the deep moans round with many voices

So hey, question for you all!

Today I acquired the bag of red lentils pictured above -- look when outgoing tenants leave stuff in their apartments at the end of their leases, sometimes we make off with various items before either donating the rest to the local re-use center or chucking it in the trash (depending on the nature and condition of said items), and dry goods are dead useful, generally speaking -- but unfortunately I have precisely zero idea what to do with them, aside from, you know, maybe make lentil soup with mixed vegetables.

Therefore: what are some good but fairly low-effort lentil-based recipes?

Landlord Dude came over today to check out the oven, and we jointly fished out the following mess from underneath:





The tally includes

1. a second disposable lighter
2. a lipstick-sized bottle of Advil (pills still inside, ugh)
3. a mouse-shaped cat toy
4. pieces of dry pet food
5. two beer caps
6. a lump of silly putty
7. a pen cap
8. a list of things not to forget
9. a cigarette butt
10. cashew shells
11. the lid to a spice jar
12. a long piece of straw or wicker
13. various plastic pull-tab lids
14. a small bolt and washer
15. one penny
16. the metal top of a THIRD lighter
17. so much dust
18. ashes

It is pretty damn obvious that Landlord Dude and Former Landlady forgot to clean under the oven as part of the turnover before I moved in. He apologized for this, as well he should.

I have vacuumed under the oven and inside the broiler drawer as thoroughly as I could, and also vigorously scrubbed the whole area with Windex. There was so much grease and grit and gunk. SO MUCH.

I'm now letting the whole thing air out overnight, and I think I may not use it until Tuesday, since that's when I'll be able to turn the oven on for an hour or so early in the afternoon and hopefully work through any residual burned plastic smell before I cook dinner that evening.

We shall see how it goes. :)

I've been trying to work through the tail end of a Great Lectures series on the Vikings, but I didn't feel like rummaging through my art supplies basket to find my coloring pages, so I opened MS Paint instead and have been making little finger "paintings" loosely in the style of Bob Ross as my latest concentration aid.

They're actually pretty fun. :)


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I feel like I am slowly getting the hang of Bob Ross's techniques, insofar as that's possible when making finger-doodles with a notoriously shoddy digital art program. *wry*


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Tiny gardening update! Here is the Lazarus pepper, which I am going to pick later this week and stir-fry with some onions, because reasons. :)

(Regular gardening updates are probably not resuming at this time, sorry. I have been having brain glitch issues.)


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Tonight I attempted to reconstruct one of the Blue Apron recipes -- the Persian-style chicken with rice -- to... moderate success? It tastes all right, though I think I know some things that would make it better if I try again later this year.

Anyway, I wanted to try this both as a way to use the first two summer squash from my porch garden, and as an experiment to see if I even could approximate the recipe. So I bought some turmeric and cardamom, acquired some dried currants and some roasted almonds, and kind of winged it.

I cut out some of the fancy steps -- zesting an actual lemon to make the lemon yogurt topping, baking some of the rice -- because I don't like baked rice to start with and there is a reason I bought a small bottle of lemon juice concentrate a while back: namely, "I don't have the time or patience to deal with freaking lemons when all I need is some lemon juice." I roughly doubled the quantities of onion and squash (and of course substituted yellow squash for zucchini), and both substituted chicken thighs for chicken breasts and increased the quantity of meat, though not as much as I increased the vegetables. Also I used plain medium-grain white rice instead of jasmine rice, because that's what I had on hand.

I completely guessed on the proportions and amounts of the spices to use for coating the chicken, but I think I came pretty close. (Mostly I went by the smell and color of the blend.) I think if I were doing this again, I'd use slightly less onion (proportionately) and also use six chicken thighs instead of just four -- the vegetables ended up drowning out the chicken a bit, which is not terrible from a nutritional standpoint but does affect the overall flavor. I also had to add spices to the veggies as they cooked, twice, because there wasn't enough spice gloop left over in the pan when the chicken was done cooking. While that definitely helped, I think that A) more chicken and B) even more spice would have been better.

All flavor issues aside, I wound up with SO MUCH of the chicken-veggie mix. SO MUCH. I will be eating it for a WEEK. (This is not a bad thing!) One cup of rice only got me maybe three to three-and-a-half portions there, but rice shouldn't be kept indefinitely as leftovers to start with, not to mention that it's a lot easier to make a new batch of rice (plus currants soaked in lemon juice) than it is to make the chicken-veggie mix, so I am okay with that wild mismatch.


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