My First Ottolenghi Recipe – Spiced Red Lentils with Cucumber Yogurt

After salivating over Yotam Ottolenghi's many cookbooks, we finally tried an Ottolenghi recipe, courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library's eBook version of Plenty.  The recipe we tried was the spiced red lentils with cucumber yogurt, one of the book's few recipes we could construct with ingredients we largely had at home.

While the dish was fairly easy to construct using the recipe directions, I was shocked at how many ingredients  (24) were used for this otherwise relatively simple dish.  Preparing that number of ingredients, along with blending some of the spices, made the meal more complicated than what I want in a weeknight meal and I could see why Ottolenghi's at-home recipes have some detractors.

Ultimately though, the dish was pretty tasty – rich flavor, enhanced by the fresh and dried herbs – but again, maybe not worth the effort.  The lentils, even with the flavored yogurt, were also not complex or interesting enough to stand alone as a one-pot dinner, rather would be better served with several other options.  

On to the next one!