Cooking

This sub really gives me motivation to start cooking again. Looks waaay to tasty! <3

In my experience, slow cooker caramelized onions are pretty reasonable to make in bulk, then freeze into a lump in your freezer that you keep telling yourself you'll totally use in a recipe until you forget about its very existence, rediscover it once it's a freezer burned mess, and reluctantly throw out, telling yourself that surely next time you bulk prep caramelized onions for some recipe that calls for them, you will not make the same mistake.

Er, I mean, have you tried slow cooking caramelized onions? It takes longer but it's so hands off!

I'm just here to see a poster thank another poster for a recommendation and it result in food.

I personally don’t like mjaddara but if you at all want to try the more traditional preparation you need to put way less rice next time. This looks like a rice dish with lentils and not a lentil porridge with rice giving it consistency. You want the rice to soak up way more liquid.

As an adult making lentils I never add rice at all. Lentils are plenty of carbs as it is. You can go more soupy or more porridgy. Funny how it’s cheap comfort food now but as a kid I pretty much hated it.

If you don’t want to caramelize onions, you don’t have to. My rough, zero thought, not strictly traditional, lentils recipe is more like this:

Wash/soak some lentils for 20 minutes to an hour. 300 grams dry red lentils as an example quantity
Chop up a small onion, any kind, finer is better, rougher is fine Slice up a whole head of garlic (or less if you’re less garlic inclined) Lentils go into a pot, with enough water to cover them once over (I just eyeball it). I have an electric kettle so I pour in boiling water. You can start with cold water, it’s fine. You can add water to get it more soupy or let it become chunkier later. Just throw the onions and garlic in. They should cook annd soften over time. If you really really like garlic you can add it a bit later so less of the kick cooks off. In my case I just add more later lmao

I usually use red onions and watching them lose their color is a decent indicator of getting closer to completion. Stir so it doesn’t burn.

And here you just wait. You can add some extras if you want here, but you just do dishes and stuff until the lentils become soft. I don’t know what to say here except let them cook until they’re done.

I sometimes add tomato paste here, or any leftover leafy greens (kale, spinach, sorry grandma I never have chard on hand), I’ve thrown in like a tablespoon of dried oats before, it’s really just a flexible base for different ideas. Mjaddara is the variation with rice. I’ve once blended my lentil soup with an immersion blender for a very different texture. It’s just a base.

I eat this pretty regularly. If you’re on hard times you can eat a lot of this stuff for very cheap and it’s pretty nutritious and low effort. Lots of fiber and protein in there as well.

The most important thing taste wise is probably the seasoning. I appreciate you probably can’t run out and buy the standard Lebanese Seven Spice blend, but you can absolutely throw it together yourself. And that’s what will make it taste like what I know from my childhood. It’s very allspice heavy. I once ran out while cooking something else and used about half “garam masala” and half allspice and it was a bit fennelly but a reasonable substitute.

Definitely a comfort food and cheap. Love it.

Caramelizing onions is annoying though.

Yeah, I was just theorizing to another person in a comment here that possibly big-ish batches could be made in slow-cookers or pressure-cookers if the amount of liquid was well-titrated.

At our local grocery there's a company that offers a line of hummus (average+), stuffed grape leaves (absolutely terrible) and taboulah salad (solid), and then once in a blue moon, mujadara (delicious). If they had that latter item on a regular basis then I'd be a nonstop buyer. Naturally, it only appears every couple years...

Btw, one thing I've found that pairs unexpectedly well with the taboulah salad and mujadara is unflavored Greek yogurt. Hit that all up with some hot peppers / hot sauces and you get an exquisite balance of heat and cooling (the yogurt).

Not to mention, SCO (steel cut oats) are always an improvement over hulled rice.

Mujaddara*
It's spelled correctly literally right there as the title on the recipe page.

Ah, rice & lentils. Good combo.

Caramelizing onions

That's basically low-heat frying them for more than half an hour, according to the recipe?