Wednesday 8 October 2008

a new lentil pie recipe

lentil cottage pie


Every four weeks or so I have to trot on out to uni for a three hour lecture that finishes about 20:30. By the time I get home I'm usually quite hungry, so D is left to prepare a hearty dinner that's going to be filling but won't weigh me down two hours before bedtime.

Last night's lecture ended spectacularly early, it being the last of the semester, so when I get home D was still admist the preparations and somehow I ended up finishing cooking dinner, which was very tricky on D's part!

It was an adaption of this recipe, but I think ours was probably more awesome, or certainly more to D's taste (D dislikes parsnips and celery). I think what makes this pie really tasty is cooking the lentils in stock, they soak up that extra delicious flavour.

I've posted a lentil pie recipe here before, but where that one was more like a dahl lentil pie, this is more like a lentil shepherd's pie.

Lentil Pie

ingredients:
two or three sweet potatoes
1 cup lentils (I think D used a combination of red and yellow)
1 onion (diced)
a dozen mushrooms (sliced)
1 carrot (diced)
1 tbl tomato paste
2 bay leaves
some stock
rosemary
garlic (minced)
pepper
3 tomatoes (diced)
1 tbl light soy sauce
2 or 3 tbl pumpkin seeds


method

Simmer the lentils in a few cups of stock for about half an hour, forty-five minutes.

Fry the carrots and the onion until carrot starts to soften. Add garlic, followed by mushrooms. Fry until looking delicious, then add tomatoes and cook until the tomatoes just start to go mushy. Drain the lentils and add, along with pepper, soy sauce, pumpkin seeds, bay leaves, tomato paste and rosemary. Leave to simmer for five minutes.

In the meantime boil and mash the potatoes in whatever is your preferred method.

Divide in to four ramekins, top with sweet potato, bake at 200C for 20 minutes.

4 comments:

CB said...

it's autumn here in the far north, and baked beany things rock my world. I'm making this soon, and i'm using parsnips. it turns out i grew up in a state that produces most of the east US's parsnips, but i didn't try one until i moved 4 states away...ah well.

steph said...

Claire, isn't that the way it always works, though? I hope your pies turn out, they're perfect cold weather food!

Sarah said...

I made this the other day. SOOOO good. But somehow mine made 8 pies! My ramekins must be small. It also freezes well.

steph said...

Yay! I'm glad it worked out for you. I think our ramekins are quite big, they're the large ikea ones. Also, awesome about the freezing, thanks for letting me know.