Lentil salad
Just last week, Gil and I started pondering healthier eating and adopting a mostly vegetarian diet. Gil’s decision was prompted by the bypass surgeries his father and uncle have endured, while my concern was a healthier diet overall coupled with some not-great dental work that’s left me nearly unable to truly enjoy eating a nice hunk of meat. I’ll see what can be done about that, but moving to a more grain- and vegetable-based diet can’t be a bad thing, right? (Don’t worry. Bacon will never be off the menu completely. I consider it more of a seasoning than a meat.)
But because I’m pretty inexperienced with eating this way, it’ll be a slow progression to our ultimate goal of mostly meatless weeks. I know I won’t garner any sympathetic coos with this revelation, but I’ve abandoned vegetarian diets in the past because I’ve dropped too much weight on them; a girl like me needs all the calories she can get, and meat’s a pretty efficient way of getting them.
So I foraged in our regular grocery spots (two hallway closets and one small corner cabinet in the kitchen) for something to make last weekend and came upon a bag of Puy lentils bought on my last trip to Kalustyan’s. It just so happened that I was reading The Bacon Show earlier that day and ran across a recipe for lentil salad that was very similar to something I’d thrown together before, so I knew it’d be something we’d like. After triple-checking the amount of red wine vinegar called for and (gasp) using about half the bacon, I threw this meal together in less than an hour, which left us plenty of time to do more greyhound research.
recipe after the jump