Keystone Kops Skool of Kooking

    As I mentioned, I invented lentil pancakes the other day, probably for the twentieth time or so. The problem with this is that I made a brilliant innovation caused by making a bonehead mistake before that. Now I want to figure out how to get the same result without either boneheadedness or brilliancy, the latter of which had a fair quantity of boneheadedness as well.
    What I was doing was cooking black lentils. The Whole Foods package had different directions from what I remembered (four times as much water as lentils instead of two times) but I think I did ok. The whole recipe was inspired by finding two things at Aldi: their gluten-free flour mix; and tomatoes with lime and cilantro. (Also jalapenos!) The idea such as it was was to make pico de gallo pancakes. I also steamed butternut squash cubes and collards because I try to make balanced meals and because I knew it would excite shock and dismay on Facebook. And I added crushed garlic, cumin and cloves to the lentils becase it's my freaking religion, and sauteed sweet onions because that's another prime tenet.
    I mixed all this stuff in the stew pot, then worried that all this hot stuff would prematurely cook the pancake batter. So I ran some water in the sink and put the pot in without putting a lid on (did I not say boneheaded?) and went off to take care of something. By the time I returned, the ship was foundering and taking on water. So I dumped it all in the strainer and got rid of the added water, but also the tomato juice and lime juice from the canned tomatoes.
    This was all accidentally brilliant, because I wound up with perfect pancakes, whereas if I hadn't done the straining operation, they would have been runny as anything. I had almost as much stuff as I had pancake batter and I was sure that this would never work, but it really did. So all I have to do is drain the tomato can first and use that as part of the water for the lentils. Right? All solved! Well, if not, we'll just have the glorious fiasco I expected to have the first time I did this. Fortunately, there are a lot of good things in my freezer and if that doesn't suit, there are a lot of good restaurants around here. Big fun regardless, I figure.
    Amelia the cat still wants to escape, but is being slightly less of a pain in the butt about it. She joins me in not being a fan of clouds, apparently.