I love baking precisely because it is a science.

The creativity comes later in the proportions of things like how much icing/filling to make.

Yeah. Baking is chill because the ingredients are effectively standardized and fungible so if you just follow the steps it’s hard to screw up. You usually only heat the baked good once and that happens in isolation.

Meanwhile, cooking is anarchy. Just because one piece of chicken breast took five minutes on medium heat doesn’t mean that the next one will. You constantly have to monitor and adapt to changing conditions and everything from ingredients to measurements to the very steps of the recipe itself is up for negotiation. And you have to do half the steps while heating the meal and if you ever take too long for something you burn it and it’s ruined.

When I bake I’m relaxed. When I cook I’m in nonstop crisis management mode.

I’ve found that cooking with lots of veggies, kind of towards East Asian cuisine, is a lot less crisis management.

You can chop your veggies in whatever pace you want, before you start heating anything. Just put them into individual bowls until you’re ready.

But you even can start boiling some water and then later throw in rice+lentils, and it doesn’t require much multi-tasking either, because rice+lentils doesn’t need much attention while cooking.
You can generally just set a timer and once that goes off, pause chopping veggies to turn off the heat. Your veggies can’t get burnt while you do that either. 🙃

Are you boiling your rice and lentils together? Does that work? What variety of lentils? Rice? This could be a game changer for my “too lazy to do more than boil water” nights.

I do, yeah. I also saw this sentence on Wikipedia earlier today, so I don’t think I’m alone in that:

[Lentils] are frequently combined with rice, which has a similar cooking time.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentil

And I mean, if you time it right, I imagine you can cook any combination of rice and lentil varieties together.
Well, except beluga lentils, as those turn the water black, which dyes the rice into a rather unappetizing color. 🥴

But if you’re lazy, then I’d generally recommend split lentils. They had their hull removed, which makes cooking them much quicker. You’re also normally supposed to pre-soak lentils and pour the water out, to make them more nutritious and less farty, which you don’t have to do for split lentils.

In the shops, you will usually find “red lentils” and sometimes “yellow lentils”, which are split lentils. If they look not quite round and a bit frizzy, then they are split lentils. Like this:

And then, yeah, white rice, Basmati rice or Jasmin rice is usually close enough to their cooking time. But both, rice and lentils, don’t need insanely precise cooking times anyways, so a few minutes difference is usually still no problem.

Non-split lentils and brown rice or wild rice also have similar cooking times.

My personal staple is Basmati + split red lentils.

Note: I’m not a huge rice expert and had to actually read up on some of the differences just now. If something seems off, I’m probably just dumb. 🫠

What’s your go to seasoning blend for a basic dish? Sorry for the game of 20 questions, but lentils aren’t the staple in my region that they are elsewhere. I want to be more versatile in how I use them (and other legumes). I’ve got red beans and rice on lock, and I made a mean pot of frijoles charro last night, but, to date, lentils are basically nothing more than a way to bulk out ground meat recipes like taco meat or sloppy joes. I could stand to learn how to enjoy them in a more naked form, so to speak.