“What the hell?!” you are probably saying, “Why are you doing that?!”

Because lentils are cheap (69 cents a bag), healthy and delicious!

Also, it’s fucking freezing today in Austin (it’s 49 degrees as I type this, and I’m bundled in layers like I’m back in Montreal), so any excuse to fire up the stove is a good one.

The lentils aren’t actually for this evening’s festivities (which actually include NOT watching the game, since we don’t own a TV and hate football), but for tomorrow’s breakfast of champions. Celebrity Intern and I discovered a tasty, cheap breakfast that we’ve been savoring for the past few weeks, which he claims is based on a French country-style tradition, and I thought I’d share the recipe.

So first, the lentils. Unlike beans, lentils are kick-ass because they don’t need to be pre-soaked. Brilliant! Grab a cup of ‘em, sort through to make sure there aren’t any weird rocks or gross shrivelled ones in your batch, and then give them a quick rinse. Once you’re done with that, chuck ‘em in a pot with a 2 to 1 ratio of water to lentils, basically the same way you’d cook rice. We make ours in broth (chicken, usually, although you could go veggie or beef, depending on your tastes) to bump up the flavor.

Then, all you have to do is bring the pot to a boil and simmer those babies for about 20-30 minutes.

Once your lentils are al dente, you can either eat ‘em straight off the stove or save them in a container for the following day (hence my pre-cooking them today).

The recipe for our French-style Lentil Bowls is as follows:

INGREDIENTS

• cooked lentils (about 1/4 c. per bowl)
• eggs (1 or 2 per person, depending on how hungry you are)
• breakfast sausage (let’s say a medium-sized patty per person)
• baby spinach (a few handfuls ought to do it)

MAKE IT

1. Put your pre-cooked lentils into individual bowls for each person. If you’ve got ‘em straight out of the refrigerator, nuke ‘em for about 30 seconds to warm them up.
2. Cook your breakfast sausage patties to perfection, i.e. browning ‘em on both sides. This should take maybe 15 minutes tops. Set ‘em aside to cool down while you make the eggs. While the eggs are cooking you can cut up your sausage into bite-sized pieces and distribute into the bowls.
3. Cook your eggs over easy (this is why I have Celebrity Intern in the kitchen; I am terrible at flipping my eggs without breaking the yolks!), and layer ‘em over your lentils and sausage.
4. Wilt that spinach in your skillet. This goes pretty quick, maybe 1 minute max. Add the results to your bowls.
5. Serve hot, with sriracha hot sauce if you’re feeling adventurous.

Sounds weird, looks a bit like dog food in a bowl (hence the lack of photos), but tastes delicious. And did I mention it’s good for you?

Check out Closet Cooking’s Sausage on Lentils and Greens or Serious Eats’ French Lentils with Sausage, Wilted Arugula & Dijon Mustard recipes for pix if you don’t believe me.

What’s your favorite lentil recipe?

Our first impressions of the place were good. The service was super-friendly, and our waiter even offered us ice-water! (We’ve found it’s strangely rare for people to offer water in restaurants, and sometimes even harder to get them to actually bring you any, much less refill the glass. Happily, this was not the case at Thai Kitchen.) We gratefully accepted, and pondered the lunch menu, which was still in service at 3 PM even though it was clearly stated that lunch service ended at 2:30—score!

We knew we wanted Pad Thai, so we ordered 12A right away, then decided to add another dish so we could share #25, Green Curry with Chicken and Coconut (Hot-Hot). DC and I both enjoy a good green curry, so we were jazzed by the idea of one that was being billed as “hot-hot.” Along with our mains, we were also visiting on the right day for the soup du jour to be Hot & Sour (our fave), so we each got a bowl. DC thought the Hot & Sour soup could’ve been more hot (and sour, presumably), but I thought it was pleasantly understated. Hot & Sour soup is a great dish for warming you up on a cold, rainy day, and since Austin’s been experiencing a lot of these lately (including today), I was pleased with this dish.

Shortly after we’d slurped down the last of our soup, the waiter re-appeared with our mains. Super-fast service! We thanked him and got down to business, munching our egg rolls, and then digging into the Pad Thai and the Green Curry.

Now, I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the Green Curry, even though it made my nose run. It wasn’t über-hot, but it definitely had a nice kick to it, and the accompanying veggies (bamboo strips, zucchini and the odd green pepper) were quite tasty. We avoided the rice (evil carbs!), but devoured the rest. DC even sucked the excess green curry sauce straight off the plate. That’s how tasty it was.

Delicious-looking Pad Thai (photo via Closet Cooking)

Sadly, this was not the Pad Thai of our dreams. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the deliciously savory Pad Thai we had been lusting after for weeks. Instead of a mildly spicy dish stuffed with rice noodles, chicken, egg, peanuts, shrimp and bean sprouts, we got a more sweet, peanutty-flavored dish that mainly consisted of rice noodles, a bit of egg and bean sprouts, and some chicken. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t what we were expecting. And since the Green Curry was so delicious, we were kind of disappointed. I mean, you look at the photo of the homemade Pad Thai that we featured on our previous post, Where can you get good Thai food in Austin? (and shown above for emphasis), and you salivate. Thai Kitchen’s Pad Thai, unfortunately, looked nothing quite as sexy as all that.

Still, we ate it all and were reasonably satisfied with the affair. So while I would definitely return to Thai Kitchen for inexpensive Thai food (our total came to about $17, before tip), I am still searching for the elusive Pad Thai that haunts my dreams.

Any suggestions?

In the meantime, though, I did find a pretty excellent looking recipe for a homemade Pad Thai via Saveur Magazine, over at the Toronto-based Closet Cooking blog, which I plan to try out this weekend. Check out the photo:

Delicious-looking Pad Thai (photo via Closet Cooking--click for recipe!)

Seriously, if that doesn’t make you want to bust out the fish sauce and rice noodles, I don’t know what will.

So share your Thai-style lovin’ with me, Austin. Where do you go to get your Pad Thai on?