Yesterday I wrote about my change of diet to mostly plant based food, and my renewed appreciation of Greek vegan dishes. So today I thought I’d share one of my favourite Greek vegan recipes with you.
When I first got married, I asked my mum to buy me a Greek cook book to take with me to my new home in Scotland. What possessed me I don’t know- I’d never been particularly domesticated or into cooking, or recipes for that matter.
But I guess I thought that with getting married, and starting a family, there would come more responsibility for making food. And since Greek food is good, and since I only had about four Greek dishes in my repertoire at the time… I guess I felt a cook book would be appropriate. When I first started cooking I felt quite frustrated by the book. It didn’t have exact timings or oven temperatures. It didn’t say how much salt and how much pepper to add. But as the years have gone by, and I’ve become more and more confident in my cooking skills, the book has become a friend to me.
Recently, I have started making a very simple but tasty dish called Fakes: a Greek lentil dish. Here’s my recipe translated for you:
Ingredients:
1/2 kilo of dry brown lentils (if you’re in Edinburgh you can get brown lentils from McBool’s supermarket near the mosque, but if you can’t find them, green lentils will do, and most major supermarkets stock them.)
1 medium sized onion, finely cut
8 cloves Of garlic (or 4 teaspoons of garlic granules/ powder)
1 cup of olive oil
4-5 tablespoons of white wine vinegar
1 cup of tomato juice (pasata or chopped tinned tomatoes work too)
5 bay leaves
Salt, pepper
Wash the lentils. ( I don’t wash them I just put them straight in.)Put them in a pot, cover with water and boil for 5 minutes. Take them out and sieve the water out. Then place back into the pot with the oil, the onion, the garlic, vinegar, tomato juice and bay leaves. Add water according to how watery you want your dish – it can be a soup, or more like a Dahl. Boil until lentils are quite soft. (I like the lentils to still have a bit of bite to them.)
There you have it. The easiest thing ever. Any time I’ve made them, everyone has said how gorgeous they smell. My daughter wolfs them up, as does my husband. I’m still working on my three year old to eat them. Guests have loved them too. They are really yummy and healthy, packed with protein, meat free, dairy free, gluten free. Try them!
