What We Ate Wednesday--Mujaddara with Flat Bread

Hello Lovelies! Have you ever heard of Mujaddara? It's a Lebanese dish. It basically means lentils, rice and caramelised onions. Who doesn't like that?

When my in-laws were alive, a Lebanese restaurant was the perfect compromise. Roy could get lamb, we could get lentils and nobody felt hard done by.

I have seen several versions of this recipe. many of the call for frying the onions on copious amounts of oil. I am not that keen on frying. I am sure it tastes *heavenly* to be fried in 3/4 oil, but this recipe is delicious the way that it is, with considerably less fat. It is adapted from a recipe from www.healthy-delicious.com. It is also fairly economical, too.

not too pretty to look at, but pretty darned tasty to eat!

Mujaddara

1 TB oil
2 onions, thinly sliced into rainbows
100g (1/2 cup) puy lentils
100g (1/2 cup) brown easy cook rice (original recipe used basmati rice)
500ml (2 cups) water
1 tsp each ground cumin, ground coriander, ground cinnamon (original recipe used cardamom instead of coriander, bit I don't like cardamom)
Lots of freshly ground pepper

Lemon garlic sauce:
Juice of one lemon
up to 5 cloves minced garlic
pinch sea salt

1.Heat the oil and cook the onions until they soften and start to turn brown. (about 10 minutes)
2. Add the lentils and rice and water to the onions and bring to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer with the lid on for 20 minutes.
3. Take off the lid and the spices. Stir and cook uncovered until all liquid is absorbed--about another 10 minutes or so.
4. Remove from the heat, add the pepper and drizzle on the lemon garlic sauce and stir to mix.

 If gluten is not an issue for you, serve with pita bread. As I can’t find a decent gluten free pita I use my standard 5 minute flatbread recipe.  5 minute flatbread is a *slight* misnomer as it takes about 5 minutes to put together and then 5 minutes each side under the grill to cook so it technically should be called 15 minutes flatbread, but since every step takes about 5 minutes I have decided to keep the illusion of swiftness in the name because it tastes amazingly good for gluten free and is relatively quick in terms of making bread from scratch.


GF 5 minute flat bread is adapted from the blog Including Cake.  

 Ingredients:

200g (1.5 cups) gluten free flour mix or regular flour

3 tsp baking powder

1 tsp xanthan gum (only if using GF flour)

2/3 cup soya yogurt

¼ cup water (maybe a splash more if needed)

½ tsp salt to taste

1 TB nutritional yeast.

Makes 4 small saucer sized flatbreads

Method

Put your oven rack up to the top of the oven. Heat the grill to medium and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Mix the flour, baking powder, nutritional yeast, xanthan gum and salt in a bowl then add the yoghurt and water and stir through, using your hands at the end as necessary. This should result in a rather sticky dough.

Divide the dough into 4 equal pieces using wet hands and form circular patties with your hands approx. 5mm thick. . Lay on the baking sheet and sprinkle with salt and pepper if desired.

Grill for approx. 3-5 minutes on each side (depending on the strength of your grill) until lightly golden and puffed up.

I find smoothing the rather sticky dough with wet hands gives a nice finish. It is amazing how this puffs up under the grill and goes all crispy on the outside, soft on the inside and golden brown and yum.

If you wanted to make the flatbread instead of using store bought pita, go ahead. Just use while flour and eliminate the xanthan gum as that is only for GF bread.

This is really tasty and very healthy. I have served it to company and the recipe easily doubles. Just use a bigger pot.

Enjoy!