Lentil Ragu

Trying to keep your food budget down, with the seemingly ever increasing prices and trying to eat healthily can feel hard at times. This is one of the reasons why I'm trying to incorporate more vegetables, beans and pulses into my diet and recipes. I spied this recipe and thought it would be worth trying out.

The recipe gave extremely generous portions,  I would actually say that it could easily feed 8 people and I was pretty pleased with the end result.

The original recipe does need some tweaking though, I added some Henderson's relish to the onions, carrots, celery and garlic when they were frying in the pan. This gave it a little more flavour, but perhaps it was still missing something. Next time, I will be adding a bit more tomato purée to this recipe, to make sure that the tomato taste comes through quite strongly.

I think I enjoyed this recipe more than my other half, who thought that the recipe tasted more like a lentil stew so wasn't so keen on eating this over pasta. I don't think we're quite ready to write this recipe off yet and think that there is a lot of potential for this. It would be a great opportunity to use up any leftover vegetables. 

Next time I will be using lentils to bulk up a regular spaghetti bolognese, rather than leaving the meat out 

entirely. Hopefully this will give us the flavour and texture balance that we're looking for without breaking the bank. I'll also still use this recipe to make the base for a lentil stew recipe instead.

You can find the recipe that I used here.

Notes:
I used gluten free spaghetti bought from asda and knorr vegetable stock cubes.