Lentil & Spinach Burger
 
I have to admit I’ve been rather lax on the cooking new dishes recently, although I have been perfecting my pizza making, which seems to be working well. This entry is in honour of the March edition of ‘There’s Something in My....’ which focusses on pulses. I have been using lentils a fair bit recently, but have just noticed I may have missed a couple of entries, as I did make a tasty puy lentil, pancetta & aubergine concoction which went very well with a couple of lamb chops I’d marinated in ‘rosemary, garlic & salt’ (to quote Uncle Monty). Anyway, I digress. I regularly use all sorts of pulses and I suppose a really cheeky entry would have been to make beans on toast, but whilst I didn’t exactly push the boat out in making lentil & spinach burgers, it did take more effort than heating a tin of beans and making toast. As we had half a carrier bag of spinach that Ms R got for a song (well, a quid) from Lewisham market, I thought I’d better use as much of that up as soon as possible. I had planned to make two types of lentil burger, one with puy lentils & streaky bacon and one using the orange variety of lentil. However, being hungry and tired after football (we won 7-6, hooray), I didn’t want to faff about with puy lentils, which take almost three times as long to cook as the orange (or split) variety. I first put the lentils on to cook in some boiling water, after thoroughly rinsing them. Whilst the lentils were cooking, I chopped the ginger, garlic and onion and gently fried them in a separate pan until they were soft (about 10 mins), then mixed in the spinach. The residual heat from the onion mixture and pan was enough to wilt the spinach. The lentils were done in 15 mins, so these were drained and stuck outside in the garden to cool (inclement weather in March does have some uses after all!) for about 10 minutes, which allowed just about enough time to cool them to handling temperature. Mixing the onion and spinach mixture with the lentils, I then added some cumin and a bit of hot madras curry powder to give some flavour. I found that the mixture was still quite moist, so I added some plain flour to absorb some of the moisture. A couple of tablespoons of the mixture are enough to make one burger, so get these and shape into a burger shape, before placing on a pre-floured surface. The mixture is pretty sticky, so the floured surface is essential, unless you want to spend ages scraping burgers off your bread board. Probably chilling the mixture for longer would have eased the handling process, but I was hungry! Heat some oil in a frying pan and then cook the burgers for 3 minutes on each side or until they get nice and brown. Serve in a bun with salad and ketchup, coleslaw optional. I did really like the taste of these and whilst I’m not sure that exercise induced hunger may have played it’s part, I actually preferred these to some meat burgers I’ve eaten (not mentioning any names!). The flavour also improves with time, as I had one in a bun for lunch the next day and it was even better than the night before! Recipe (for 4 burgers): 125g of red/orange/split lentils knob of ginger, finely chopped 1 fat clove of garlic, finely chopped Half an onion, finely chopped 2 big handfuls of fresh spinach 1 heaped tsp of cumin 1 heaped tsp of hot curry powder plain flour (if necessary to absorb moisture)http://www.cooksister.com/2008/03/waiter-theres-s.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
Lentil & Spinach Burger
Tuesday, 25 March 2008