Lunch: Lemony Lentil Salad

Lentils, capsicum, lemon juice, spring onions, olive oil, dijon mustard, black pepper

I decided this year I need to be more prepared with my work lunches - more salads and not so many leftovers. Only because I'm sick of waiting in line for the damn microwave! And someone almost always puts a fish and/or chicken dish in there before mine and the whole thing reeks.

Anyway I was on Pinterest this morning and came across this delicious sounding salad that would be easy to eat, doesn't require reheating and had minimal preparation. And it has lentils and I have nearly a whole kilo to use. And anything with mustard in the dressing is a winner.

I only made like one minor change to the ingredients - reduced the olive oil by 1 tablespoon. I don't mind eating it unheated, but I thought 3 sounded a bit much. I'd have put the third tablespoon in if there wasn't enough dressing to go round though. I also sliced the capsicums long and thin because that's how I like them.

I got three lunch sized servings out of the recipe.

A day of cooking

I couldn't go to work again today because my car is yes, still broken. And unfortunately my previous assessment of it not costing too much has changed.

So today I decided to cook up food for the week! Mostly as a way to relax, and also to try and make some food without buying anything. It worked :) I even cleaned my oven, organised the crockery cupboard and did all the dishes!

The above picture is tomorrow nights dinner and Friday's lunch. I was inspired to make it after seeing this recipe for Sweet Potato and Black Bean Salad on Oh She Glows. I changed it up a bit to suit what I had, and I sort of mated it with another salad on her blog.

I roasted together 1 diced small sweet potato, 1 large onion and a whole thing of garlic for about 1/2 an hour. I defrosted two can's worth of black beans that I cooked up last week. Meanwhile I was cooking 1 cup of dry wheat berries in 3 cups of water (this took about 40 mins). When it was all done I put the sweet potato, onion, black beans and wheat in a bowl and squeezed out the garlic cloves and mixed it together well.

It's really delicious just like that without any spices or dressing, but I might go with some lime juice tomorrow, and maybe some fresh herbs. I have all sorts in the garden right now. Wheat berries are awesome, by the way. I've never used them before, but now I may never cook rice again! Nah, kidding since rice doesn't take as long! But they are chewy and sort of pop in your mouth. And taste really really good.

I made up some whole wheat pastry on Monday, intending to make these little pies that afternoon but got distracted, so they had to wait until today. Last week I made a large pie with the same filling (red lentils, mushroom gravy, broad beans, peas, tofu) and I made too much filling so I froze it to use for little ones. I think these ones are better than my original 'family' pie! Maybe it's the pastry/filling ratio. I made 6, had two for lunch and froze the other 4 to have as emergency lunches in case I forget to make enough dinner for leftovers.

At the same time I made dinner for tonight and lunch for tomorrow! It's essentially a chana masala type dish. I threw together in my awesome red frypan rescued from mum's house: 1 sliced onion, 4 cloves garlic, 3cm ginger, 1 can's worth of frozen chickpeas, 1 pkt frozen tofu, 1 small carrot, 2 tbsp tomato paste, 400g can crushed tomatoes, 1 tbsp garam masala, 2 tsp coriander seed ground, 1 tsp chilli powder and black pepper.

And so now I'll be doing the dishes I made by cooking while waiting for the mechanic to tell me my stupid car is ready to be picked up.

On the upside, all I have to do all week now is turn on the microwave.

Lentil and Chestnut Soup

When I saw a packet of fresh chestnuts at a fruit shop last week for half the price as usual, I had to buy some. I have never ever eaten a chestnut before! I have always wanted to. I looked up instructions on the web for how to roast chestnuts, and most instructions were pretty much the same - cut an x in the top of the nuts, spread them in a single layer with the x facing up on a baking tray, and cook at 190 degrees C for about 30 minutes or until they look a bit like this:

Oh, they smelled good. (I tried one raw and it was strange, but quite tasty, however apparently if you eat a lot of raw chestnuts they can give you a stomach ache).

Then comes the difficult and time consuming part, the part that makes me not to want to buy them ever again...the peeling. As you can see in the above picture, a couple of nuts came out whole but most of it is a mushy mess. That's because I didn't actually roast them long enough, and they were too hard to peel and therefore we had to squeeze out the flesh! My thumbs were bleeding.

But the soup I chose to make with them was completely worth it. I knew I had come across a few recipes on Allotment 2 Kitchen using chestnuts before so I went there first to see what I felt like.

I chose the Lentil and Chestnut Soup. I made a couple of substitutions - I used fresh chestnuts instead of tinned (I ended up with 200g of pulp from 500g nuts) and I had no fennel seeds so I chucked in some dried marjoram (it was the first thing I saw!) I also used a few sprigs of fresh thyme from my garden istead of dried. And I had a 1/4 green cabbage going brown in the fridge so I chucked that in too.

We served it alongside toasted sourdough, which was unecessary as this soup is very hearty and filling! I suppose I COULD have used smaller bowls...

It was really unlike anything we have ever tasted before. The chestnuts added a sweet, almost meaty taste to the soup, and I enjoyed every mouthful! It was a pretty good birthday dinner. :)

I probably will end up buying chestnuts again, as they come more into season. I'll just be prepared for hurt thumbs, or just cook them longer and cut bigger x's. Are there such thing as Australian grown chestnuts? I forgot to read the label at the fruit shop, I was too excited, haha.

Gardener's Pie

I really felt like lentils because I haven't had them for ages. I've been using up my millions of packets of split peas first. (I've only got 1kg left! haha. I couldn't walk past 500g packs of split peas for 50c without buying at least 10 of them). I thought about using the split peas in this meal but decided it wouldn't quite work for me.

