Eating legumes

Legumes are a cool family of plants, notable for their ability to fix nitrogen directly from the air. And we like to eat them. Most of the air around us is composed of a fairly inert gas: nitrogen. Nitrogen is also one of the four most abundant elements in living matter, along with carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Amino acids and nucleotides, and thus protein and nucleic acids contain most of this nitrogen in us.

And how do we humans get this inert gas to make our DNA? Well, we don't. Mostly we consume previously living things that already gathered it and incorporated it into organic compounds for us. But someone at some point needs to do the hard work of getting this inert gas to react and form compounds.

Plants belonging to the Fabaceae family (legumes) can accomplish this by taking nitrogen gas directly from the air. Truth be told, they collaborate with some bacteria in the process. The bacteria fix the nitrogen, and the plants provide them with housing in exchange. In conclusion: these guys are working together to accomplish a tough job. All I can say is: respect.
And now...we are going to eat them!

First some split yellow peas:
Ingredients
1 cup of split yellow peas
2 cups water
1 clove garlic
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp oil
1/2 tsp paprika
salt to taste

Preparation
Wash the peas twice in water. Drain and add to a pot. Add the two cups of water, the garlic clove and a pinch of salt. Bring to a boil and simmer for 1 hr (until the peas stop being crunchy).

To a frying pan add the oil and flour, heat until light brown. Add the paprika, stir and heat for 20-30 more seconds. As always: take care not to burn the paprika!

Add a scoopful of the cooked yellow peas to the roux (the cooked flour and oil mixture) and stir until smooth. Pour it into the pot with the remaining peas, stir and bring to a boil again. To reach the desired thickness, add more water as necessary.

On the picture below it's served relatively thick, in lieu of mashed potatoes, with Hungarian fried meatballs.

And then some lentils:
Ingredients
1 cup lentils
2 cups water
1 small onion
half of a smaller bell pepper
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp oil
1 tsp paprika
salt to taste

Preparation
Wash the lentils, then add to a pot. Add the water, the onion cleaned and halved, the diced bell pepper. Bring to a boil and cook just until the lentils are not hard anymore.

Thicken with the roux as described above, using the flour, oil and paprika. Finally salt to taste. You can also remove the onion at this point. But personally I like the flavor.

The lentil stew is served with some pepperoni bits which were cooked to release the grease and drained on a paper towel. The stew is delicious without them as well, simply serve with a warm piece of bread.

Bon appetit!