Katherine Sharpe | a pilgrim’s blogress

Budget Recipes, Volume 6: What I Ate on My Late-Winter Vacation (Punk House Lentils)

I know five people who live in a house in West Philadelphia. One of them, I’ve known for a really long time. He told me, on behalf of all the people, that I could come down and stay in their spare room for a few days and check Philadelphia out.

The house looks out over a Sunoco gas station and an A+ market. It appears pretty anonymous from the outside.

Inside, it has things that New Yorkers can only dream about: six bedrooms, miles of creaky staircase, a heartbreakingly ornate wooden mantlepiece and banister that you can chisel white paint off of if you are bored.

The occupants bought an old, single-head espresso machine at a property auction, or something, last year, and hooked it up to the plumbing under their sink so that it has its own water supply.  It kicks the pants off any yuppie made-for-home model you can imagine. The floors in this house may be sticky, the high-ceilinged rooms a little cold, but you can creak downstairs and make yourself a fresh Americano whenever you want. Naturally, I exercised this power several times a day.

Wanting to thank my hosts for putting me up and for sharing their food and coffee beans, I decided to get groceries and cook dinner one night. I picked a one-pot meal from my past—lentil stew, which is pretty much the first complete dinner I learned how to make after moving out of the dorms in college. I still make it every now and then. It’s cheap, makes good leftovers, and tastes better than a lot of more complicated things.

Then I ended up expanding beyond the one pot. They had such a nice collection of well-seasoned cast irons! So, dinner, in three acts (actually better if you start the stew first and then make the other things while it’s cooking):

I. Bacon on the Side

One-half package of the cheap bacon: $1.24

Cook the bacon. Drain on paper towels. Give it to everyone who’s not a vegetarian. Normally, I’d put some bacon into the lentil stew…but I kind of liked it this way. If you’re going to eat bacon, you might as well freaking eat bacon?

II. Lentil Stew

One bag lentils ($1.39)
Two small onions ($.36)
Three carrots ($.34)
Several stalks of celery ($.79)
One tablespoon dried thyme ($.75)
Olive oil
One bay leaf
Three cloves garlic

Price per serving: $.91

Chop the onions, carrots, and celery into small pieces.

Heat olive oil in the bottom of a large, heavy pan, add the onion, and cook on medium heat until the onion is soft. Add the carrots and celery, and cook a few minutes more.

Rinse the lentils and drain them. Add them to the cooking vegetables, along with the thyme, bay leaf, and three cloves of garlic (peeled and smashed with the flat edge of a knife). Add about six cups of water and raise to a boil. Add some salt and maybe some pepper. Then turn the heat down and simmer, uncovered, for about half an hour.

Stir occasionally, especially as the water begins to really cook off. Cook it until the lentils are done and breaking up a little, and enough of the water has gone to make for a nice, stew-y consistency.

Serve with red wine vinegar on top. This stays hot like molten lava, so be careful not to burn your mouth.

III. Blanched and Sauteed Kale

One bunch kale ($.99)
Three shallots ($.65)
Olive oil
Lots of salt

Price per serving: $.41

Anna taught me this method for cooking greens. I don’t think I practice it quite as well as she does but I still get pretty good results: it takes bitterness out, makes classic tough greens super tender, and somehow locks in a beautiful, preternatural green color that’s better than what you started with.

Boil a very large pot of very, very salty water. (I probably used four or five tablespoons of kosher salt in mine.) While it’s boiling, wash the kale, then take the whole bunch and use a large knife to slice it into very thin strips. (Anna calls this a chiffonade and does it more carefully, usually, but then it’s hard to do it carefully with kale which is so curly anyway.)

Add the greens to the boiling water. Put the lid back on. Bring it back to a boil as fast as you can, and watch the greens intently. They probably only need about two to three minutes. When they’re almost tender enough to eat, strain them into a colander. Actually, plunging them into a big ice-water bath is best. But this time I got away with just pouring them out into a strainer and running cold tap water over them to stop the cooking.

Once they’re pretty cool, you can set them aside until you’re ready for this next step. Chop up the shallots into fine strips, and cook them in olive oil until they’re getting just a little bit browned. Add the kale and sauté it until it’s just ready to eat. It should be soft but not so over-cooked that it loses its freaky greenness. If the blanching water was salty enough, you won’t need to add more salt.

It feed four, with enough left over for a midnight snack. Also, I think this dinner might be some kind of personal budget recipe record so far: a complete meal for $1.63 a person. Here’s hoping they don’t take the cheapskate-ness into account when deciding whether or not to have me back again. The love it was made with? That was priceless.

Hey Katherine! Turns out that I lived in one of those big ass houses during my years in Philly. I think ours had 7 bedrooms and, at the time, I paid $92/month rent – yes, it was about $650/month for the whole house. (I won’t tell you what year!)

I still have some relatives further west, around 68th and Osage and my Mom tells me that those houses were absolutely glorious when she was a girl visiting the fam. University City has regained much of its former grandeur and I’d love to be back in school there now.

Thanks for evoking some great memories!