Weekend Carnivore

Beans, beans, the more you eat the more you….erm, feel full? When I decided to start eating less meat, I knew that I still had to get my protein from somewhere if I was going to be eating a healthy diet. This is where my love affair with beans and other legumes began.

I quickly discovered that if I made beans and pulses the main feature of my evening meals that I would feel satisfied and full all the way through the evening and feel no need at all to snack or nibble for the rest of the evening. The reason for this is because they are slow burning and low gi which means that it takes your body longer to break them down for digestion. All of this regulates insulin levels and helps you to feel fuller and sustain energy for longer. All of which is fantastic for me since I am insulin resistant.

Bean and veggie baked patties

Something else I discovered was that beans and other legumes are very flexible and you can get really creative with them in your cooking. Everything from a bean casserole to a bean burger can be whipped up and be both tasty and healthy. What’s more, is you don’t have to be an actual vegetarian to enjoy these dishes, either.

When I saw the My Legume Love Affair food blog event, it sounded like a perfect event for me and the Weekend Carnivore blog. The event is run by The Well Seasoned Cook and is this month hosted by Monsoon Spice.

I thumbed through my cooking magazines looking for a legume based recipe to make and the veggie bean bakes found in a recent copy of BBC Good Food Magazine caught my eye. In the past, my husband has been really receptive to bean burgers and so I was fairly sure he would eat these without much complaint.

I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter apart from using panko breadcrumbs instead of fresh ones. That did indeed work well but I think next time I would try the fresh breadcrumbs to see if it makes any difference. I also chopped up some fresh parsley and added it to the mix. For the mixed beans, I used a can of mixed beans that included adzuki beans,cannellini beans and a few other types.

Once the potatoes are boiled, the rest of the bean and veggie patties recipe comes together very quickly. At the stage in which I was forming the patty, I thought that this would actually make a really tasty mashed potato. In the patty form, it wasn’t dissimilar to a bubble and squeak cake. Nothing that I am going to complain about!

The original recipe, calls for them to be served with salsa. We didn’t have any in the house, so I simply served them with a green salad and they went down hubby’s hatch without complaint. Next time, I will try putting some spices into the bean and potato mixture to try to pep them up even more.

Often it is the recipes with the most simple of ingredients that really pop. I came up with this zippy fresh vegetarian salad idea nearly straight after I made a homemade pesto recipe for the first time ever in my life. Honestly, I don’t why I waited this long to learn  how to make my own pesto sauce. I guess, I am conditioned to think that sauce you buy in a little jar on the supermarket shelf is going to be too complicated to make at home.

Fresh Pesto and Tomato Salad Recipe

Boy, is that wrong when it comes to making your own pesto recipe ! For guidance, on how to make my own pesto sauce, I went to the recipe collections of one of the cooking gurus of Recipezaar – Kittencal. As well as having nearly 4,000 (!) recipes posted on Recipezaar, Kittencal also has her very own Kittencal’s Kitchen blog.

I knew she had a pesto recipe, so I went looking for it on her blog and found Kitten’s Best Pesto recipe. It was only me in the house and I wasn’t sure if I would mess up making my own pesto sauce. So, I decided to only make a half batch of the pesto. I followed her recipe to the letter with the only difference being that I toasted my pine nuts in a pan just before putting them into the recipe.

Want to know how easy it was to make my own pesto? I stuck the basil, pine nuts, garlic and olive oil into my mini chopper. Yup, I didn’t even have to get the actual food processor out. Which is great because I truly hate cleaning up my big food processor after I use it. Then I wizzed it up for a bit before opening it up and chucking in the cheese, some salt and some pepper and giving it maybe about 30 seconds of whizzing. Done! I mean, seriously that was too easy.

