We struggle with healthy breakfasts around here. The Husband and I were not raised on fresh fruit and yogurt; we woke up to sausage gravy & biscuits, cinnamon toast with sugar and butter, bacon, Captain Crunch, bacon. This lentil bread looked like something healthy that might suit us both.
I watched the entire video and wrote down the recipe, then added the ingredients to my grocery store list. One ingredient, psyllium husks, had to be shipped. In the video, the cook used an immersion blender to grind up the lentils. I've wanted an immersion blender but have never had one, so I ordered one of those, too. The psyllium husks and the immersion blender arrived on my doorstep yesterday. I went straight to work on the bread.
The first step was to soak the lentils for an hour or so. Without checking the recipe, I dumped the whole one-pound bag into a bowl and covered them with water. Two hours later, I pulled out the recipe and saw that it called for one cup of DRIED lentils, but I'd already soaked them all. Had to google to find out how many WET lentils equaled a cup of dried lentils. (FYI, one cup of dried lentils equals 2 to 2.5 cups of cooked lentils.)
Things went downhill from there.
Long story short, I made mistake after mistake, such as dumping the leavening ingredients into the bowl of extra beans instead of the food processor (which I'd decided to use instead of the immersion blender since I had not yet washed it). In the end, into the oven went two loaf pans of bread batter, one of them not quite as full, each of which contained a questionable quantity of ingredients. They came out of the oven just about the time The Husband got home from work.
The bread wasn't too bad. But it wasn't too great, either. It came out half (or less) of the height of the bread in the video - *maybe* 2" tall. Maybe my loaf pan was bigger. The bread held together well enough to be sliced, but despite the parsley, cheese, and garlic that went into it, it didn't have much taste.
Here's the sad part:
The thing that made me want to make the bread in the first place was not so much the bread, itself, as the yogurt-based spread they made to go with it. Yogurt, fresh mint, lemon, toasted sesame seeds, other stuff, smeared on a slice of the bread. The bread, itself, had yogurt in the batter. I had bought enough yogurt to make one loaf of bread AND the spread. Of course, having made TWO loaves of bread, I'd used all of the yogurt and couldn't make the spread.
We'll eat the rest of the bread - at least one of the loaves - with dinners. But I probably won't be having it for breakfast until I can put some yogurt spread on it.
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It's chilly on the back porch this morning. My hands are cold. I need to think of something to do inside until it warms up.
On my sewing table are the portraits of The Grandchildren. Technically, I could call each of them "finished." The Granddaughters' portraits were done in colored pencil on mixed media paper, the Grandson's in chalk pencil on pastel paper. I would like to do all of them again in chalk pencil, preferably on pastel mat, which I don't have in the house right now.
The yard needs mowing, but ever since I ran over a mole trap with the lawnmower, the mowing is now The Husband's job.
Maybe I'll just paint.
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