had I thought about it, a hit of lemon juice wouldn’t have gone awry either.

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