Everyone has at least one emergency recipe in their arsenal,
even if it’s just frozen chips with cheese. When the cupboards are bare and
it’s lunchtime, this is the one that I fall back on time and time again. It’s
based on a recipe I saw a few years back in The
Guardian by Yotam Ottolenghi (before he was famous, yeah?). Lots of budget
foodstuffs like pigs ears and oxtails have recently been picked up by celebrity chefs
and so thrown off their uncool reputations. Lentils, on the other hand, still bring
to mind images of dingy 1970s bedsits and hippies. I’m not going to fight for
their cause but I do always have some in the cupboard and they taste great in
spicy soups or as sloppy rainy day meals like this! I make this recipe by
memory and according to what doesn’t have a thin layer of mould on it in the
fridge; the results are always slightly different but still tasty.
