You’re shocked, right? No chocolate, and no sprinkles today!
You might not know it from my recent posts, but I promise I don’t sit around all day eating chocolatey desserts… Today I’ve decided to break the “desserts-only” streak, on which I’ve been for the past month or so, with a savory recipe featuring one of my fave legumes: the lentil!
When I do make a lentil dish, I always say to myself, “I should cook with lentils more often!” Such was the case with last night’s dinner.
Yumlicious Lentil Curry
(Lentils… perfect for Lent!)
- 2-4 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
- 2 large onions, diced
- 4 carrots, chopped
- Optional: 2 zucchini, sliced
- 3 minced garlic cloves (about 1 tbsp)
- 1 (28 ounce) can plum tomatoes
- 1 cup (7 ounces) lentils (See the note below this recipe, in regards to whether to use 1 cup uncooked or cooked)
- 2 cups vegetable stock
- 2 teaspoons mild curry powder
- 2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves, chopped (I use 1/2 tsp dried)
- 1 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
- optional: pepper (I only use a small dash)
- 1 tablespoon good-quality red wine vinegar
- Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the onions and carrots and cook over medium low heat for 8-10 minutes, until the onions start to brown. Stir occasionally with a wooden spoon. Add the garlic and cook 1 more minute. Be careful not to burn the garlic.
- Meanwhile, cut the tomatoes with a knife until they are coarsely chopped. Add the tomatoes (and the juice in the can), lentils, broth, curry powder, thyme, salt, and pepper to the pan. Raise the heat to bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer covered for about 40 minutes, until the lentils are tender. Check occasionally to be sure the liquid is still simmering.
- Remove from the heat and allow to sit covered for another 10 minutes. Add the vinegar. Season to taste and serve hot. Enjoy!
Cooking Mishap!
The original recipe, based off one from The Barefoot Contessa, is supposed to be for lentil curry. So I could not figure out why mine looked more like soup. Finally I realized: when it called for 1 cup lentils, it meant un-cooked. I’d used 1 cup canned! Oops!
All was not lost, however. I simply drained the liquid and poured it into a separate container. This gave me the curry for which I’d hoped… and now I had the most delicious, broth-y soup, besides. Two dishes from one recipe!
And just because it wouldn’t be a CCK post without chocolate…
edit: just realized my name was deleted…
I don’t photograph everthing I eat. I usually photograph the recipes I want to post, activities, etc. 🙂
I love LENTILS!!! 😀
It is kind of fun when you screw up a recipe and it ends up being kind of awesome. That sorta happened to me the other day. I was making a madras curry from 30 Minute Vegan’s Taste of the East, and HATED how it turned out. So I imagined what I wanted it to taste like, and made a freaking DELICIOUS curry-like dish that I am going to make quite often now!
I just made this as dinner for parents and myself; the aroma and taste is moksa as the Hindus would say – it’s like Vishnu the Preserver has taken another avatar as the curry itself! 😀
All jokes aside, my father, who is famous for his own Indian chicken curry, and my mother, being half Indian has grown up on curries, both said it was delicious, and between the three of us, we devoured the whole recipe!
Oh wow, that makes me so so happy! And ironically enough, I was *just* on this page yesterday (after not looking at the recipe for almost a year), thinking about it for Thanksgiving.
I’m so excited you liked it!
I made this today, and it turned out great! My grandma, who pretty much won’t eat anything that I call healthy, loved it!
Katie,
So I know this is a pain but I am a calorie counter and am making this recipe for dinner this week was wondering what the nutritional break down is for a serving I saw that it served 6. Do you happen to have that available?
Sorry, I don’t. But if you go to Spark Recipes, apparently you can list your ingredients and they’ll give you a total. I haven’t done it, but I know a lot of my calorie-counting readers use it.
re: vegetable stock — Katie how do you acquire yours … do you make it from scratch, buy it, maybe use vegan bouillon? I wind up buying the Imagine or Pacific brand but it gets a bit expensive. If you make your own stock, please share at some point. Thanks in advance.
This looks delish
I don’t really like the taste of the Imagine veg one, but I do like their No-chickn broth.
I wait until I find coupons, and I always freeze what I don’t use in ice cube trays, so at least I never waste any. Yeah, I should probably make my own… but I pay for convenience :-(.
Oh this is just so yummy, I can’t believe how much of it the recipe makes as well, I’ve got enough easily for a week’s worth of food here! I didn’t have any courgette but I’ll definitely try it with it next time.
I love your blog Katie, I’m not a vegan, I’m not even a vegetarian, but your recipes are so wonderful they are definitely making me considering turning veggie (not sure about vegan though, I am far too much of a cheese lover unfortunatley!!).
Haha I hear you on the cheese thing! Oddly enough, I used to be the BIGgest cheese lover… my aim screenname even had “cheese” in it! I moved to China, though, where they don’t eat much cheese and so I wasn’t eating it anymore and suddenly found I’d lost my taste for it. It was the weirdest thing, because I could eat a bowl of macaroni and cheese like nobody’s business lol.
In any case, I’m glad you like the recipes! No one says you have to be vegan to enjoy vegan foods, right? 😉
Yes, but as someone who had breast cancer, I feel a caring duty to tell people that dairy is bad news any way you look at it.
Is there a particular colored lentil that is best? I have a lot of red lentils in the house. They tend to cook up very fast and get soft. So I guess I’ll have to watch them.
Anyway just wanted to know people’s preferences on lentils for this recipe. Thanks in advance.
I used green, so I can’t say for sure!