Sweet potato, spinach and lentil dahl

When we were thinking about what to eat this week, we knew we had quite a lot of beef on the menu after making the salt beef, so decided that putting some more vegetables on the menu would be in order. What I'm coming to realise is that meat does not have to be the centre piece of every meal, some vegetarian dishes are just as tasty and do not leave you wanting afterwards.

My boyfriend and I are both curry lovers and I really liked the look of this lentil dahl recipe. The flavour really came through and the addition of the sweet potato and spinach made for a really tasty meal. It's definitely something that we would make again. I say we, but the lovely boyfriend made this last night ;-) 

I know the curry might not look like much, but believe me it comes through on flavour and it was low in calories. 

The recipe we used was here, the only change we made to this recipe was that we seasoned it and put some sugar in the recipe to help balance out the flavours. We also used Knorr stock cubes as they are gluten free. I recommend that you give this recipe a try, it would be good recipe to have mid week as it only takes half an hour to cook. The portion sizes are also pretty decent.

If you do decide to make this or have made something similar, please feel free to share.

Have a good weekend everyone!

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.

Meal Plans 07/04/13 - 13/04/13

For over a week now, there's been in an invader taking over a full shelf in the fridge. My boyfriend decided that he wanted to make salt beef, following a trip to Winchester that we had last year. On this particular day, his dad and step mum had taken us to a farmers market, where we'd had this amazing salt beef. We've both been looking forward to trying it so much, that the original dinner plans that we had went out the window, so this week we'll be using those leftover ingredients and making use of our leftover meat (it was approximately 2.5 kg so there will be leftovers).

Meals Planned 07/04/13 - 13/04/13

Lentil Ragu with spaghetti

Beef Tacos

Mushroom and rice one pot

Beef with mashed potatoes and vegetables

Sweet potato, spinach and lentil dahl

Salt beef sandwiches

Leftovers

I've not included a shopping list this week as we've had some leftovers from last night and we've already bought the beef previously. Overall though this has cost us approximately £55 to £60 for the full week.