Lentil Surprise

Tonight’s dinner was an unqualified success and an unexpected one at that!

We were working on our house project during the day and I had been planning what to cook as I worked – I was thinking lentil burgers, because I knew we had a few eggs and some cheese, accompanied by a Mexican style rice.

When we came in for our coffee break and I put the espresso pot on the gas cooker I realised that we were running out of gas and wouldn’t have enough for cooking dinner.

Luckily we had a good bright day and received a good deal of electrical energy from the sun today – yahoo for photovoltaics!

As we were now going to use the new induction hot plate I decided to do couscous instead of rice and shorten the cooking time.

I put puy lentils on the hotplate to cook with a small handful of porridge oats and some tumeric for flavour. When this was cooked I mixed in a couple of eggs, some pine nuts, grated cheese and a few spoons of gram flour.

We were making this up as we went along! We just added enough gram flour until it looked nice and gloopy, we then decided against burgers and thought about cooking flatbread style.

Enter our old reliable cast iron pan and our new fangled induction hotplate.

What a wonderful combination of old and new. Induction cookers work on magnetism, you have to use a cooking pan which is magnetically active so old fashioned cast iron pots are just the job.

When you lift the pot the cooker stops working, the hot plate only heats the metal that is in touch with it so a small pot only activates a small part of the hotplate – wasting no excess energy.

I love the idea of cooking with magnetism because we use magnets to make the alternator in our wind turbine.

I always loved playing with magnets as a child and I love that I still play them!

The lentil dinner was real tasty too!