Kedgeree with lentils, leeks, and smoked mackerel

My neighbor is a Filipino-Californian (is that how you say it?) and when he invites us to spontaneous dinner parties in his kitchen, not only is the crowd around the table a colorful mix (Turkish-Italian-Indian-French-Scottish-Swedish-American-German), but the unforgettable menus he serves up are too. The other day we had homemade wild garlic pesto made from wild garlic hand-picked from the nearby Plänterwald forest, served with roast beef and gnocchi, alongside spicy chicken burrito with coriander-cilantro and fried polenta with mushroom ragout ...

These inspiring evenings with their creatively composed food combinations have certainly made me want to try another cross-border crossover dish for our recipe of the week. That's why today we have lentil-leek kedgeree, a dish of Anglo-Indian cuisine with warming spices and thus perfect for this weather limbo (it actually snowed recently! In April!), made from green French lentils, Portuguese smoked mackerel and free-range eggs from Brandenburg.

Ingredients:

• 3 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 500g dried green lentils – e.g. the famous Puy lentils. I used the slightly lesser-known green Berry lentils
• 1 - 2 leeks, thinly sliced
• 8 crushed cardamom pods, or 1 tsp ground cardamom
• 2 cloves
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 4 bay leaves
• 2 tsp piment (I must admit that I didn't look up the translation for "allspice", which was given at this point in the original English recipe, and instead used an Indian spice mix that seemed right to me ... – so in this regard, I would simply advise adding whatever you like)
• 2 tsp curry powder
• Salt
• Pepper or Piment d'Espelette
• a handful of flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
• 2 cans of smoked mackerel
• 3 large hard-boiled eggs
• Spring onions, thinly sliced
• 1 lemon
• 8 tbsp sour cream, crème fraîche or crème épaisse

Preparation:

1. Heat the vegetable oil briefly in a large pot, then add the lentils, leek, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, piment (or another spice of your choice) and curry powder, and simmer over low heat for approx. 20 minutes.
2. Pour in 700ml water and then cook the whole thing covered for another 30 minutes until there is no more water in the pot. If you then find that your lentils are still too firm, simply add a little more water and let them cook further.
3. Remove the bay leaves, cloves and cinnamon, season to taste with salt and pepper or other spices. Now add the 2 tbsp olive oil and the lemon juice.
4. Let the lentils cool slightly before adding the parsley, flaked mackerel, egg, spring onion and crème fraîche or épaisse.
5. Serve and enjoy. Bon appétit!

My tip: it looks nicer plated separately, but this dish – like bibimbap (to complete the crossover fusion round here) – tastes ten times better if you mix everything together and taste all the wonderful aromas at once. And as with all dishes of this kind, it tastes even better if it has sat overnight!

Our wine recommendation: Cuvée "Le monde en parle", a spicy, peppery wine with berry notes.

For dessert we treated ourselves to ricotta with acacia honey from the Pyrenees and the incomparable Piedmont hazelnuts ... I'll let the pictures speak for themselves here ...

- - -

The original recipe is by Harry Eastwood, who published it in his book "A Salad for all seasons", which was published by Bantam in 2013. I found it on the cooking blog "Valentinas Kochbuch".