Sweet and sour lentils (p171); Golden basmati rice (p185); Japanese sesame spinach (p330)

... So two of my new year's resolutions are to do more cooking and to do more healthy eating, which are pretty good resolutions to have, I think.  And resolutions are easier to keep if you tell your friends about them and keep a diary, so a blog meets both those needs ...


I was inspired by the blogs such as this one, where Kathryn cooks her way through the recipes in one of Jamie's books.  But I didn't see much about Moosewood.  And Jamie is not very healthy or very vegetarian, both of which I try to be.  (Wait till you get to 40 Jamie, you will balloon if you eat all of your food every night...)


So anyway, this is about the book "Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites: Flavorful Recipes for Healthful Meals", which you can read more about here.  Some good reviews, no?  I opened the book yesterday after a long absence and saw some annotations I made a couple of years ago -- encouragingly saying things like "v tasty" by a couple of recipes.


This is London in December and the rain is being blown onto the windows and I can hear the water dripping down the gutters.  So it was time for a hearty stew and some bulk and carbohydrate to beat the winter blues.


The lentils are boiled first in a combination of water, apple juice and ginger, then they have added to them a mixture of sauted vegetables: tomato, carrot, courgette and some soya sauce and vinegar.  (The book said brown lentils but I'm colourblind and I'd never heard of them, so I used a combination of Waitrose Green Lentils and Tesco Continental Lentils.)  The dish was filling but light, with the lentils tasting sweet and very rich, and the vegetables adding some more texture and flavour.


Golden basmati rice - well we cheated and used brown basmati rice which we had in the cupboard already.  It's cooked with sauted onions, orange peel and carrots and a few spices (I have a thing about cardamon so exceeded the recipe quantity on that...)  It was really good, quite sweet and nutty.  But I think a plain rice would have been fine with those lentils, maybe on a school night I would go with a cup of untainted Japanese rice.


And the spinach - well it was lovely.  Just a microwaved bag of spinach, with a paste made of sesame seeds, soya sauce and sugar.  But like spinach does the world over, it disappeared in five seconds on the plate.


So - a good meal, very tasty but not overly moreish.  Definitely worth doing, so it gets a pretty good three stars.  ***


(Pic to follow)