Maple Dijon Red Lentils Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we are going to make some maple Dijon lentils which is always a nice way to dress up your lentils. They are very fast cooking legumes so you can get some proteins, some fibers, some folic acids, all that good stuffs with rather quick cooking method.

So, I’ve got these lentils on, I’ve brought them to a boil. I’ve got a cup of dried lentil, enough water to make sure that these guy are fully covered, doesn’t matter really how much water you put in as long as there’s enough because you can always drain the excess off and they’re gonna take about half an hour to cook.

So, while they’re cooking we can get our beets going which a medium size beet is like that and I’ve got pretty small hand so often lots in my hand coz its small there but I don’t know. As much beet as you want to eat, right?

So what we’re gonna do is get them in a pot, leave the whole. Ok? You cut the green off but leave the tail on and leave the skin on for now because otherwise all of the beet flavor is going to leach right out it into the water.

And mine are giving me a bit of the challenge of fitting this into this pot but I think I can do it so we got here. Ok! There we go! So they are all fit in there, the tail is going as well.

And what I’m going to do is cover them with water to halfway up, what it does is it partially boils them like I get too much there. Partially boils them but mostly they’re cooked by steaming so you get minimal lost of nutrients and really great flavor. It doesn’t lose its flavor to the water then I’m gonna just sprinkle a tiny bit of salt on top and just rub it on the skin.

You can get the skins wet. Now the purpose of this is to facilitate the cooking process as salt usually does then these tails just don’t want to stay in here. Stay! Ok, then we put the lid on and of course the lid isn’t gonna want to put the lid on either but work with what you’ve got.

Then I’ll put it over here, bring it to a boil and as soon as the water gets boiling I can turn it down a little bit so the lentils were taking 30 minutes and I got them started first, the beets will take probably 15 – 20 minutes but you can just cook them to whatever softness you like.

Some might like a little bit less cooked, a little bit crunchier beet, some might like a really soft beet in which case go for the full 20 minutes. While these are cooking we can get together our Dijon maple, is that what it is? Yes maple Dijon dressing.

So we’ll start with a little bit of Dijon mustard here like so and I’m gonna use flax oil today. Flax oil is extremely rich in omega 3 fatty acids which are essential in your diet meaning that you need to get them by eating them and your body can’t produce them.

They’re only two fatty acids that are essential, omega 3 and omega 6. The reason omega 3 gets all the attention because it’s not in a lot of things whereas omega 6 is in almost every unsaturated vegetable oil and the trouble is we need to get the proper ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 and because it’s in every other oil, the omega 6 is way over represented so getting omega 3 is definitely a good idea and this is the nice way to do it because we’re not gonna be heating the oil where the flax oil cannot be cooked with.

That’s the downside of it. You need to eat it cold because chemically its polyunsaturated meaning when you cook with it, it’s not stable. Anyway, I never have enough time to fully explain things on the show but I think I’ve written some blogs about it.

Anyway, the ratio of oil to vinegar for beans is one to one. You don’t need as much oil for bean marinate, you can be a bit heavier on the vinegar and I’m using balsamic and then I’ve got a little bit of maple syrup here to counter the mustard.

So, get my little whisky here, I’m not adding salt to this dressing because there is salt in the mustard. You can see its getting nice and thick. Mustard is a great thing to add to a dressing to make it a little bit thicker.

And the reaction of the oil and the vinegars thickens things as well, it’s gonna be great on our lentils. Ok! It is very important to taste your dressing before you throw it all over your lentil so just drop a drop here. Nice!

Alright! Finishing touch for my dressing I have some fresh thyme that I’ve chopped up. If you don’t have access to fresh, dried is fine as well. Just if you’re putting the dried in, give it a little pinch with your finger to bring the flavor out of the thyme.

One last little stir here and now all you gotta do is wait for your lentils and beets to finish cooking and wash some fresh spinach and we’ll be ready to put everything together.

So, the lentils have finished cooking and I will just drain off any excess water left on there. Ok, and what I’m gonna do is put these greens in first so I’ve got some chopped up spinach and I’m putting these into the hot lentils because I want to wilt a little bit. And hopefully the steam from the lentils would get that spinach wilted just slightly.

Once your beets are coked to your liking, they should be fairly easy to peel and chopped up. See how that peel just comes off very thin, I just scrape it with a knife. That’s the nice thing of peeling beets when they’re cooked and you can now get rid of that little rat tail.

So chopped up your beets and get them stirred in with the lentils and spinach. Your cutting board would probably look like a massacre after having the beets but that’s ok. Now one thing to keep in mind is that although lentils and spinach have good amounts of calcium in them.

Beets and spinach when raw also have something called oxalic acid which prevents your body from absorbing the calcium properly so while I do eat spinach and beets raw sometimes it’s also good to have them cooked because otherwise they can interfere with the calcium levels in your body.

Know that calcium is important for bone, teeth, many many other purposes. Alright, now the fun part is putting the dressing on. So just pour this right over and sometimes to get the end of the dressing out of the bowl I take some food and use the food as a spatula. Here you go!

There’s a tip you won’t get anywhere else, use your food as spatula. Ok, get a little bit on my plate. You can see it’s a beautiful red color from the beets and I’m gonna top mine off with some fresh sprouts.

I hope you enjoy our maple Dijon lentils. You can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.