Of course, the proof is in the tasting. So, I dipped my spoon in and tasted my first ever homemade pesto recipe. I swear, as the pesto sauce hit my tongue it was as if my taste buds came alive and started to dance the can-can. No store bought pesto sauce ever tasted that good. The only problem was that if I was going to stop myself eating the whole batch of pesto sauce with a spoon (which I totally would have done!) then I needed a recipe for it.

I took a look in my veggie drawer and really, I couldn’t get past wanting to pare the fresh pesto sauce with the ripe vine tomatoes I had. For a while, I was leaning towards doing a tomato and pesto sandwich on granary bread. I still think that would taste really good but instead I went for this super fresh tasting pesto and tomato salad.

Try this but really, if you don’t make your own fresh pesto for it then you aren’t getting the full impact of the recipe. Try making your own fresh pesto recipe. It really is stupid easy!

Fresh pesto and tomato salad

Fresh pesto sauce and tomato salad

Ingredients:

1 medium tomato, sliced fairly thickly
1 tablespoon pesto sauce, fresh is best
1/2 teaspoon pine nuts, toasted

Directions:

1. Lay the tomato slices out on a plate with the ends just overlapping.
2. Drizzle the fresh pesto liberally over the tomato slices.
3. Scatter with your toasted pine nuts and enjoy.

Serves: 1

One of the things I love the most about cooking vegetarian food is that there is always some new ingredients to explore. Until I started to follow a largely vegetarian diet, I had never had or cooked with polenta. I am not even really sure that I knew that it was actually cornmeal. Yet, now I love the stuff. I dig how you can have it all mushy like porridge or if you let it sit for a bit it gets nice and solid but tastes just as yummy.

When I saw this recipe over at Recipezaar, I knew I had to give it a try because I had never had polenta combined with parmesan cheese. For some reason, I have mostly kept it sweet. The recipe was posted by Sharon123,  a Recipezaar regular who has tons and tons of very good vegetarian recipes amongst her collection. Really, she is the one that should be doing a vegetarian cooking blog!

Creamy Parmesan polenta with garlic kale

I wasn’t sure about some aspects of the recipe when I first read it. In particular, I wasn’t sure how the raisins would play with the other savoury ingredients. They really did work though to balance out all the rich tasting ingredients that went into the dish. A bit like how it is always nice to add a little something sweet to a curry to balance the spice.

The original recipe – Polenta With Garlicky Greens – called for Swiss chard. I have never been able to find chard in any of the British supermarkets I visit unless it is as part of a pre-packaged salad bag and then only in very small amounts. I did, however, have some curly kale and so I used that instead and I have to say it was a good choice because the dark leafy green really carried the garlic very well.

Truly, this is a great vegetarian comfort food dish and isn’t too dissimilar to eating a big batch of cheesey mashed potatoes topped with rich garlic greens. Mmm!

The times when it gets difficult to stick to a vegetarian diet comes when I just have no energy to get into cooking a meal that takes a long time to prepare. It is also exactly these times when I am starving and need something that is really going to fill me up. It was just one of these moments when I came up with these Mexican bean stuffed baked potatoes.

I have always loved how a good twice baked potato recipe is an easy recipe but looks really impressive. The problem is though that so many twice baked potato recipes are usually rather high in fat and calories from all the butter and cheese that usually goes into making them. Anything that high in fat is a no no for me these days.

I am always looking for something else to put refried beans into. I know they don’t look pretty but I just love them and with vegetarian and low fat versions of refried beans now readily available in British supermarkets I pretty much always have a can in the cupboard. I usually have a bit of salsa in the house and we are never without some potatoes. So, this really is the sort of recipe that comes more out of a cupboard than a cookbook.

You can control the spice levels by picking the intensity of salsa that your family enjoys. I am a total spicy heat wimp. So, I used a mild salsa and then the two of us topped our Mexican twice baked potatoes with chillies. I went for the really mild banana peppers. These are fantastic and now sold as part of the Discovery brand’s range of Mexican foods. They aren’t in every supermarket but I usually can find them in Morrisons. My husband has much more of head for spices. So, he topped his with Jalapeños.

