Lentils Fusion Style

lentils fusion style with sausages and potatoe

Besides the fact that lentils are damn high in their nutritional value, they make me remember my youth. Up till today my fathers favorite food of all is the original Swabian style lentil stew. So not only as a kid i very much enjoyed having lentils a  lot. For the above mentioned original Swabian lentil stew we normally would use brown lentils to make this dish and we would add a regional sausage speciality to it, the so called "Saitenwurst". As both are kind of hard to get over here, I have to improvise (like oh so many times :(...).

Instead of these original ingredients, I had to alter the dish and use these paprika sausages that I got in Hong Kong (not bad at all either) as well as those yellow dried lentils that we can find on the local markets.
Normally we will home made noodles swabian style (called "Spaetzle") as a staple food with the lentils. But if you do not have a special press for these noodles, you need to make them by hand which is quite tiresome. As I am a lazy bum and never found the press to buy anywhere in China, I used potatoes to go along with the lentils instead of the "Spaetzle". While we are talk about original versus copy, the swabian original recipe does not add any other veggies to the dish. But I like to mix and match here and with the time my dish grew into a fusion kind of recipe that is influenced by Indian style lentils and my traditional style swabian lentils.

One day if I find the right lentils and sausages and the noodle press, I will post the original recipe here, promised.


Ingredients::

• 2 sausages
• 1 diced onion
• 1 diced carrot
• 1 leek cut in rings
• 1 diced celery
• 1 table spoon of flour
• 1 table spoon of butter
• 250 gram dried lentils
• 1 table spoon of white vinegar
• a dash or salt, a dash of pepper
• a good handful of smoked bacon cubes (cooked bacon would not work here).

If you work with dried lentils, as me, you have to soak the lentils over night in water to get them soft and reduce the cooking time of the lentils. For the cooking: We will heat two spoons of oil. If the oil is nice and hot, we will add the onions and fry them on hot heat until they turn sea through, then we add the bacon cubes and fry them well through. Now we take the diced carrots,, the leek, the cubes of celery and the lentils, add them to the onions and let them sweat for a while. After that we cover everything with water until water covers all the ingridients well. Then we cook all that on a small flame for 20 – 30 minutes, everything should be firm to bite. In the meantime we will cook the potatoes in another pot, depending on the size of the potatoe between 15 – 20 minutes, until they are soft in the middle. Then we will prepare a roux with the flour and the butter in another pot and deglaze it with the soup from the lentils, until we got a nice and viscid sauce. Now we will add some salt, pepper and the vinegar to the sauce and add the vegetables to it and add the sausages. We cook all of that for another five minutes till the sausages are cooked through. Then we are ready to serve. Enjoy :)