Vegetable Lentil Stew

This Monday the letter for Meatless Monday's from A to Z begins with L for Lentils.

Surprisingly, I have never cooked with lentils before.  I always found that if I wanted beans it was easier to grab a can of chickpeas or black beans that just needed to be heated or just grab a can of pre-made lentil soup (like I did Saturday night for dinner.)  This really is not an excuse to not cook lentils since all that is required is tossing some lentils with water in a pan and letting them cook for 30-40 minutes.  What could be more difficult?  However, with this recipe I still cheated because I did not pre-cook the lentils.  I simply tossed them into a crock pot to make this soup.  I'm still without a kitchen and needed something easy and not time consuming.  Plus, I wanted dinner ready for me when I came home.

This recipe was adapted from FatFree Vegan Kitchen.  I made several changes to the original recipe.  Here is how I made my Vegetable Lentil Stew:

Ingredients:

• 1 small onion, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 16-oz packages frozen vegetables (I used one that was a vegetable soup mixture)
• 1 15-oz can diced tomatoes
• 4 cups vegetable broth
• 1 1/2 cups dry lentils
• 1/3 cup quinoa
• 2/3 cup canned pumpkin
• 1 1/4 tsp oregano
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 1/2 tsp cumin

Directions: 

1. Combine all ingredients in a crock pot.  
2. Stir to combine everything together.  
3. Allow to cook for approximately 6-8 hours.

Possible Variations:

• To make this even more simple you can use onion flakes and minced garlic (the kind you keep in the fridge). Just follow the directions on the containers to add the appropriate amounts. 
• You can also precook the lentils if you want them to be softer.
• If you want to (and have that luxurious time) you can can buy fresh vegetables to chop.
• I also like more spice so I added some Sriracha sauce to my own bowl of stew.

One thing I really like about this stew is you can buy different types of frozen vegetables each time to have a different variety of stew!

I am roughly estimating that this recipe yields 12 cups.

Based on one cup:

Approximately 127 calories and 6.5g protein