Tonight's menu: Green lentils and whatever's in your refrigerator

Begin by thinking to yourself how much more you would prefer red lentils. Lament the fact that the local granola store has been sold out of red lentils for a remarkably long time. Decide to press on nonetheless and make the best of it. In your small stock pot, put two cups of green lentils. Follow by adding a pretty decent amount of olive oil. Cover with four cups of water and bring to a boil. Move the boiling pot to another burner and set to simmer. Think to yourself how nice it is that you have two large eyes on your stove and don't have to figure out a way to use the small eye to simmer a stock pot full of green lentils.

On the already hot first eye from which you removed the pot of boiling lentils, add your large wok. Pour into your wok a decent portion of olive oil. No, maybe a bit more. Once the oil is hot, take the diced onions (1 medium) and minced garlic (about three cloves, although they seem kind of on the dry side) you chopped up while waiting for the water to boil and dump them in the wok. Stir with wooden spoon. Chop the shittake mushrooms that you had previously rinsed and left in the sink. Start out chopping them kind of coarse and then change your mind and chop them a little finer than that. No, maybe even more. That looks good. Dump them in with the garlic and onions that need stirring before they burn. Stir the garlic, onions, and mushrooms.

Look in your spice cabinet. Add a little curry powder (careful, that one doesn't have a shaker lid), some cayenne pepper, and some of the annatto powder that you generally use with black beans and rice to the garlic, mushroom, and onion mixture. Look further back in the spice cabinet and find that nothing else in there really interests you. Wonder, once again, how you came to have three things of cumin. When have you ever used cumin? Add salt (but not to the lentils, you've heard doing that before they are nearly done will cause them to become tough). Remove from heat before the mixture cooks too far.

Wait a bit and check the lentils. They're tougher than you expected. Think to yourself that this will be nowhere as good as the red lentils you made two weeks ago. Those were great. Repeat this step several times. At some point give your dog a rawhide treat. Eventually get tired of waiting and turn up the heat some. At some arbitrary point, put the wok back on the first burner (the one from which you did the boiling earlier). Set the burner to slightly higher than medium.

Dump the pot of lentils into the wok. Stir with the wooden spoon. Add some balsamic vinegar, but not as much as that many lentils would seem to require. Add some of the half bottle of chianti that's been sitting next to the stove the last six weeks. Stir. After a bit remove from heat.

Put several scoops of the resulting lentils into a decent sized bowl. Grate a large amount of romano cheese over the bowl. Grind pepper corns in your turkish coffee mill that you use as a pepper grinder (on account of the fact that you have an even better grinder with which you can grind coffee beans for making turkish coffee). Remove flat bread you put in the oven a couple of minutes ago. Eat. Think to yourself that this is a ton better than you were expecting. In the back of your head, wonder when the granola store is going to get red lentils back in stock.