Mexican Bean Stuffed Baked Potatoes

Mexican bean stuffed baked potatoes

Ingredients:

4 baked potatoes, freshly baked
1 (435 gram/15 ounce) can fat free refried beans
1 cup salsa

Optional Toppings:

fat free sour cream
banana peppers
jalapeños
chives

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees or gas mark 6.
2. Cut off most of the top of the baked potatoes and scoop out the majority of the insides leaving just enough not to break the skins.
3. Put the potato shells into an oven proof dish and the insides into a large bowl.
4. Gently mash the potato insides but don’t mash so much that they are fully smooth.
5. Empty the can of beans and the cup of salsa into the bowl and gently mix so that everything is combined but not over mixed or it will get really loose.
6. Spoon the mixture back into the potato shells and bake for 20 minutes.
7. Top with any or all of the optional toppings and serve with a green salad for a low fat and healthy vegetarian meal.

Serves 4

Every month, I take part on a vegetarian recipe swap over at Recipezaar. The basic idea is that everybody interested in the vegetarian recipe swap puts their name in and at the start of the month you adopt one of those chefs and somebody in turn adopts you. Over the following month you agree to make two vegetarian recipes from that person’s Recipezaar recipe collection. I love this because it is a great way to discover new vegetarian food and you don’t at all have to be a vegetarian to take part. In fact, I think that most people that are involved aren’t actually vegetarians but are just enjoying learning how to cook vegetarian dishes. That can never be a bad thing.

This month, I adopted January Bride. I must have been in a lemon mood because the two recipes I decided to make both had some lemon element to them. The first was the lemon garlic green beans that I blogged about earlier in the month. The second were these amazing Lemon Pepper Nuts .

lemon pepper nuts recipe

If I am honest, when I selected this recipe I wasn’t sure if it would work. I love candied nuts and have had salt and pepper cashews before which I enjoyed. However, lemon pepper on nuts was something totally new.

I am so glad that I tried them though because they were super easy to make – simply put the nuts, sugar and lemon pepper into a pan and heat and then cool down. On top of that, they were just incredibly tasty! There was a background of sweet heat that was perfectly balanced. I am glad I only made the one batch or I would have for sure eaten the whole nut recipe! It is even a vegan recipe so it doesn’t get much better when it comes to snack food recipes.

There isn’t a modern day British celebrity tv chef that doesn’t owe something to Keith Floyd. Most of them, may not share a cooking style with Keith Floyd but if it wasn’t for Floyd and his tv cookery adventures none of them would have the sort of cooking shows they now front. Keith Floyd took the British tv cookery show out from the stuffy studio and onto location.

Evidence of the influence of Keith Floyd’s cookery shows can been seen even in the current tv schedule with Jamie Oliver’s American Roadtrip cooking series. The whole idea of going to another country, meeting the locals and then cooking their own dishes for them is taken directly from the Keith Floyd school of tv cookery.

So, when it hit the news earlier this week that Keith Floyd died of a heart attack, the British foodie community certainly took notice. Normally, you would say that when somebody such as Keith Floyd died at such a fairly young age that it was a shock. However, nobody that ever saw the way that Keith Floyd drank or saw the fat levels in his recipes could be all that shocked that he would have a heart attack. None of which, makes it any less sad.

When two members of the UK Food Blogger’s Association – Back To The Chopping Board and A Slice Of Cherry Pie – started the Farewell Floyd blogging event I knew that I wanted to take part and make a recipe.

The quest  to find a vegetarian Keith Floyd recipe began. If there was one thing that Keith Floyd was not then it was vegetarian. He used bacon drippings in recipes the way that some chefs use salt and pepper. For a moment, I thought I struck gold when I found a Keith Floyd recipe for braised celery. That was until I actually read the recipe and discovered that he cooked the celery in veal stock. I mean – *veal stock*. As if chicken stock wouldn’t have been good enough to take it out of the realm of vegetarian possibilities. He has to go use stock from a meat that most meat eaters in the Western world won’t even eat!

