Why hello there, and welcome back to “the Endless Chaos that consumes us all”, Kitchen edition. I’m your Willy Wonka of Culinary Madness, Jon O’Guin, and the hits just keep coming, folks. Before I get into that, however, it’s possible you’re here just to ‘dish’, as it were. In that case, snag this link, and get straight to the service. Everyone else, dig in.

May You Live in Interesting Times

Man, what a week, eh? When last we spoke, I had swiftly bashed out a brief summary and endorsement of a YouTube show about hamburgers, which was really all the strength I had, given the mental stress of the ongoing election, and direct physical suffering of my kidney stone. Right after that, I spent 3 days working on a play I’m directing, and then the election was called, and it looked like Sunday was the bright dawn of a new beginning. I took a deep breath, cleaned out the fridge, and sketched out some quick and simple recipes to get a handle on the coming month. Sure, I was running late, but I was feeling on top of things.

Then, at 3 AM Monday morning, our chickens started screaming in panic. Turns out the automatic door for their coop had decided to die, and some raccoons had wandered in to find something to eat. Luckily, unlike last time, I was awake when it happened, and we believe it was the babies of the mother raccoon, so they hadn’t been after the chickens themselves, but rather their food, and maybe some eggs. As such, all the chickens are currently doing fine…after it was determined that we weren’t going to get the coop closed, so we had to set up a temporary roost for all of them in the house.

We had JUST hauled out the trash bags from the LAST chicken roost!
That feels like a line from a weird sitcom.

2020, folks; never a dull moment. It’s particularly great, because I have already scheduled things from 6:30 to 10 PM this evening, meaning I have to cook, research, write up, and upload this post in the time between “Jon going to sleep at…looks like 4 AM” and 6:30 PM. A very exciting time for us all. Will I do it? Fuck if I know, I’m passing out, and actual Morning Jon can handle this mess.  This was all just Vamping, so we could pad out the word count since I don’t think there’s going to be a lot to say regarding this dish’s history, etymology, or origin.

A New Day Dawns

Alright, is anything on fire? Any beloved pillar of our nation’s fragile psyche snatched away by cruel fate? No? Good. I’m Morning Jon, and after a brief tussle with a cat, today’s looking pretty good, so let’s get some lentils simmering, and we’ll talk turkey. Or, tofurkey, I suppose.

Stop looking at it, or it’ll never cook!

So, Lentils. Why lentil gravy? Well, the answer to that is mush. Specifically, good gravy is, in a lot of instances, fairly thick, at least in America. There are good smooth gravies too, but for certain applications, such as biscuits and gravy*, and during holidays, we tend to veer to a thicker gravy built on robust fonds. This presents a problem for vegetarian or vegan cooking, since a good meat-based gravy contains a fair few elements that make it tricky to pull off.

* -  As a quick aside for my UK friends who may not have heard this explanation before: the American dish of Biscuits and Gravy (which we will be approximating today) relies on two very separate understandings of both of those terms than you might have at first. I covered the distinction between a British Biscuit (what an American would call a “cookie”) and an American one (Which would more closely resemble a unflavored Scone to a Brit, or an unpuffed Yorkshire pudding) in our Culinary Compendium Britain post, while the gravy involved is what Americans call a “country” gravy, more of a “ thin béchamel with crumbled pork sausage and black pepper” than the brown broth-based gravies you’d have on a Yorkshire.

The tricky elements to replicate are…well, pretty thorough. The basic purpose of a gravy is to add a layer of umami and saltiness to a dish, to make it taste/feel ‘meatier’. It’s built using meat-based broths or stocks, a butter-based roux, and a COUNTRY Gravy requires literal ground-up meat in it, and milk for the base liquid! If you took every non-vegan ingredient out of a traditional country gravy recipe, you’d have flour, salt, and black pepper.  But, that’s where the lentils come in.

They can also be made into chili.
That’s not what this is, it turns out I didn’t take a picture of the mid-point, so I just went with the end.

See, lentils break down as you cook them, into a more mush-crumble texture than a lot of other legumes and plants, which is GREAT for this purpose, since it more closely resembles how meat breaks down into a crumble. Since they’re legumes, their broken down starches already form a paste not unlike a roux-thickened liquid. A quasi-meaty texture and thick sauce formed the perfect textural backbone for a vegan gravy. But, why MAKE a vegan gravy?

Well, firstly, because I believe, like many others, that America eats too much meat. Reducing our meat consumption (especially red meat meat) would A: help fight some of the medical issues our nation is facing, and B: help us transition to more sustainable farming practices. Now, am I going to go fully vegan because of this? No. But plenty of people have, and accommodating them is another reasons. In my family in particular, we have a long-standing relationship with a local restaurant that specializes in Biscuits and Gravy, and my brother had recently become engaged to a vegan, so making sure we can make something to help include her if/when we decide to have a Biscuit and Gravy breakfast is a worthy mission. Lastly, of course, there’s the idea of the challenge of it: Why NOT make a vegan gravy? Green Eggs and Ham exists because Dr Seuss was challenged to write a book using only 50 words. Limitations breed creativity. Vegan cooking isn’t some kind of magic, only accessible by those trained in the Druidic ways: if you can cook, you should be able to cook vegan too.

Can you fry rice? Because that’s vegan, as long as you don’t add the pork/ham/bacon/chicken/shrimp/venison/elk/combo.

