Never Under-Cook Your Lentils

This dish was incredible. A vegan dream. So much kale. So many forms of protein outside of meat. So much creativity on display due to operating on an empty pantry. And then it turned for the worst…

Diabetics understand sickness in it’s own way. We have unique symptoms. When you’re sick, you know it pretty quickly. Strange things happen to your sugar. First your blood sugar elevates for no reason. Then, your blood sugar stays elevated regardless of normal insulin corrections or exercise. The normal reasoning will no longer suffice. Illness now runs the show. (The source of all this madness is cortisol. Explained here.)

The roots of this illness can come from different places – mainly viruses, the flu, stress, and… food poisoning. As a consumer of a vegan diet, I use to laugh at food poisoning. That’s a carnivorous conundrum. My how I was wrong. For the last two days, I’ve ached, had the chills, and been emptied from the inside out. How you may ask? I cheated the recipe’s time commitment. The cardinal sin of cooking. I only cooked the dish for 20 minutes when it should have stayed on the heat for 30-45. When I bit into my Indian lentil, corn, kale, black-bean, and onion stew, I thought, “Yeah, this tastes pretty good. The lentils are a bit crunchy but so what?”. Later I discovered, with still limited understanding, that some compounds in legumes remain poisonous and indigestible to humans if not cooked all the way.

Now I write this with insides still churning but with a greater love and appreciation of canned lentils.