In case you were wondering, yes, I am still doing the whole meatless lunches thing. In fact, I even managed to extend this to the weekends last week, even though we were eating out in Lübeck, so, pat on the back for me, look out world, I will definitely be feeling like I am better than you this week. I haven't been completely creative with the recipes thus far, sometimes just cooking noodles with eggs, but I thought I'd share this recipe for lentil 'meat'balls because the texture is pretty damn good, for a meatless meatball. I mean, it's no Ikea Kottbuller, that's for sure, but it ain't half bad, especially with some pasta or cheese. If you'd like to check out how to make them, take a look at the recipe below!
Ingredients (5 portions or 25 balls)
- 1 cup of green or brown lentils
- A handful of vegetables of your choice. I chose brussels sprouts, but any leafy vegetable would also work pretty well.
- 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
- 2/3 cup breadcrumbs, or paniermehl would also work fine (which is what I used)
- A pinch each of thyme, oregano, basil and rosemary.
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
- Lots of water (to cook the lentils)
- 3 shallots
- 3 cloves of garlic
Method
- First, cook the lentils in lots of water, according to package instructions or as a rough guide, I use around 1L of water to a cup of lentils. To do so, heat on high heat until water is boiling, then turn down to a simmer and simmer for about 25-35 minutes or until lentils are soft (do a taste test! Although they're pretty nasty just boiled :p).
- Drain the lentils of water and leave to cool. In the meantime, grate Parmesan cheese and roughly (or finely, if you don't like the sight of green) chop the vegetables and shallots. Also preheat oven to approximately 180 degrees Celsius.
- Fry shallots and garlic until shallots turn slightly transparent.
- Once lentils are cool, place in a food processor and blend until it has the mushy consistency of minced meat. (see photo below) If you don't have a food processor (like me), some other alternatives are to use a smoothie machine (what I did) or to mash it by hand with a fork. If you're using a smoothie maker, make sure to add a tiny bit of water to ensure smooth blending. If you use this method and your lentils turn out too watery, use a sieve to get rid of excess water, or cornflour. Don't worry too much about wateriness, the breadcrumbs will help to absorb some of the moisture anyway.
- Throw everything else in and mix well!
- Shape the mixture into approximately 2cm balls, or to your preference. Lay them on baking sheet.
- Bake in the oven for approximately 25-35 minutes, or if tops of lentil balls are golden brown.
And there you have it! You can have these lentil-balls with a tomato-based pasta sauce (my personal favourite, pesto sauce (also good).
Alternatively,bake them with potatoes in a cream-based sauce. I am way too lazy to make another post for it, so I'm just going to insert another recipe in this post. First, choose 3 small potatoes (by small I mean like, new potato small, ya dig?), peel the skin and slice them into thin slices as seen below. Cover the bottom of a small container (I used a small silicon loaf mold that I got from Daiso) with the sliced potatoes.
