Tag Archives: caramelized onions

The De-fennel-stration of our Vegetable Drawer

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onion and fennel risottoOur CSA with Windflower Farm is totally awesome. For almost half the year, they load us up with delicious veggies, and they never skimp on the good stuff. Every once in a while, though, they throw us a curveball, like in one of our last shipments of the season, when they gave us a big ol’ bulb of fennel. Fennel looks kind of like a multi-snorkeled Snork and has a name that sounds like a scheming butler on Masterpiece Theater. Needless to say, the CSA fennel offering kicked around in our vegetable drawer for quite a while.

And then—eureka!—the NY Times cooking section laid a solution right in my lap with this recipe for Carmelized Onion and Fennel Risotto. When I started to make it, I realized that I didn’t even know what part of the fennel to slice, and I had to watch some YouTube videos to school myself. Basically, you just want the layered part of the bulb; you can make stock out of the rest of it, but it’s too tough to chew. That means that there was shockingly little fennel on my cutting board by the time I was finished hacking away at it. Would I even be able taste it in the finished dish?

Because it is in my nature to meddle with even the simplest recipes, I made a few changes to the NYT version. Continue reading →

I’ll See Your Rice and Raise You a Lentil: Shannon’s Easy Mujaddara

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mujaddara

Did you know that dishes that combine a grain and a legume (like peanut butter sandwiches or, um, mujaddara) offer your body a complete set of proteins?

Whenever we go to Jason’s parents’ house for a holiday, I can rest assured that lurking somewhere in the refrigerator will be a container of mujaddara for us to “snack on.” The quotation marks are necessary, because the container is approximately the size of a bathtub. I chalk up the mammoth proportions to two factors: 1) Bob, Jason’s dad, is immensely fond of the Bosnian guy who owns a restaurant near his company’s offices, and 2) we are a clan that can polish off a vast quantity of the rice and lentil dish with alarming speed.

As delicious as the Richmond holiday version is, it’s not always within easy reach when a mujaddara craving hits, so I recently went hunting for a recipe. There are approximately a zillion floating around the internet (and yes, I’m about to add one more). Because I loathe soggy rice and was concerned about my own ability to time things correctly, I combined a couple versions that called for the rice and lentils to be prepared separately. Even though that probably makes it less traditional, the final product turned out quite well—aromatic and subtle and earthy, a warmly comforting end to a chilly fall day.

Shannon’s Easy Mujaddara

  • 1 cup lentils (any variety will work, but the baby ones are nice)
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 2 cups water, vegetable stock, white wine, or a combination of these
  • 2 cinnamon sticks
  • 1 tablespoon cumin
  • ½ teaspoon allspice
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 1 cup rice
  • 3 small or 2 medium onions, sliced Continue reading →