February 14, 2017
This week I wanted to share with you a recipe that I cooked for my vegetarian friends. I feel like this year living in Melbourne has really opened my eyes up to vegetarian cooking and eating. I’ve always been a fan of vegetarian food, but I never knew how many options were actually available to you in this space. Since soon my roommate/best friend and I will be moving out and parting ways, I thought I would write a blog post sharing a Vegetarian recipe that I made for her and one of our friends. We are both in a bit of denial that I’ll be moving away from Melbourne, because we’ve had such a great year together that I will always cherish. The least I can do is immortalise fond memories in a blog post.
As some of you might know from my blogs, my roommate is vegetarian. Not by choice, she still appreciates a good meat filled meal (the smell of it anyway), and she desperately misses prosciutto. But she’s had to stop eating meat for health reasons, and while I’ve been living with her I’ve been taking the opportunity to learn and try new recipes.
Usually on a Sunday night we will take it as an opportunity to order takeout, because often we’d rather spend the time we’d normally use for cooking and put it into watching Netflix and drinking wine. I think I’ll always look back on this time and remember the great Sunday nights we spent chilling out before the start of a new week, chatting about our weekends and eating our body weights in delicious food. Sometimes it’s nice to shake it up though, and so when we had one of our other friends over for dinner, we decided that we would cook. I had some leftover quinoa in the freezer, and in our bid to clear out everything from our house, we thought we would cook up a bit of a vegetarian feast. I also had some lentils in the pantry, so we managed to kill two birds with one stone! It’s amazing how thrifty you can be when you need to do it.
So I whipped up a bit of a recipe on the fly for a lentil and tomato dish to go with the quinoa, and it was quite delicious so I thought I would share it with you all. A word of warning, I made my dish quite spicy, so I’ve reduce the amount of chilli in this recipe. If you like it hot like I do, feel free to add more chilli, but make sure you check the heat as you go! Or check if your guest likes hot food, which I forgot to do! If you like hot food though, this dish is absolutely delicious. It makes for a really healthy, Moorish vegetarian dish!
- teaspoons of olive oil
- 2 cloves of garlic crushed
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 1 teaspoon of dried thyme
- 1 teaspoon of dried oregano
- 1 teaspoon of dried chilli flakes
- 1 can of diced tomatoes
- ½ cup of water
- 1 can of lentils drained
- 1/3 of a bunch of kale chopped
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Heat the olive oil on a medium heat in a non-stick frypan. Add the thyme, oregano and chilli flakes, and stir. Fry for 1 minute and add the garlic, salt and pepper. Fry for an additional minute, stirring constantly.
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Add the lentils and salt and pepper, and cook for 2-3 minutes. Combine with the tomatoes and a half a cup of water, stirring to combine with the lentils and spices. Bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer for 15 minutes, adding water if it gets too dry.
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Once the tomato mixture has reduced, add the chopped kale and stir to mix. Cook for 3-5 minutes, or until the kale has softened.
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Serve with quinoa, rice or steamed vegetables.
Although this dish was a little on the hot side, I really enjoyed it. The flavours were really punchy and gave the lentils a really nice kick. I love this sort of cooking, especially if you let it simmer for a while to really let the flavours develop. It’s also a really healthy way of cooking as you don’t need that much oil or additions, you just let the natural flavours shine.
You could easily alter this based on what you had on hand. If you don’t have kale on hand, you can easily substitute for another green, or just leave it out. I think this would taste great with baby spinach! It’s a great option for using up slightly wilted leaves before they go to waste! You could also add other greens in if you wanted, such as zucchini or even broccoli! You would just need to let it steam for a bit to cook down before adding to the main mixture. That’s what I love about recipes like this, there isn’t really a right or wrong.
This is a perfect weeknight meal and keeps really well in the fridge. It’s a great, quick meal that’s packed full of flavour, and one of those one’s that you can set and forget while it simmers. It also doesn’t take much preparation which is perfect for when you get home from work and have a couple of things to finish! Nice simple, quick and delicious cooking!
Until next time, happy eating!
Ella xx