I personally decided to make this recipe…because I felt bad we’d had a bunch of cheese and meat-heavy dishes, and I was going to make a cool pulled-mushroom taco recipe, but my mushrooms went bad. They’re not a very common variety, so I couldn’t just replace them, so I needed something else to whip up, and I chose this recipe basically at random. So, how do we do it?

Thug Life…Wait, My Bad

This recipe comes from Thug Kitchen…oh, excuse me. It seems that they’ve rebranded due to recent events, “Bad Manners” is a vegan cooking blog with several cookbooks under its belt, based in the LA area, whose conceit has been, as I know I’ve referenced before, an amazingly aggressive/coarse tone in its recipes, as an attempt to undermine the conceit of vegan food as something poised, reserved, and elite. You know, the kind of “yoga in a $10,000 personal studio” mindset. So their recipes include lines like “sprinkle with sesame seeds to make it look extra fucking fancy”, and “you’ll get a creamier sauce using a blender, but we get not wanting to wash that fucker when you’re done.” It’s meant to be very conversational, with the idea being that you’re talking to a normal ‘man of the street’ who’s excited about the recipe, and not averse to a sprinkling of profanity, as few of us fucking are. I legitimately enjoy just reading their recipes even without the intent to cook them, since there’s a real sense of that idea of “if you can’t explain it to a child, you don’t understand it”, where they break down ingredients that might be confusing or off-putting for vegan cuisine in a way that makes them make sense.

This specific recipe mostly has to overcome a couple key flavor components: the “meaty” flavor, balancing the salt, and sausage spices. As the lentils cook, you’re going to start a basic savory starter of some diced onions, minced garlic, black pepper and dried thyme.

To make a savory dish, first soften some onion and garlic.

By the way, while this is a somewhat involved method, the only parts that are really hands-on are cleaning/prepping the lentils (before you cook lentils, you need to give them a once-over to make sure none of gone rotten/ossified. Legit just look them over, and any that look weird, toss ‘em). Once you’ve diced the onions and minced the garlic, everything else is in one of two pots.

Once the onions are softened and seasoned, drain your lentils, make a flour-veggie broth slurry, and mix it all together with some more seasonings, specifically soy sauce (more salt/umami), smoked Paprika (building that sausage flavor), and  red wine vinegar (to cut some of the richness),

None of which is visually distinct enough to be seen once you add the vegetable broth and flour.

 Once everything’s in the pot, you have two options: pop in an immersion blender and break it down…or dump it in a blender and break it down. You want it smoothed out. I personally didn’t go FULLY smooth, and indeed, my mother suggested maybe it would be better if you reserved some of it to add back in after smoothing, since we’re so used to clumps of pork in our gravy. The result is not amazingly pretty.

The soft lighting is doing its best, damn it! Also, I should have figured out something green or white to sprinkle on top. That would have helped. Damn you, forgetting about presentation!

But what it IS…is surprisingly good. It doesn’t taste like the kind of gravy I’m used to. But it tastes like a different idea of it. Like…Remember how I mentioned that the Keema Matar ends up “basically like a chili”? That’s what I felt here: this was basically a gravy. The thyme and onions give just that touch of the herbal element of sausage. I specifically hit my batch with a little extra umami powder, which is a mixture of dried mushrooms, mustard powder, and red pepper flakes, which I think really added something valuable to the dish. Specifically, I think the red pepper flakes were the star addition. Our batch was a little under-seasoned, in that it needed you to add a little salt and pepper, but that’s a great place to be. This was much better than I thought it was going to be, and I thought it was going to be okay. (Though I will yield that I definitely didn’t use vegan biscuits. These were some pre-made Pillsbury, from a tube, suckers. The world’s on fire, I gotta cut myself SOME slack.)

THURSDAY: MAYBE I’LL REVIEW A SHOW, BUT THE MATH DOESN’T LOOK GREAT ON THAT.

MONDAY:  I HAD AN IDEA.

Recipe

Lentil Gravy over Biscuits

Makes enough gravy for 8+ biscuits

Ingredients

Lentils

1.5 cups brown or green lentils

5 cups water

A pinch of salt

Onions

1 teaspoon olive oil

½ a yellow onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp dried thyme

Freshly Ground Black pepper

Slurry

1 tbsp flour

1 cup vegetable broth

Additional seasonings

1 teaspoon soy sauce

½ teaspoon hot smoked paprika

½ tsp red wine vinegar

For serving

Some biscuits, prepared you normally would

Salt and pepper

Preparation

1. Cook the lentils: inspect and rinse the lentils, and then place in a medium saucepan with the water and pinch of salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 40 minutes, until lentils are falling apart.

2. While lentils cook, heat olive oil in a small skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, and cook until browning on the edges, 3ish minutes. Add garlic, thyme, and several cracks of black pepper, and cook an additional 30 seconds, then turn off the heat. Stir together flour and vegetable broth in a small bowl.

3. Drain the lentils of excess water, return to the pan, and combine with ALL ingredients except biscuits: the onion-garlic mixture, the vegetable broth slurry, all additional seasonings. Stir to combine, and blend together, either with an immerision blender or in a standard one,

4. Bring to a simmer and cook down for 2-3 minutes until flavors are balanced and consistency is as desired.. Ladle over biscuits, season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve.