Thursday's roast

A small thing made this dinner blogworthy. I will come to that small thing later.

We'd enjoyed fish and chips with my mother-in-law on Wednesday night and I was due out for a hen night meal on Friday so Thursday needed to be a healthy day. The most healthy thing would probably have been a salad, but I didn't fancy that. What I fancied was something that would use up my bargain aubergine that was looking like it wouldn't last much longer. And I didn't fancy another moussaka. So what I decided on was roasted vegetables with lentils. Augmented with some cheese, thus making a highly healthy dinner slightly less healthy, but with the added bonus of cheesy tastiness and calcium.

I selected the vegetables while heating a little olive oil in a big dish in the oven. As well as the aubergine, there was a golden courgette from our garden (it is supposed to be golden) and I decided to use a red pepper too. I could have added some carrot and potato but didn't want to break the theme (which I suppose was loosely Mediterranean). In the time it took to chop all the vegetables the oven had reached temperature (hottish) and so the roasting process started.

Many of my friends frown at me when I extol the tastiness of lentils, but they really can be delicious. Tonight I would be doing some simple braised lentils. I started off by gently “sweating” (sorry, horrible word) an onion, a couple of sticks of celery and a couple of carrots (all chopped fairly small). I didn't measure the lentils, probably about 100g (but I'm not good at estimating weight), enough to come up about half way in a normal size sieve. The lentils go in the sieve to be rinsed thoroughly. I once had a bit of grit in my lentils so at least by rinsing them the risk is reduced to clean grit. The lentils then go in the pan with the onion, celery and carrot and I added enough water (from a boiled kettle) to just cover everything. As is my preference I added some yeast extract (from a squeezy pot that Matt bought – here is not the right forum to go into the pros and cons of yeast extract in squeezy pots versus the traditional jar) and a spoonful of vegetable stock powder. Then all I did was to leave it to simmer on the hob and hope that it would be ready at the same time as the roasted vegetables.

The vegetables looked to be coming on nicely, but needed some seasoning. (Watch out, the small thing is coming up soon.) I added salt and pepper and sent Matt out to the garden to choose some herbs. He chose some oregano (at least I think it is oregano, it might be marjoram, but oregano and marjoram might actually be the same thing). Matt duly washed the herb (we have some unreliable neighbourhood cats) and threw it in on top of the vegetables in the oven.

This was all going on in the background while I topped and tailed some green beans that my mum had sent us home with from her garden. I was disturbed from my top and tailing reverie by a cry of “Quick get some tongs!”. It transpired that Matt's herb washing had failed to dislodge (or even identify the presence of) a caterpillar. Being the animal lover that he is Matt was frantic to save said creature. I extracted the dish from the oven, Matt found the tongs and extracted the caterpillar from the dish. Being the animal lover that he is that was not sufficient for Matt so while I returned to my beans he took the caterpillar to the park.

I wanted tomato to feature somewhere in this dinner – it would probably be ok added to either the lentils or the oven vegetables. If I only had tinned tomatoes it would have been a no brainer to add these to the lentil pan, but I had some lovely cherry tomatoes and decided that I'd put a few of these (minus caterpillars) in the oven. So it would be a kind of oven roasted ratatouille.

Everything was sort of looking ready so I took a chance and put the green beans in to cook. I also added a splash of balsamic vinegar to the lentils, it adds just a little sharpness otherwise they can be very rich. All that was left for me to do was to chop the feta (almost any strong / salty cheese would probably be fine but we had two blocks of feta for some reason) and beckon Matt to serve it all up (I am useless at serving food).

As usual Matt made a beautiful job of serving the food, and as usual this combination tasted delicious. There was no trace of caterpillar, which was a good job for a vegetarian dinner.