One Flew Over the Calico Nest: Cooking: Red Lentil Curry

I have decided to try and cook more meatless meals. I noticed I was always feeling weird after eating meat, I was always miserable, bloated and felt sick. Not like I had to run to the washroom sick, just my stomach never felt right.

Last Monday after eating some pork chops and noticing that I was once again feeling sick I decided to go to Facebook and ask for advice on cooking vegetarian meals. A lot of friends gave me good starting points and recipes to try. I did find one myself and figured since I like Indian food I might as well start by cooking Indian vegetarian food. The recipe I found was so easy, I pretty much had everything I needed :). I doubled this recipe so I can bring some to school for lunches.

This is the recipe I used:

Ingredients

2 cups red lentils
1 large onion, diced
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons curry paste
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon white sugar
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon ginger root, minced
1 (14.25 ounce) can tomato puree

I will let you go check out the directions but it really is very easy and takes about 40 min, depending on how you like your lentils cooked. I like mine a little mushy when I am doing a curry so I cook them longer. Also add as much or as little water as you want. I cooked the water down but next time I may keep some of the water to make it a little more runny.

I let the lentils cook while I prepared the rest of the spices and onions. Well Marc cut the onions up for me :). I skim off the foam as the lentils cook.

Onions the wonderful husband diced for me. Those I fried with Ghee instead of vegetable oil.

Because I was sick this morning, Marc went out grocery shopping and one of the things I needed was the curry paste. He bought some but when I opened it we realized he had actually bought a jar of curry (didn't smell great let me tell you) so he had to run to the store for emergency curry paste. We got the hot curry paste and it really didn't make the curry all that spicy so I would add more next time.

The spices: Curry powder, Turmeric, Cumin, Chili powder, White Sugar, Curry paste, and Garlic.

Here are the lentils with the added onions, spice mix and tomato sauce.

Couscous.

The recipe calls for salt but I never add salt. Also I would probably cook basmati rice instead of couscous next time. It was a little heavy with the lentils. As this cooks it smells great!

The meal ready to eat. It was very filling for me so I only ate about half of my plate and over an hour later I am still really full.

Marc is usually the one who cooks the Indian food but I did this all alone and it was very tasty. Later this week I am going to try adding tofu to stir fry as well as cook this, we'll see!

O and we catsat this cutie all day. He drove our cats up the wall and me at times but he's still a cutie. Say hi to Sammy!