Sequestration Meal #688

 

Here we have some curried spinach, rice, and lentil bake with garlic mushrooms and curry-roasted carrots. It was, in some respects, a nostalgic meal for me.

The curry roasted carrots are a recipe at Budget Bytes. I've made them before and they go great with things like this, as a way of adding in more veggies, and I had the carrots in the oven the same time as my casserole.

I made the mushrooms just to use up some I had, but of course they were delicious. I love mushrooms.

The star of this meal is the casserole. A long, long time ago--in March of 2018--I first tried this recipe. I recorded my impressions of it in a previous post. The recipe has since vanished from the internet, but I still had a copy because I loved it. It's relatively simple--you start with cooking lentils and partially cooking some brown rice. While that's happening, you sauté onions and garlic in olive oil, then add curry powder, salt, and pepper along with the partially cooked rice. After a few minutes, you add in spinach, lentils, and coconut milk (this time I used light coconut milk), and bake that for a while, until the rice cooks through.

It's better with full fat coconut milk, but still delicious withe the light version I used. I don't know if I can call it a cheap recipe necessarily, given the fresh spinach and coconut milk, though I could make it cheaper with frozen spinach. It's not an expensive recipe, though. It's still probably about $1 or so per serving. Lentils, rice, and onions being major components of a dish will do that for you.

I think, when I first made this, I was still learning how to cook lentils. It was about a year and a half into my vegan journey, and today I am a little bemused by the memories I have of myself making things like this and still trying to find reassurance, somehow, that I would still be able to eat food I liked. These days I have absolutely no interest in a lot of the stuff I was eating a decade ago, but it's good to remember how I viewed things back then.