Dinner Plate #15

 

Here we have Polish beet salad (recipe from Polish Feast), steamed carrots, and brown rice casserole (recipe from Better Food Guru).

We're back to pantry challenge food. I don't know if it will look like that much of a challenge, because I'm realizing that my pantry is more than a little absurdly stocked. It will be a goal of 2025 to get my pantry stocks under control again. Anxiety is hard to control sometimes, and knowing that potentially we could all face drastic increases in grocery prices due to tariffs, I have a tendency to, for lack of better words, freak out.

I'm trying to stop freaking out. We'll see if it works. I did okay with not buying out the stores when I went shopping after Thanksgiving, but I did panic over potentially running out of oil and had to have a conversation with myself. Multiple, actually, as my heart raced every time I saw the olive oil levels decreasing during the last pantry challenge, as if I couldn't just go to the store if I needed to. Maybe I can have more such conversations and gently guide myself to a more sensible level of pantry stocks.

Or not. Sensibility is not always my strong point.

Anyway. A while ago, I bought some precooked beets, and now was the time to eat some of them. This beet salad wasn't bad. It would be better with beets I'd cooked fresh, and no matter what style of beet I try, shortcuts always disappoint a little. But it wasn't a bad salad at all, which is a strong recommendation for the recipe, I think, to try with fresh beets. I'll keep you posted.

I don't know what I expected from the casserole, but it was amazing. I used French green lentils because that's what I had, and I soaked them for a few hours before cooking, because that's my current habit (they cook so much better that way). French lentils are probably becoming my favorite lentil variety. The brown rice I used is the plain long grain kind, nothing fancy, but it was really flavorful in this treatment. There are a lot of veggies here--mushrooms, onions, garlic, broccoli, spinach, and peas--so I probably don't need the extras, but I am somehow no longer capable of just being contented with no veggie sides in a meal like this.

It wasn't the easiest of casseroles, given that you have to precook basically the whole thing before mixing it up--the brown rice and lentils separately while cooking the vegetables in another pan--but it wasn't too fussy. And as I say, it was delicious. It's worth a little extra effort sometimes.