Leftover cooked lentils — into tomorrow’s salad, not bin

After soup a bowl of lentils is left — still warm, and supper has already moved on. Easy to leave it “for later”: by lunch it has stuck, nobody wants a reheat, the hand is already at the bin. I cool them, fluff, a pinch of salt and oil — and put them in the cold as tomorrow’s salad, not as “one more reheat”.

Leftover cooked lentils — into tomorrow’s salad, not the bin. Yesterday’s boiled eggs are another note; couscous into a salad its own; cooked beans another story. Here it’s the lentils themselves: cooled, fluffed, waiting for cucumber and greens — not a lecture about “protein from legumes”.

A day or two in the cold is enough. A sour note or a wrong smell — bin, I don’t hide it under onion. I don’t mix them with raw mince “for cutlets later”: that is other food. I’m not writing a new dal here — it’s about the handful already cooked that can become a bowl, not a lump.

I don’t need lentils that cool until pity. I need a bowl from which tomorrow the hand takes without coaxing. At yours do cooked lentils reach a salad — or already sit as a grey lump until it’s shameful to throw them away?