Lentils, Squash & Chickpeas – A First Week’s Worth of Vegetarian Dinner Recipes

As of when I’m writing this, last night was our first ‘cook vegetarian night.’  It’s not like we don’t have vegetables every day for a side dish, cuz we do. They’re healthy, and we like them. Roomie usually runs to the Safeway grocery store near the gym during the day to pick up random groceries, so I emailed him a list for two dishes, and off he went. Roadblock already, because he couldn’t find some of the things. And here I thought I was giving him the easy to find recipe ingredients! It’s obvious that most of the vegetarian shopping will have to be done on the weekends at Whole Foods. Fine, since I shop there every weekend anyway. I had to stop by a small natural foods convenience store on the way home (Buffalo Foods) and got the ingredients, and we had Creamy Spinach Lentils, or Creamy Spinach Dal . Here is the recipe, on a yummy looking blog I just discovered. We’ll be trying more of her recipes! I substituted some leftover eggnog I had instead of the cream, not wanting to buy a whole container of cream for 2 TBLSP.  The main problem I had with this one was that there was too much water. The lentils took longer than it said to cook, and then when they seemed cooked, they were very soupy so I poured off the extra water, and I think I poured off some of the taste. It wasn’t bad, I think Roomie liked it slightly better than me, it was just missing something. We’ll probably try again, because it was pretty filling and good, just not awesome. I have to think of what to add to make it awesome. I did get to use our CSA spinach which had just arrived in the morning, so that was perfect. Both of us ended up being hungry after, but not till a couple hours after, and we’re always hungry by then anyway. If you love spinach, tomatoes and lentils the way I do, try this recipe and let me know how it comes out!

Roasted Butternut Squash with Leeks & Sundried Tomatoes over Quinoa

The following day, we decided to have our second veggie meal. I used the CSA butternut squash and leeks to make roasted butternut squash with leeks and sundried tomatoes over quinoa. I found the recipe online, once again, and made some changes, the chief one being that they call to cut up the squash beforehand and then boil it. Squashes are too hard to cut raw; it’s dangerous. Instead, i had roomie roast the squash whole when he got home, and by the time i got home and cooked, it was easy to cut into cubes. The other main change is that this calls for walnuts. Walnuts would surely taste good in this recipe, but i omitted them due to roomie’s walnut allergy. I was kinda expecting this one to leave us hungry…it’s got no beans or tofu, only veggies. i was SO pleasantly surprised on this one! MMMM! The squash and honey left it sweet, balanced by the leeks and tomatoes. I’d added quinoa because of it’s high protein and all together – so filling! Quinoa tastes like chemically sawdust to me, but mixed with the squash, it was actually good! Both roomie and myself were full after yet we cleaned our plates at its deliciousness. THIS is one recipe that will be repeated again and again!

After a pineapple cheesy tomato chicken day, we were back to the vegetarian recipes for our third and last veggie meal of the week. This one was an indian spiced garbanzos and greens recipe i found from the Whole Foods website. If you read my food posts, you’ll know that I find that a great place to get recipes from. I changed this recipe quite a lot, on accident. I chose the recipe because it asked for collards, and i wanted to use up my CSA collards. Only the thing was, when i got home that night to cook, i realized we didn’t get collards in the last csa shipment! OOPS! i don’t know why i thought that. since we don’t have those lying around, it was time to improvise. I’d already decided to make an extra side of stir-fried bok choy with ginger and garlic because i had a last minute third person to feed and was afraid we wouldn’t have enough food, plus i knew he loves bok choy and we got a lot in our csa shipment. But what to do about the greens needed for this dish? We had a little bit of half and half spring greens/spinach salad leaves, so i decided to use those, plus some more bok choy in the recipe itself. It worked! The other main change is that roomie had bought double the size can of tomatoes, figuring to use the rest for something else. I misread the recipe and dumped the whole thing in, so we had twice the tomatoes. Overall, it was very flavorful, owing to the spices and lemon juice. The recipe says it feeds 4, and i usually take that to mean it will feed two, but it fed the three of us comfortably with a half a serving leftover. I probably didn’t even need to make the side bok choy. This might be due in part to the extra tomato. We had this over couscous and it was tasty. The guys enjoyed it a ton, i liked it not as much, but still good. We’ll probably make it again.

I’m going to try and post the veggie dinner recipes we try the week before every monday (meatless monday and all that…). My observations so far: we’re buying a lot of spices…once we’ve been cooking a while that’ll probably die down. it’s hard to find ingredients at a large, generic grocery store, but definitely not impossible. cooking real recipes each night is very time consuming. cooking real recipes each night is way tastier than the same boring couple fast things thrown together.  Don’t forget to click on the links above and check out those recipes!