Finally, I settled on having a go at making Keith Floyd’s Welsh Rarebit recipe. Just by reading the recipe over at BBC Food, I felt my arteries harden. Still, I had already mentally committed to it and since my husband is visiting his folks this weekend, I can cook ‘weird’ meals without anybody but me pulling a face.

The recipe called for brown ale, butter, cheese, whole milk and egg yolk. I decided to do my best to make it just a tiny bit more healthy. For the bread, I used Burgen’s soya and linseed bread and since all I ever have in the house is reduced fat cheese I used that in place of the full fat cheddar. I mean, if I was going to use real butter than there was no way I was using full fat cheese too. I also went for skim milk instead of the whole full fat milk.

I don’t drink beer either. Which meant that I had to go across to the shops to pick up a bottle of beer. Me shopping for beer is about as clueless as it gets. I stood there just looking at the beer for ages. The only brown ale I know the name of is Newcastle but they didn’t have any of that. So, I decided just to grab a bottle of Guinness.

The only other real change I made was that instead of normal English mustard, I used some of some beer mustard I bought from Emily’s Jams and Preserves when I was in Wales earlier in the year. It felt apt to use the boozy mustard for a Keith Floyd tribute. Of course, this being a vegetarian recipe blog, I used vegetarian Worcestershire sauce too.

As far as Keith Floyd recipes go, this wasn’t a complicated or overly involved recipe but it still had a lot of fiddly bits. Certainly more than I would normally take to do what really boils down to cheese on toast. Still, it was pretty darn tasty even if there were so many calories in it that I had to make two slices be my entire evening meal.

Here is my somewhat healthier (but not all that much) version of Keith Floyd’s Welsh rarebit recipe.  I think I will use this Keith Floyd inspired cheese fest as my jumping off point to get seriously back on track with my calorie counting and make up for the ton of cheese I just ate!

Keith Floyd’s Welsh rarebit makeover

Keith Floyd Welsh Rarebit Recipe

Ingredients:

1 ounce butter
1oz flour
5 fluid ounces skimmed milk
6 ounces reduced fat cheddar cheese, grated
5 fluid ounces Guinness
1 tsp English mustard or beer mustard
2 tsp vegetarian Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper
2 egg yolks
4 slices of granary toast

Directions:

1. Make a roux with the butter and flour, and leave to cool.
2. Bring the milk to the boil, then whisk it into the roux. Bring to the boil once again, whisking to ensure that it does not burn and also that the sauce is free of lumps.
3. Add the cheese, beat in and remove from the heat.
4. Reduce the ale, English mustard and Worcestershire sauce. When thick, add this mixture to the cheese sauce. Season well with salt and pepper and beat in the egg yolks.
5. Spoon on to the slices of toast and grill until bubbling. Serve with extra Worcestershire sauce handed separately.

Serves: 4

Glasses up to Keith, whereever he may be!

I love Greek food but I am in the solid minority amongst my friends. So, even though I have been eyeing up The Real Greek restaurant on the Bankside area of the Thames for years now, I had never actually managed to talk anybody else into going there with me.

That all changed this weekend when we had some friends from Wales staying with us for the weekend. The female of the pair, Mandy, is as much of a hummus nut as me. We knew we would be near the Bankside around meal time and when I floated the idea of trying out the The Real Greek restaurant they didn’t take much selling.

Even before we tried the food at the Greek restaurant, I loved the atmosphere. It is located on the Bankside area of the Thames and is found right next to The Globe theatre. The day we ate there, just happened to be one of the days of the recent Thames Festival, so there was even more added atmosphere to the area.

