Friday Food #16

As most of you know, I have a vegetarian recipe blog in addition to this one.  The idea for it came one day when I was talking with my friend Kindee on the phone.  She and I were both relatively new vegetarians at the time and thought it would be fun to share recipes with each other.  If one of us tried a recipe and thought it was a keeper, we would post it on the blog.

Since I started the blog, I’ve had some additional friends and family members join as contributors, but I have to admit that I have been a slacker and have not been trying new recipes to post on a regular (or even semi-regular basis).  I have piles of recipes that I want to try and have been a rut lately just cooking my old stand-bys.  Enter my little brother Mitchell.  He noticed that there had been a lull in recipe posting and decided to step it up.  The last four posts on the blog are all his.  He’s been on a lentil kick (I dub him the Lord of Lentils), and three of those four posts use lentils as the star ingredient.

There are lots of advantages to using lentils.  Nutritionally speaking, they are great sources of fiber, protein, iron, folate, thiamin, phosphorus, copper, and potassium.  They are virtually fat free and have just 230 calories for an entire cup of cooked legumes.  Their fiber is the type that aids in lowering cholesterol and keeps blood sugar levels from rising too rapidly after a meal.

Another advantage is that they are very affordable.  You can generally buy a pound of dry lentils for less than a dollar.  If you find them for an extra good deal, why not stock up?  If stored in an airtight container in a cool, dry, dark place, they’ll keep for a year! 

Unlike other legumes, you don’t have to soak lentils before cooking them.  They cook in 30-40 minutes versus more than an hour for most dried beans.

Lentils are a staple of the Indian diet.  They are eaten in some form at least twice a day in most Indian households.  In fact, lentils are like India’s “meatloaf”:  the quintessential comfort food.  If that’s true, why not make a vegetarian meatloaf out of lentils?  I tried making one a year or so ago, and it was okay, but I wasn’t a huge fan of the recipe and haven’t made it since.  I recently found a recipe that sounded a lot better, so Mitchell agreed to try it out for me.  His wife is a huge meatloaf fan (the food, not the band) and she LOVED it.  I can’t wait to make it for this Sunday’s dinner!  If you’d like to try it as well, go here.