Easy peasy

    'Cause "lentily" wouldn't rhyme. For reasons that I cannot explain, I keep trying and trying to make lentil hoecakes, which is to say fried cornbread with lentils mixed in. I think the original thought-- Oh hell, I just have to leave that as a sentence, don't I? Just too cool! OK, let's try again: My thinking probably had to do with the fact that corn, although it has a lot of amino acids, is nothing like a complete protein. Lentils are much better in this regard. (I years ago posted that beans aren't a complete protein without brown rice; this I am told is not true. All apologies.)
    Anyway, I seem to have mastered lentil/polenta fritters, or as I prefer to call them, polentil hoecakes. (This will also be my drag queen name, by the way.) They take about an hour, as a minus. As a plus though, they're big fun to make.
    So far I've made them with black lentils (from Whole Foods) and split red lentils (from Trader Joe's). The latter are problematical mainly because TJ's kind of omits the instructions. There's a recipe on the package, but no simple How to Cook These if you don't feel like following the recipe. However, with a lot of added ingredients, the recipe time is 20 minutes, so it stands to reason that the same time would be adequate for just cooking them in water. And, uh, all the spices in the house.
    Regardless, I start by putting a half cup of filtered water in my saucepan and put the pan on medium heat for 5 minutes. I add 1/4 cup of lentils. I add ground cloves and cumin as well as Crystal hot sauce and Tabasco and salt and pepper. So far, I've been adding all these by random shakes and taps, because I'm a rebel. Someday perhaps I'll get organized and measure them out. So far, the problem is more too little spices than too much. So, uh, feel free to have a free hand.
    I cook the red lentils at medium-low heat (2 on this electric range) for 20 minutes, the black for 30. Then I add another 1/4 cup of filtered water and raise the heat back to medium (5). This is also a good time to start preheating the oven to 350. After a minute, I add 1/2 cup of organic yellow grits (aka polenta). I cook for 4 or 5 minutes, stirring like a madman (or anyway poking at it with a spatula) in hopes of keeping the stuff from sticking to the sides and bottom of the allegedly non-stick saucepan. Fairly futile, but fun.
    I dump the goop out on parchment paper on a baking pan. An ambitious person or one with time on his or her hands could put the pot in the fridge or freezer such that the goop is not so hot (or, ya know, wait 10 minutes or so) and then form the polentils into patties. Because the point I was getting around to eventually is that the resulting product is quite burger-like, particularly if you use the black lentils because then it even looks burgerish.
    However, being lazy and impatient, I just spatula my polentil (Hey, it's my word! I get to decide if it's singular, plural or both!) onto the paper and throw the pan in the oven. You do not want your pan on the top rack or the parchment paper will hit the top element and you will be very unhappy. I cook for 15 minutes. I cut up my polentil at this point into maybe 2" by 2" chunks, because when I tried to flip the whole dealio it mostly wound up on the floor, making me very VERY unhappy. Flip the chunks, put back in oven for another 5 minutes.
    Grease your skillet with EV olive oil. Turn the heat to medium. Good cooks do this before putting their fritters in; as you've no doubt guessed, I did it the other way around. They turned out; maybe it was a brilliant innovation! Cook on one side for two minutes; flip and cook on the other side for two minutes. Corn is fairly unpleasant tasting burnt, so do err on the side of undercooking.
    Yeah I know, there's a lot of steps and it looks really complicated, but it just isn't. They're tasty hot, they're tasty warm and much to my surprise, they're tasty cold, too. I think they're pretty good burger substitutes for vegetarians and vegans. You can just cut them up patty-sized midway through the baking stage rather than 2X2 (or going through all the cooling it to make patties before the baking.)
    Try 'em! You'll like 'em!

Edit: Previously, it said to cook the lentils in a cup of water rather than half a cup. Strangely, even though I didn't come back and look this up, that's how I remembered it too when I tried to make this again. You wind up trying to fry lentil soup. It didn't turn out that well, though it didn't turn out all that badly either. My apologies if anyone in the world actually tried to follow the recipe as originally written.