As we walked up to The Real Greek restaurant, it was very inviting with tables set out on the walkway outside of the restaurant. There were chefs grilling some meat skewers outside which also added to the atmosphere even if it did make me slightly nervous about how vegetarian friendly the restaurant may have been.

Luckily, my fears died down as soon as I got a look at the menu. The main style of food served at The Reel Greek is meze and souvlaki. Whilst most of the souvlaki menu was meat based, nearly all of the meze menu passed as vegetarian. They got plus points for not only clearly marking which dishes were vegetarian but also which were vegan. On top of that, they also listed the calorie count for each dish right behind it on the menu. Now, that is something I would love to see as a trend in other restaurants. Had, I been making myself stick strictly to my daily calorie count it would have taken all of the guess work out of it. Really, that alone tempts me back since it would take so much stress out of dieting. Mind you, it did mean I didn’t even want to look at the dessert menu.

We chose to take a table in the outdoor portion of the restaurant. With the weather being so nice and with so much hustle and bustle going on around Bankside it felt for sure the way to go. Clearly others had the same idea because the restaurant was busy with other people relaxing as they munched there way through some Greek meze. As we looked over the menu, I was amused and charmed by watching the others get served their meze on the very English sort of cake stands normally seen at high tea. It was such a lovely British twist to the Greek restaurant.

The Real Greek restaurant

They had a number of meal deal options on the menu which allowed the whole table to order a large number of meze dishes and share them amongst the group. Which was perfect since there were so many vegetarian dishes to try out.  In the end, most all of the vegetrian meze we ordered was very good.  A few items did particularly stand out such as the Greek flatbreads which we all agreed were truly outstanding.

Another of the favourite vegetarian dishes we had that afternoon was the Gigandes Plaki. This was made up of giant white beans – they looked like butterbeans – served in a rich tomato sauce. It was marked on the menu as being fine for both vegetarian and vegan diets.

Gigandes Plaki

Of course, as I mentioned, I am a hummus freak. So, there was no way we were going to a Greek restaurant and not sample their house hummus. The hummus at The Real Greek was so nice that in the end we actually ordered a second plate so that there was enough for us all to have healthy servings. It was the right thickness and tasted especially good smeared on those tasty flatbreads.

The Real Greek hummus

I would for sure go back to The Real Greek and not least because there was so many vegetarian dishes on the menu that there are still a large number left to try.  You have to love it when you go to a resturant where there is enough meat on the menu to please the full on carnivores in your life but there are enough vegetrain dishes on the menu to leave you with just as much choice.

This is going to be one of those recipes where it is clear that I am not an actual vegetarian. Sure, there is no meat in this recipe. Actually, if I posted a fudge recipe that did include meat, I would hope somebody would try to get me some help. No, what makes this recipe not totally vegetarian is the use of marshmallows. As you probably know, commercially sold marshmallows are  usually made with gelatine which is in turn made with the use of animals. So, marshmallows are for sure a no no for real vegetarians. There are vegetarian and vegan marshmallows available to buy but I would be lying if I said that I knew for sure that they would work in this sort of recipe. Perhaps, somebody could contact me and let me know and then in the future I can try doing this fudge recipe with vegan marshmallows.

Still, I have decided to post it anyway because I think that a lot of people such as myself, which are trying to eat less meat and perhaps progress into being real vegetarians will still be interested in such recipes. It is easier for those of us taking those baby steps away from meat to give up the big items first and then move into worrying about things like the gelatine in marshmallows. It will happen for me but just not straight away.

Apart from that, this is a super easy fudge recipe which I developed the other night. I am a dark chocolate type of a gal. I very rarely ever crave milk chocolate but now and then I just have to have a bit of the dark variety. I had learned this basic method of making fudge a few days prior but with the normal milk chocolate. So,I wanted to see if I could come up with something for the dark chocolate freaks such as myself. I thought that just a block of dark chocolate fudge would be far too rich. So, I roamed the aisles of the supermarket looking for a few ingredients that would jump out and scream ‘add me’. When I spotted the dried cranberries and raw cashews I thought they might be worth a shot.

