Well, what I did was not exactly "by the book" and I sort of did not pay much attention to proportions and we ended with eating it for three days three times per day lol.
Basically, I started with pouring warm water over the bowl full with basmati rice, and red and green lents. My mistake was that I took too much of rice, in fact, lents should be in majority. I would say a cup of rice, and three cups of lents (1,5 of orange and 1,5 cup of green), but really the choice of lents does not matter much
. Leave them for an hour there.
Then I splashed a bit of olive oil on the sautoir pan (I did almost everything in the same pan), added a handful of cummin seeds, sunflower seeds, sesam seeds and pumpkin seeds and fried them until all oil was gone.
Now we need to choose the vegetables and fry them a bit too - this is the only time when I would actually use another pan - I did it on the same, but that was a bit of mistake - it did not spoil anything, but, nevertheless
.
You can even use frozen vegetables, by the way. So, the same - olive oil or something better and fry them either a bit or until they get crispy. I used some potate slices (they make the whole dish a bit more mushy), grated carrots, brocoli, legume beans, peas. I did not use fresh ginger or onion, but they should be fitting there nice too.
So, at this stage there are two choices to be made:
1. Either the vegetables are fried till crispy and added at the end.
2. Or we just fry them a tiny bit and add into the main dish so they basically end up being steamed.
I went with the latter option.
So now, we have fried seeds on the sautoir pan - just pour risen rice and lents on top of them, add boiled water - they usually say four cups, but You have to see Your proportions and anyway, I noticed that 4 cups is never enough - You would have to add water during the course of time. Put it on small fire, add salt, pepper, scented pepper, masala, curry, bay-leefs, close the lid and let it stew for a while. After 10-15 minutes, add the fried vegetables and proceed with stewing. The whole process took me about an hour, but I was doing it for the first time and a bit overdid it
. So, depending how much You have there, it should steam for about 40 - 50 mins, together with vegetables.
I saw several recipes where You add fresh leaves and other greenery on top of it, but I only had dills and chives - still worked fine for me
.
So just stick with the basics, use the common sense and improvise
. There are not many bad things which can be done wrong to steamed rice and lents 🙂 The most important thing is to check water ofter, because it really tended to evaporate pretty fast, even with closed lid.
