Phyllo dough lentil pouches

The other weekend, some friends and I got together to play Diplomacy. I made some lentil pouches, as it's no fun stabbing each other in the back on an empty stomach. They came out rather well.

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This is actually the only complex foodstuff I have ever made without following an explicit recipe. Let's see if I can coherently describe what I did.

Ingredients

  • 2 cups brown lentils
  • 4 cups water and/or veggie broth
  • 2 cloves minced garlic
  • a chopped onion or two
  • frozen peas and/or corn
  • spices such as cumin and chili powder
  • lime juice
  • 20 layers of frozen phyllo dough (Note: Some phyllo dough is vegan and some isn't.)
  • olive oil

Directions

You'll need to thaw the phyllo dough in advance. Follow the directions on the package; I believe overnight in the fridge works.

Filing

  1. Sautee some onion and garlic in a large pot.
  2. Add the lentils and the liquid. Throw in some peas and or corn for variety.
  3. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer until the water is absorbed.
  4. Mix in your spices and some lime juice. (The acidity seems to be a good thing.)

Pouches

  1. Unroll the phyllo dough roll. Keep the dough you're not working with covered in plastic wrap and a damp towel on top of that to keep it moist but not wet.
  2. Take one layer of dough at a time and lay it on a piece of parchment paper or the like.
  3. Cover the dough with olive oil. You should brush each layer gently with oil; I sprayed each layer with olive oil-based Pam because I'm a bad person.
  4. Take the next sheet of dough and lay it on top of the first. The oil is the 'glue' that holds them together.
  5. Repeat until you've got four layers of dough.
  6. Cut the layered dough into six squares.
  7. Put a dob of filling in the middle of each and squeeze the corners up into a pouch shape.
  8. Put the pouches on a greased cookie sheet and bake for 8-9 minutes at 375°F.
  9. Repeat until out of dough. I had a twenty layer roll, which made about 30 four-layer-thick pouches.

Once more into the blogs

Apparently, I've decided to start a new blog. I'm not really sure what I'll do with this blog. I don't really need a blog at the moment, but I feel I should have one just in case. One day, I might conceivably have a neat project I'd like to share online. If and when that day comes, it would be good to already have a working blog; it would be one less thing for future project-having me to worry about

I've messed around with blogs before. I had a Byteflow blog at one point and actually posted a few entries. (Maybe I'll import and back-date them here.) It's a great system, but at the time I didn't really have the time or energy to wrap my head around Django or troubleshoot FCGI issues on a cheap shared web host. I had Wordpress installed for quite a while, but I never did anything at all with it. At some point I realized a static blog would be much less hassle. I didn't really need much dynamic content and didn't look forward to dealing with comment spam. I strongly considered some of the Python static blog generators like Blogofile, Hyde, and Pelican.

In the end, I chose o-blog. I've been moving more and more of my life into one directory of org-mode files; why shouldn't my blog live there too? Note that o-blog should not be blamed for the appearance of my blog. I brutally ripped everything pretty out of the example templates in order to simplify them enough for me to fully understand.