Now, just to prove you don’t have to spend a ton of money to experiment with cooking, I am happy to say that everything for this easy fudge recipe was bought at Lidls. I bought their 70% dark chocolate which cost something like £1.85 for the whole bar. They also sell fair trade milk chocolate bars for the same price. Which is great to know and for a milk chocolate fudge recipe I would have for sure bought that instead. Then, for the marshmallows I went for their multi-coloured kiddie bag which was about a pound. Sure, they were funky colours but once it melted down it really wasn’t going to matter. Lidls now has a range of natural nuts and dried fruit too. So, I grabbed a really big bag of dried cranberries for just under £2 and a the cashews cost a bit over £1. The bag of cranberries had many more than needed for the recipe but they are great thrown into salads or just eaten as a snack. So, I had no problem spending the money on them and a small bag in Tescos or other supermarkets cost much more than that.

So, loaded up with my cheapo ingredients, I went into the kitchen and came out with this scrummy dark chocolate cranberry and cashew fudge recipe. We had guests over for the weekend and judging by how quickly we all ate the fudge, I would say it worked!

Dark chocolate cranberry and cashew fudge

Dark chocolate cranberry and cashew fudge recipe

Ingredients:

2/3 cup reduced-fat evaporated milk
1 2/3 cups sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 cup dark chocolate, broken up in bits
1 1/2 cups marshmallows
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup raw cashews, freshly toasted and roughly chopped
1/2 cup dried cranberries

Directions:

1. Put the evaporated milk, sugar and salt into a pan and bring to the boil.
2. Allow to boil for 5 minutes, stirring all the time and then remove from the heat.
3. Stir in the broken up dark chocolate,and marshmallows and keep stirring until it is all melted.
4. Stir in the vanilla followed by the nuts and cranberries.
5. Pour the mixture into a lightly greased 8 inch square pan. Try to resist licking the spoon too much!
6. Smooth out the mixture so that it is as flat as possible on the top and put into the fridge to cool.
7. The longer it is in the fridge the more firm the fudge gets and the more the richness mellows out. Overnight would be fantastic but you can eat it just fine after a couple hours.
8. Cut up into squares and enjoy.

Serves: 10 to 12 depending on the size you cut the bard

We don’t eat that many takeaways these days but we aren’t immune to urge to dial for our dinner either. When the takeaway mood strikes, more often than not, we reach for the Chinese takeaway menu. That isn’t horrible if it is a now and then treat but we haven’t been great with the calorie counting as of late. So, rather than call for our takeaway treat, I have been trying to cook my own vegetarian recipes that also satisfy our urge for a Chinese takeaway.

This week, we were really craving something Chinese and noodle based. Luckily, I had actually picked up a number of Chinese style ingredients in my shopping trip this week. The only thing that I was missing was a recipe and especially a vegetarian recipe that also worked to fit my low fat requirements. That has never stopped me before and I decided to try my hand at creating a play it by ear style vegetarian recipe for a Chinese themed soup.

I had a bag of precooked Chinese rice noodles in the fridge and so it made sense to use them and make a rice noodle soup. They take next to no time to cook. So, I worked on cooking up a broth first by heating up some stock and throwing in whatever veggies I could find. In this case, it was bamboo shoots, spring onions, frozen corn, mushrooms and carrots.

Because I knew that the soup wouldn’t take long to cook, I decided to shred the carrots so that they would cook quickly. I did go for a chicken flavoured stock but it was a vegetarian chicken stock. I am sure that you could use vegetable stock too. I just liked the idea of a Chinese chicken noodle soup recipe. I threw in some ingredients that felt appropriate for a Chinese soup recipe and boiled it all up for a while. finally, I tossed the cooked rice noodles into the pot just for the last couple minutes.

