Introduction
People will probably laugh at how simple this recipe is, but I absolutely wrote it to be that way. I absolutely love a big hearty dinner, particularly during the colder months, but they can be an awful lot of fuss, particularly veggie ones, because you need to work a bit harder with some flavours, but this is the complete antidote to that. It’s 7 ingredients that you could have lying around the house that are just going to work really hard for you to develop big bold umami flavours. It cheap too, and serve 4 – 6 people, so in terms of both effort and cost, its pure bang for your buck. Its also a great recipe to make if you want to try include more veggie meals in your week but what that meaty taste.
Ingredients
- 2 Bags of Pre-cooked Lentils
- Soy Sauce
- Honey
- 10 – 12 Medium/Large Potatoes
- Hummus
- Milk of Choice
- Frozen Peas
To Serve (Very Optional)
Your favourite leafy green (Spinach, Rocket, Lettuce etc) and a few extra frozen peas.
Steps
1. Chop your spuds (potatoes) into small enough chunks (thumb sizes pieces is fine). Get them in a pot of boiling water and boil them until they are soft and tender (you should be able to stick a fork in them easily and pull them out of the water). When boiling at spuds, add a good pinch of salt, think around a tablespoon of salt. Don’t worry about it being too much, most of it will come out in the cooking liquid.
2. While this is happening, get an oven tray with some nice high edges and get the oven on about 180 degrees. To the baking tray, add the 2 packs of lentils with about 100ml of water, 6 tablespoons of soy sauce, a good tablespoon of honey and a tablespoon of the hummus. Get this in the oven while the spuds are boiling. Again, all these ingredients are cooked, so we are just reheating them and letting them mingle together, so keep an eye on them, if they are starting to burn, just lower the oven slightly.
3. Once the spuds are ready, drain off the water. Get a potato masher and get mashing away. When it starting to look a bit like mash, add a couple of tablespoons of milk and a tablespoon of hummus. Give it a taste here for seasoning, if you feel its needs a bit of salt, add it now.
4. When the mash is smooth, take the baking tray out of the oven. To the lentils, add a really good handful of frozen peas. After this, we are good to start building the pie. Put a couple of scoops of the mash all around the tray on top of the lentils. Once all the mixture is on top of the lentils, start to smooth it out evenly till its nice and flat.
5. Get this back in the oven for another 20 minutes or until the mash goes lovely and golden brown on top.
6. Serve with some leafy greens, a few extra peas and enjoy!