Gardener's Pie

Serves 6

Ingredients

250g green/brown lentils

2 carrots, diced

1 large zucchini, diced

100g mushrooms, thickly sliced

1 onion finely chopped

4 cloves garlic finely chopped

1 tbsp mixed Italian herbs

400g can chopped tomatoes*

750ml chicken style stock

The greens from one bunch of beetroot, well washed and roughly chopped**

1kg potatoes, washed and cooked and made into mash. We make ours with a little soy milk, nutritional yeast, margarine and pepper.

Pretty pretty

Method

Prepare mashed potatoes. Set aside.

In a large stock pot, saute the onion and garlic until it begins to soften. You can do this in oil or water - I used coconut oil. Add the carrots, lentils, stock, herbs and can tomatoes. Bring to a boil then turn down to a simmer and cook until lentils are soft/edible. It may run out of water, so keep an eye on it. Just add more, 1/2 cup at a time if this happens.

Stir in the mushrooms, zucchini and beetroot greens. Cook until mushrooms have softened and greens have wilted.

Pour into a casserole/lasagne dish and spread potatoes on top. Sprinkle with herbs, nutritional yeast or pepper if desired.

Turn oven to 180 degrees Celcius and bake for 1/2 an hour or until potatoes are crispy on the top!

----------

*ALDI sells cans of organic chopped tomatoes for $1.29! Or non-organic ones for 69c (at the moment). I was pretty excited, I bought 3 cans.

** Spinach, silverbeet, kale or any other kind of leafy green can be substituted for this. Even frozen spinach (just add to the pot earlier, or defrost first). I just had beetroot greens on hand. Speaking of beetroot I should really use those before they go soft.

          

This is an excellent meal to cook up when broke or in need of something hearty, filling and comforting, and you can't be bothered cooking rice. It reheats well and could be frozen to have another time. You could use whatever veges you have on hand - I had mushrooms to use up but I probably wouldn't go buy them specifically for this, for example. Celery would be a good addition. Frtozen peas or beans would be too :) It ended up costing me about $1.50 per serve.

Minestrone with pesto

Minestrone :)

Minestrone
Serves at least 6

Ingredients:

1/2 cup of brown/green lentils, soaked for an hour or so in hot water
2.5 cups 'chicken' stock
1 cup red wine
oil for frying (Can use water)
1 large onion, chopped
1 med eggplant, cubed (I don't peel mine but you can if you want)
1 med carrot, chopped
1 big stalk of celery sliced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
800mL cooked tomatoes (about 2x400g cans or 1x800g can)
3 med potatoes, skin on, cubed smallish
1 med zucchini, chopped
handful fresh green beans, sliced
1/2 cup sprial pasta, or other small shape
Basil pesto for garnish

Method:

Fry onion, eggplant, carrot and celery in oil until starting to soften. Add garlic and stir. Add stock, wine, tomatoes, lentils (without soaking water - you can use this to make the stock) and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Put in potatoes, zucchini, pasta and green beans. (I added an extra cup of water here because the liquid had simmered down a bit). Turn heat back up and gently boil for about 15 minutes, or until potatoes, pasta and lentils are cooked. They should be by now!

Serve in bowls with a spoonful of pesto on top to stir in. Add as much as you like - we had quite large dollops. It was delicious!

The wine seems like a bit much at first, but by the end of the cooking time it had mellowed out quite a bit.

This would be good for omnivourous friends/family :) If I were giving it to my family I'd probably replace the eggplant with extra pasta or lentils, or just leave it out, and chop the celery up really tiny. But everybody has different tastes!

Breakfast for the hungover, and 'meatballs'!

It was the Pride fair day on Saturday which was amazingly fun (except the beer cost $5 a can! and I forgot to take a picture of our picnic). And we went to the pub with a friend afterwards and stayed a lot longer than we expected (and therefore drank a bit more) so there was a hangover on Sunday.

We usually prepare ourselves for such occasions (because they are genenerally few) and buy hashbrowns and fizzy drinks the day before. We didn't this time, but I had a little bit of pumpkin in the fridge and decided to make my own! I didn't go find a recipe because that was too hard. I ended up grating the pumpkin, and making a mixture of about 3 tablespoons of cornflour and 4 tablespoons of water and adding it to the pumpkin. I dropped a large tablespoon worth of the mixture into heated oil (just shallow fry, not deep fry) and squished them down. They are very fragile so I had to be careful flipping them. But they did end up staying in one piece which was good. They did the job :)

They were very crispy (I almost burnt them) on the outside but soft and pumpkiny on the inside. Very unlike potato hash browns. :) And nice and oily which was the point. You could use a lot less oil than I did with no dramatic difference I think.

We had them with baked beans, garlic, spinach and chilli.

The other night I wanted two things: baked corn pudding, and spaghetti and meatballs. I couldn't decide so we had spaghetti and meatballs, with a side of corn pudding. :) The meatballs are SO GOOD. I will make them again, and again, and again. Cheap and easy, though time consuming, they are DELICIOUS. Next time I make them I will cut the mustard powder in half and replace with sage or some other powdered herbs.

The sauce I made started out as a basic Napoli tomato sauce (tomatoes, garlic, herbs - I also usually put kalamata olives in but SOMEONE ate them all and put the empty jar back in the fridge), but I added grated carrot and zucchini, and a handful of red split lentils to make it thicker and heartier. Didn't really need to with the meatballs, but it was delicious together anyway. It's always good to add extra vegetables.

The corn pudding was good too, probably a bit strange to eat it with pasta but who cares, really. :)