The end result of my experiment to make a vegetarian recipe to stand in for our normal Chinese takeaway fix, resulted in my hot and sour vegetable rice noodle soup. We both ended up really enjoying the soup recipe and not only didn’t mind that it was a vegetarian recipe but expressly enjoyed all the veggies keeping the rice noodle soup light tasting while being rather filling too. The combination of ingredients made the soup have the right balance of being a bit spicy with the background sour taste.

We will be for sure making this vegetarian noodle soup recipe again when the takeaway urges strike.

Hot and Sour Vegetable Rice Noodle Soup

Hot and Sour Vegetable Rice Noodle Soup Recipe

Ingredients:
53 fluid ounces vegetarian chicken stock
2 garlic cloves, crushed and chopped up
1 teaspoon fresh ginger, chopped
1 cup green onion, including the green tops, roughly chopped
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
1/4 cup light soy sauce
1 cup mushroom, thickly sliced
1/2 cup frozen corn
1 cup bamboo shoot, from a jar
2 cups carrots, shredded
1 teaspoon dried chili pepper flakes
13 1/2 ounces rice noodles, already cooked
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

Directions:
1. Put the stock, garlic and ginger into a large pot and bring to a boil.
2. Reduce heat and allow to simmer for about 5 minutes.
3. Add the onions, rice wine vinegar and sauce and bring back to a boil.
4. Add in the mushrooms, corn, bamboo shots,shredded carrots and dried chili flakes. Allow to boil for about 5 minutes.
5. Put the noodles and black pepper into the pot and cook for two or three minutes just until they are warmed up.
6. Divide into bowls and enjoy.

Serves 4

When I am in a rush to put something on the dinner table, it can be so tempting to just reach for some meat and throw it in the oven to cook. However, I really am trying to eat less meat and eat as many vegetarian meals as possible. On top of which, I want to make sure everything I cook is a healthy recipe. It doesn’t always work out that way but that is certainly the aim.

The other day, we were in between shopping and had very little in the house and I had even less desire to spend a load of time standing in the kitchen putting together a meal. So, I opened the cupboards and took at look in the vegetable drawer to see what had made it to the end of the shopping week. It was a real mixture of stuff but for some reason it screamed ‘Mexican’ to me.

I warned my husband that I was trying a new vegetarian recipe and it was either going to be really good or really horrible. Luckily, my new recipe for vegetarian tacos turned out to be very good! On top of being a super easy vegetarian recipe, it is packed full of vegetables that your kids or other veggie phobic family members won’t even notice are there when they are chowing down.

Vegetarian Bean and Lentil Tacos

Vegetarian Bean And Lentil Taco Recipe

Ingredients:
2 teaspoons canola oil
1 cup carrot, shredded
1 cup zucchini, shredded
1 cup onion, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 cup mushroom, finely sliced
1 (14 ounce) can cooked lentils, drained
2 1/2 teaspoons fajitas seasoning mix
1 (15 ounce) can fat-free refried beans
8 taco shells
1/2 cup reduced-fat cheddar cheese, shredded

Toppings:
reduced-fat sour cream (optional)
salsa (optional)
guacamole (optional)
jalapenos (optional)

Directions:
1.Heat oil in a large pan over a medium heat.
2. Add in the shredded carrots, zucchini, chopped onions and the garlic powder.
3. Stir for a minute two before reducing the heat and letting them sweat for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
4. Add the lentils, mushrooms and fajitas seasoning and cooking, stirring often, over medium heat for another five minutes.
5. Meanwhile, put the taco shells in the oven to cook through. The ones that I buy take about 5 minutes so this can be done while the lentils and mushrooms are cooking down.
6. Stir the refried beans into the vegetable and lentil mixture until everything is combined and the beans are just warmed through.
7. Spoon the lentil and bean mixture into the taco shells and top with shredded cheese.
8. Add any of the other toppings you may enjoy and eat as you would a ‘normal’ taco.

Makes 8 tacos