Mjeddrah (Middle Eastern Lentil Pilaf)

I am just going to come out and say it, this dish the way I made it looks a little like a bowl of gray goop. Shockingly, I may have made a couple of errors making it! However, it tastes pretty good. Try to keep an open mind…….

I started screwing up this recipe in the grocery store. The recipe calls for brown or red lentils. I looked all over and all I could find were lentils with a garlic and herb packet. The bag just says lentils and to me they look green rather than brown or red. Since that was the only option, I decided that maybe the greenish lentils were similar to brown. I am not sure what kind of alien logic determined this for me, but there it is. In the same aisle (I swear I was dead sober throughout this entire exercise) I looked for long grain wild rice. Since wild rice seemed to be the wrong choice (in retrospect, a far better one than I selected) I bought the only brown rice in the aisle. Unfortunately, it was boil-in-a-bag rice and that might not be what they traditionally use in Middle Eastern cooking. Finally, I wandered around the spice aisle looking for cardamom pods. No dice. So I bought a jar of ground cardamom and called it a day.

When I decided to tackle the recipe, I again proved that following directions is only of marginal importance in my world. I rinsed off the lentils (I wasn’t sure what they meant by picked over, they looked alright to me) and put them in the boiling water. They sat for about three hours before it was time to make dinner according to my two year old’s clock. I laid out all of the ingredients and started to look for the carrot peeler. Then I remember I lost it in dish washer accident (it slipped down into the bottom and the handle broke off, no damage to the dish washer) a year ago which drives home how dependent I am on bags of baby carrots and frozen vegetables. Fortunately, I remembered I have a knife that I have neglected to sharpen, ever, so it seemed dull enough to use as a peeler without losing a digit. This worked out much better than my plans typically do.

I sautéed the onions, celery and carrots and all seemed well. I added them into the pot of lentils. Then I transferred the whole mixture into a larger pot since there was no way everything was going to fit. At least none of the pots in my house get lonely when I cook. I added three cups of water under the same delusion that green lentils and brown lentils are the same and then removed the rice from the boil in the bag home it knew and threw it into the pot. I added the garlic (finely chopped in my world but kind of chunky for the general population), Chile pepper and cinnamon stick. The cumin was no problem but when I got to the cardamom, I remembered I needed a whole pod equivalent. Google indicated that two pods is approximately 1/3 of a teaspoon. This isn’t terribly convenient information since I don’t have a 1/3 teaspoon in my measuring spoons set; however, the recipe called for 2-4 pods so between 1/3 and 2/3 of a teaspoon, or a heaping ½ teaspoon it is! I brought it to a boil as instructed. The final error comes with the additional water. I added a cup about halfway through and then poured it off towards the end. I also ended up turning up the heat at the end in the attempt to de-humidify the mix. As you can see from the photo, maybe not as successfully as I hoped!

At this point, my two year old is hugging my leg saying “Mom, I am SO hungry” so I added a bunch of salt and pepper, maybe 20 twists a piece from the grinder. This seems like a lot, but I had a veritable vat of Mjeddrah at this point. Then it was time to eat. Amazingly, even though it looked like a pile of goop, it tasted pretty good. My two year old liked it and ate two helpings. We had it the next day. And the next. The recipe says six servings but this is true only if you are feeding calorie loading super distance runners at your house. Next time, I might try to find the correct lentils and rice. Or I might just cook the vegetables and add the spices. It might be just as delicious, better for me and look more appetizing! Ah well, you can’t win them all!