RICE & HERBED LENTILS

I worked this past weekend and today Monday, I was off of work, and today needs to be my cooking day.

Today I made a recipe I’ve made for years. It is from a short compilation of recipes my brother and I made when we happened to work in the same office in the 1980s. My brother and I asked coworkers to submit recipes, we scotch-taped them to 8 ½ x 11 paper, scotch-taped some more clip-art that we really clipped with scissors and Xeroxed the whole bunch and just stapled the upper left corner. The compilation is called “Holiday Recipes” but when one reads the recipes, you really couldn’t tell what holiday it was except that we have the occasional Santa Claus included on the sheet. There really wasn’t any organization, these were really just non sequiturs of food.

It was a different time then, we had large Steel-Case brand desks that were in rows out in the open. We were clerks. There was an amazing amount of privacy in the openness and din of conversation. We all had IBM correcting Selectric Typewriters. I prized mine, after all, I was a “clerk-typist.” One had to pass a typing test to be a clerk-typist. Actually a number of the recipes were typed on these typewriters.



While I still have the compilation of recipes (I should scan them all at some point and share here mostly for a good laugh) I got this recipe from that compilation.

ORIGINAL RECIPE

Rice & Herbed Lentils

2 2/3 cups chicken broth
¾ cup dry lentils
¾ cup chopped onion
½ cup brown rice
¼ cup orange juice
½ teaspoon dried basil
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon oregano dried
¼ teaspoon thyme dried
1/8 teaspoon pepper
4 ounces Swiss cheese

Combine broth, lentils, onion, uncooked rice, orange juice, and seasoning. Shred half of the cheese, stir into lentils. Bake in 1 ½ quart casserole at 350º for 1 ½ to 2 hours, stirring occasionally. Cut remaining cheese into strips. Uncover casserole then top with cheese. Bake 2 to 3 minutes more until cheese melts.

Over the years I made only a couple tweaks to this recipe, I’ve changed the broth to vegetable broth to make the recipe vegetarian; however, with the cheese it still would not be vegan. I use low-fat cheese. I don’t measure herbs exactly and I am generous with them. It is not necessary to stir while cooking.

Today I used three different kinds / colors of lentils for interest. Black / Red / Green

One thing I’ve noticed in my collection of cookbooks, there have been forays into vegetarianism over the years and decades. If you read some recipes it seems that as long as you avoid killing an actual cow for your recipe it could be deemed vegetarian. I see a number of 1960s & 1970s “vegetarian” recipes that call for chicken broth.

CURRENT ADAPTATION

Rice & Herbed Lentils

2 2/3 cups vegetable broth
¾ cup dry lentils
1 chopped onion
½ cup brown rice
¼ cup orange juice
½ teaspoon dried basil
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon oregano dried
¼ teaspoon thyme dried
1/8 teaspoon pepper
4 ounces low-fat Swiss cheese

Combine broth, lentils, onion, uncooked rice, orange juice, and seasoning. Shred half of the cheese, stir into lentils. Bake in 1 ½ quart casserole at 350º for 1 ½ to 2 hours,. Cut remaining cheese into strips. Uncover casserole then top with cheese. Bake 2 to 3 minutes more until cheese melts.


SOLI DEO GLORIA