Urgent recipe help needed please! Lentil recipe not working!

[MrsTittleMouse]

I am cooking red lentils for Rose Elliot's Lentil and Cheese Croquette recipe (from her Bean Book). It says to cook the lentils in a fixed amount of water for 30 minutes unil they are "dry". But mine have turned to porridge!

Is there anything that I can do to rescue them? I have some breadcrumbs, can I use them to thicken the lentils a bit? Or will they just dry out if I leave them in the pan? They are like a hot mud spring at the moment. And they need to be mixed with cheese and onion and formed into croquettes.

Dinner lies in your communal hands!

It sounds like too much water.
Leave them on a very low heat and see if they dry out, failing that then I'd go with the breadcrumbs.

drain them in a sieve,rest the seive over a bowl put a small plate on top of the sieve and then a tin of beans or something to weight it. Leave a little while until all the liquids dripped out and they will be OK to use. (Unless they are completely liquid in which case use as soup instead)

the breadcrumbs will dry them out a lot, and you can always reduce the amount of any liquid ingredient you have to add.

Also I find when I make lentil croquettes they cook much better if they are really well chilled so they firm up. HTH

I think it might be too much stirring: non-veggie non-cook Mum helping me out in the kitchen and loves stirring pots. Could that be right?

Water and lentils were very carefully measured.

i would freeze what you have (can be the basis of soup or dahl for another meal) and start again. Err on the side of caution with the water and just add more when seems to be boiling dry before lentils are cooked

also did the recipie specify red lentils, think brown and green lentils absorb more water

I think you may have beaten them to a puree hot mud spring sounds as if you might have gone past the rescuing stage. But give the draining thing a try - it might work - if it all pours straight through the seive - its soup!

Bum, I should have waited and read all your replies. I threw caution to the wind and added the rest of the ingredients, with a handful of breadcrumbs and put it all in the fridge.

My concern is that it has the texture of wallpaper paste. I think that it may have gone gluey in the manner of mash that has been beaten for too long. :(

I don't want to waste all the ingredients, we're supposed to be having a frugal month. :(

Recipe definitely said red split lentils.

there's a kind of critical point MrsT between soft and dissolved - I generally put a bit less water to start with, keep an eye n them and add a bit of hot water from the kettle every so often if they need more.

Ah, that makes sense. I will try again another time I think - the recipe was quite well received by the grown ups, even if the preschoolers did turn their noses up a bit (do they have a sensor that knows how much a foodstuff costs? - mine both shun lentils, but DD2 was wolfing down smoked salmon at my Dad's at Christmas ).

The croquettes themselves tasted nice, but were really soft in the pan and hard to handle, so not great, but not a throw-in-the-bin disaster either. :)

Lentils (lid on pan)need at most 4:1, water:lentils so for nice 'dry' lentils start with 3 times as much water as lentils (by volume) and then add more if needed.

TBH I don't believe you can make nice firm croquettes from split red lentils, even though I am Rose Elliot's no 1 fan and make all her other recipes a lot.

Ooo, which Rose Elliot recipes do you recommend? We are in a bit of a food rut and I am fighting to get out. :)

She has 2 good pasta sauces in 'the supreme veg cookbook' one is spag bol vegetariana and one is tagliatelle with lentil sauce. The dc love the latter, we have it once a week.The veggie shepherds pie recipe is good too.