curried lentils and sweet potatoes with swiss chard

Deb took lovely pictures when she prepared this. I… did not. This is not a dish that gets much in the way of presentation points. But it is tasty and it is easy.

I’ve made this before, but not since last winter, so I started cutting the sweet potatoes as if they would be ultimately blended. I did better on the second one.

You’ll notice the beet greens on the side; I thought I might need them to supplement the chard, since it was a small bunch. That’ll be really funny in a couple of photos.

I know it’s easy enough to make your own garam masala. But Kalustyan’s is right there.

This is around when I remembered that there’s a reason I usually make this in the bigger pot. There’s a way to get a pound of chard into that pot, but it’s not pretty.

This is not a pound of chard. It’s somewhat less than a pound, which is why I thought I’d need beet greens. Heh.

As you can see from the top photo, the chard quickly reduces down to almost nothing and, if you size correctly in the first place, this is a satisfying one-pot dish. It freezes extremely well and, pre-portioned out, makes excellent lunches – just reheat and go.

My usual accompaniment is some kind of grain – rice, millet, bulgur. But I wasn’t in the mood and opted instead to go with bread. Which in turn required throwing together a quickbread, since all I had defrosted was cinnamon-raisin and that would’ve been gross.

What I got was a decent quickbread, but also a sad story of what happens when you don’t properly grease a pan. Even a glass pan.

It looks pretty gorgeous from the outside.

It has a decent crumb and good rise for quick bread. It’s got cumin and coriander in it, so it’s got a bit of a tint.

But something went very, very wrong. I couldn’t get it out of the pan without destroying the loaf – it stuck to the bottom in one spot and not all of the wiggling in the world would get it free. And so if you flip around this acceptable loaf around, you get this sadness:

I got a nice crispy, crunchy shell of crust and then one naked butt of a bread. The damage is actually to about half of the loaf, which got repurposed (except for the crust, which got eaten straightaway).