NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
January 29, 1998
I have a friend from Minot who loves potatoes. Loves potatoes. I've actually seen him order both French fries and a stuffed baked potato when we've been dining à la fast food. I've seen him come back from the buffet line with mashed potatoes covering at least three-fourths of his plate, along with an appropriate proportion of gravy, of course.
No doubt about it, potatoes can make some people crazy, me included. I've always been a sucker for potato salad. It would most likely take a statistician weeks to cipher all the probable combinations of ingredients I've ingested that have been packaged as potato salad. And I still say that a woman from my home town (I don't want to be a name-dropper, Helen) makes the best traditional potato salad in these parts.
But closing in on two years ago, my experience with potato salad went beyond traditional—way beyond. While attending the June wedding of two good friends, I partook of a delicacy called Aegean Potato Salad. The dish was a mixture of diced potatoes, green onions and copious amounts of garlic. It also had an oil-and-vinegar dressing and three kinds of cheeses: ricotta, Parmesan and feta. You want to talk about creamy? You want to talk about taste?
"Yeah, Yeah. I hope the newlyweds' life together is happy too, but did you taste that potato salad?"
Two weeks later, I still couldn't get the potato salad out of mind, so I took the cookbook featuring the recipe: "Moosewood Restaurant Cooks for a Crowd: Recipes with a Vegetarian Emphasis for 24 or More." The title says it all. The recipe produced a lot of potato salad for my wife and I to eat, but eat it we—mostly I—did. Sure, I could have cut the recipe in half or fourths, but ...
It took a couple of months before my craving for Aegean Potato Salad returned, but sure enough it did, so I made another batch. Then I made an Aegean cheese spread during the holiday season. I've since used most of the ingredients, along with artichokes, to make a hot dip, which is best served with deep-fried pasta chips.
Who knows what's possible when a potato is the inspiration? I'm willing to bet none of you would have ever thought to combine rhubarb and potatoes—sweet potatoes that is. To be honest, neither would I, but I found just such a recipe on the Internet and modified it. It's novel. Give it a try, but be forewarned: I used frozen rhubarb when I made it, and during the cooking process, the rhubarb became a mushy paste. But it still stirred nicely into the lentil-sweet potato mixture. I'd recommend serving this dish with a lemony broiled fish and steamed broccoli.
Curried Lentils with Rhubarb and Sweet Potatoes
This recipe is adapted from a version appearing on SOAR—the Searchable Online Archive of Recipes, University of California, Berkeley http://soar.Berkeley.EDU/recipes/
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients:
4 cups water
1 cup red lentils
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup rhubarb, diced
3 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon cayenne
salt and white pepper to taste
1 18-ounce can vacuum-packed sweet potatoes
½ cup shredded coconut
Procedure:
Bring water to a boil in a saucepan, add lentils and return to boil; reduce heat and simmer about 30 minutes, or until lentils are soft. Remove lentils from heat, drain, and set aside. Heat oil in a skillet, add rhubarb and cook until tender; stir in sugar and seasonings and continue cooking for a few minutes. As rhubarb finishes cooking, mash together lentils and potatoes. Combine lentil-potato and rhubarb mixtures, adjust taste with additional salt and pepper if necessary and spoon into an oven-proof dish that's been sprayed with vegetable oil. Bake at 400 F for about 20 minutes; remove from oven and top with coconut. Continue baking until coconut is toasted.
What's Your Take on This, Julie?
Rhubarb is one of those foods, like zucchini, that's produced in abundance in many North Dakota gardens—leaving people seeking new ways to use it or pass it along to friends. This unusual but tasty recipe combines the tanginess of rhubarb, the exotic taste of curry and lentils, along with the sweetness of sweet potatoes. The finishing touch is coconut, which you could omit if it's not one of your favorite toppings.
Also known as "pie plant," rhubarb is most often associated with desserts. Some ancient Chinese writings suggested a possible medicinal use of rhubarb. It was brought to America with the early colonists but wasn't used very much until the 1700s.
Rhubarb alone is very low in calories (16 calories for 3.5 ounces), but when sugar is added to counteract the natural tartness, the calorie level can soar. Using fresh rhubarb in this recipe would allow a better texture even though freezing won't affect the taste of rhubarb.
Many people associate lentils, another North Dakota crop, with soup, but they also make a nutritious addition to casseroles and salads. Their bland flavor blends well with other ingredients. Lentils are a good source of protein, iron and some of the B vitamins. They are an especially good source of folate, a B vitamin that has been shown to help prevent birth defects such as spina bifida. Research has also shown some beneficial effects of folate in preventing cardiovascular disease.
Each serving of this recipe has about 275 calories, only 5.3 grams of fat and no cholesterol. It also provides about one-fourth of the recommended iron and a full day's supply of vitamin A, as beta carotene.
Sometimes trying an out-of-the ordinary recipe is worth your time. This recipe is nutritious, tasty and a bit adventuresome.
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Sources: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Julie Garden-Robinson (701) 231-7187
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