Mujaddara

This is soo budget-friendly.  Remember how I said I wanted to run for the position of lunch organizer in the psychology society?  Well, if you've been reading my blog you would, and if you haven't- well, basically it's me cooking for these weekly lunches and getting reimbursed for it.  I'm not officially the lunch organizer yet but I've been helping them out the past couple of weeks.  There's a budget obviously.  I can't cook like lobsters in a saffron soup topped with caviar and shaved white truffles.  So, in the search of cheap recipes, I found this.  

This is an Egyptian dish consisting of rice, lentils, caramelized onions and just some spices.  The recipes for this are quite varied, especially when it comes to the spices, but most of them contain cumin and bay leaves.  It's really delicious especially because of the caramelized onions.  You can make this dish prettier by reserving some caramelized onions, serving the mujadarra in little bowls, then topping it off with the caramelized onions.  Mujadarra -- I actually went online to search up how it's pronounced. Oh, and I just discovered that according to Wikipedia, it's the Arabic word for smallpox.  That's pleasant...

Ingredients
1 1/2 cup cooked rice
1 cup cooked lentils
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp cumin
3 medium yellow onions

Method
-Dice the onions and fry in some oil over low heat until caramelized, about 30 minutes, adding water if it gets too dry.
-If you haven't cooked the rice or lentils, then you could do it at this point.
-Turn the heat up, push the onions to the sides of the pan and make a well in the middle, put in the cumin and let that dry-roast for a minute or two, until fragrant, before mixing it with the onions.
-Add the bay leaves, rice and lentils, and stir.  Let cook for 5 more minutes and serve.