My name is Jay and I'm a lentil eater

I eat beans, peas, lentils and chickpeas all the time. One of my favourite lunches is a simple Jamie Oliver recipe: Mix chickpeas or white kidney beans (out of the can) in a bowl with a can of tuna and chopped up celery. Add two or three tablespoons of olive oil or canola oil (I use a bit of both) and salt and pepper. That's it. You eat it cold. Oliver says it's a common working-class Italian lunch.

Today for lunch I made a lentil dish I found in Saskatchewan Pulse Growers' Pulse Point magazine. The dish is called vegetarian lentil delight mujaddara, and it's originally from a cookbook by Habeeb Salloum. Salloum is 80 years old and lives in Toronto, but he grew up in Saskatchewan. The cookbook is called "Arab Cooking on a Saskatchewan Homestead."

Here is the recipe, step by step:

1. Put one cup of rinsed red lentils in a pot. Add 5 cups of water and bring to a boil. Cover and cook over medium heat for 15 minutes or until lentils are half cooked. I e-mailed Salloum to see if I should use split or whole red lentils. He didn't get back to me, so I used the only thing my Safeway sold: split. Turns out that split red lentils get very soft — I'd say "fully cooked" not half cooked — in 15 minutes. They also lose all their colour.

2. Add a quarter-cup of rice to the lentils and bring the mixture to a boil. Turn to low, cover, and cook another 20 minutes. (My lentils turned to total mush in that time, but I wanted to make sure my rice was cooked.)

3. Meanwhile put six tablespoons of butter or margarine in a frying pan and fry three medium onions, chopped. (I reduced the margarine to only two tablespoons and used one large sweet onion.) Saute onions until they're golden brown.

4. Add all contents of the frying pan — onions and melted margarine — to the cooked rice and lentil mixture.

5. Then add one teaspoon of salt (I used half that), half a teaspoon of pepper, half a teaspoon of cumin, and a quarter-teaspoon of chili powder. Stir it all together and cook another three or four minutes.

I didn't really know what to expect. What I got was a delicious and hearty SOUP! It had the consistency and colour of French Canadian pea soup (made with yellow peas.) I am a big fan of pea soup with ham, and this mujaddara lentil soup was every bit as good. The photo shows my finished product.

It's easy to support Western Canadian pulse growers when the results are always so good — and good for you.