I think I'm a bit better this week. A tad glum, a smidge dopey, but definitely less fraught. You can tell by the fact I cooked this on a Monday night with no bother. For I have made fig leaf pilaf. It's both a moderate faff and pretty forgiving. Three pans, two hours to cook, actual chopping/stirring time maybe 10 minutes. Will take it, since I got it started early enough to do the various early bits before I finished work.
We are pilaffing lentils as well as rice, so step 1 is just cook the lentils. Almost through Liz's magic lentils for lockdown 1, which I will miss so much and make everything better. In this case, just a 15-20 minute boil and they are set.
Then read ahead and realise there's another long-cook tomato sauce with onion, cinnamon and garlic. Reader, I Marcella Hazanned that sucker. AKA, I chucked a whole onion, oil and some bashed garlic cloves plus ground cinnamon into a tin of tomatoes, loosened with a bit of water, and just cooked that out rather than chopping/mixing/whatever. It gives you a sweet, rich sauce and requires zero faff.
At some point after you've started the sauce, there is chopping and mixing of onion and garlic in fat, and then mixing basmati rice and those lentils from the back of the stove into it. Plus cumin and coriander seeds.
And then: casually get your fig leaves out of the freezer. Because yes, I have laid them up from a couple of weeks ago when I realised I'd run out of veg-forward week time when fig trees would actually have leaves and this new-to-me recipe sounded like fun. Just dropped by my fig leaf purveyor (in this case my parents, though there's one overhanging the school here I might forage if necessary).
They are a bit manky tbh, with holes in, as they were late leaves, but they aren't for eating, just for perfuming. And despite being in the freezer they did perfume up as they defrosted. All you do is pour in stock in ratio to the rice, then lay the leaves on to form a bit of a seal. Lid on, 20 minutes plus on very, very low.
If I'm honest, the amount of butter in this was as tasty as the fig leaves, but there was an interesting waft to the whole thing which made it fancier than just rice plus lentils.
I forgot to take a photo of the dish with sauce, but imagine this with a red splodge on. And peeling the leaves off is fun. For a very 2020 measure of fun.
I hope you too are at a bit more of a balance. A week that's fairly okay with some limited thrills related to leaves - that's the kind of time I could do with.
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