Meatless Monday - Lentil & Mushroom mixture

Vegetarian Lasagne

It's Monday which means two things:

1.  We have a meatless dinner

2.  Our cat, Luna, gets enthusiastic about what tasty treats I am cutting up in the kitchen, only to discover it's onions.

Poor Luna-the-loon.  She doesn't starve though, no matter how of much an Academy Award-worthy performance of "Cat: starving" she puts on.  We've been known to call her Sid instead of Luna, after the main character in a children's picture book called Six Dinner Sid by Inga Moore.  One day Luna got three lunches because she was most insistent that no one had fed her ever.

Anyway, onto tonight's dinner for us non-furry types.  This is my favourite vegetarian mixture because not only is it tasty, but it makes such a large quantity and freezes well.  Also it is flexible as to what you do with it.  Tonight we're having vegetarian lasagne, but often we have it as the non-meat mixture in vegetarian shepherd's pie.

Lentil and Mushroom mixture

50 g butter (you can substitute for about 2-3 Tablespoons of olive oil if you want to make this vegan)

2 large onions, chopped

4 carrots, finely chopped
2 sticks of celery, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
250 g button mushrooms, diced into pea-sized cubes
2 bay leaves
1 Tablespoon dried thyme
500 g dried brown lentils, rinsed
½ cup red wine
1 litre vegetable stock
3 Tablespoons tomato purée
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon brown sugar
A few good shakes of pepper.

Method

Melt the butter in a pan, then gently fry the onions, carrots, celery and garlic for 5 minutes until soft and golden. Turn up the heat, add the mushrooms, then cook for a couple of minutes more.  It should look like this:

 

You could freeze the mixture at this stage if you like.  (I often make an extra quantity up to this point, to have in the freezer so I can fling everything in the crockpot on a day when I'm in a rush.)

Put into the slow cooker, then add other ingredients.

Cook on LOW for about 8 hours


Once cooked, you can either cool the mixture down and freeze it to use at a later date, or use it straight away.












If you want to make a Vegetarian Shepherd's pie, spoon the mixture in a large casserole dish and top with mashed potato and grated cheese.

If you want to make Vegetarian Lasagne, use this mixture in place of the meat layer.

Note:
I tend to blitz the carrot and celery in the food processor until they’re finely chopped rather than do it all by hand.  I like the mouth-feel of it being quite small.  However, the onions and  mushrooms are best if they are hand chopped.

Vegetarian Shepherd's pie