Every bite of food should be a sweet bite
You know when you read recipe after recipe after recipe, something just sticks somewhere and when you are cooking you have that brain of your work as a file system.
You start with a specific idea of the dish, then while you are dicing and sautéing you see a half lemon and your brain does a quick search and then tells you, why not add it? You see the fresh herbs in the garden and why not? You see the wine bottle and you think, perfect.
I think our fellow Raymond is reminiscing a bit his childhood with the options he has given us while hosting this months Gutsy Cook menus. Not that I mind one bit. Seriously, who can say no to chicken pot pie?
I usually don’t, specially when I go and order it in any restaurant that has it on the menu. I have been holding off in making it at home, because it just seems like a long difficult dish to make.
But, I’m going to prove to you how wrong I was on that assumption and tell you that in less than 1 hour you can serve this to your family. First the recipe is made with puff pastry and not pie crust, so you can just go out to the supermarket and get one of those frozen packages, that are just as good a homemade but without the hours upon hours of preparing it. And while you are there, stop by your supermarket deli and pick up a roast chicken.
See? The most difficult time consuming part of the recipe is DONE.
It felt good to be back in the kitchen this weekend. First order of business was taking care of lunch and what better way to do that then serve our gutsy cook option for this week, which was Spanish Lentils.
I could go on about how lentils is a pulse and not a grain and all that jazz, but then I wrote about it in our Gutsy Cook pre-cook post and you can read about it here.
This recipe was super easy to do, the only thing I found difficult was to get the lentils to be soft enough for the dish. I cooked them as noted, but after 40 minutes they were still hard, not even to “al dente” stage, but “hard”. So, I cooked them an extra 15 minutes and they still did not reached the right stage. I was afraid of cooking them more, since they still had to be cooked with the other ingredients, so I took them out and hoped for the best.