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.
