As you may have seen in my latest post, linked here Meal Prep like a Pro, I’ve slowly but surely become a big fan of so called ‘ingredient prep’ as opposed to meal prep; the difference between the two, as the name suggests, is preparing ingredients as opposed to preparing full meals to have on hand throughout a busy week.

More often than not, I spend more time washing, drying, chopping, cleaning utensils and preparing ingredients than I do cooking, so having a few ingredients I can easily incorporate in nutritious meals is really helpful, especially on weekdays.

Here’s how I used the ingredients I prepared over the weekend.

LENTIL BOLOGNESE

I pre-cooked some brown lentils over the weekend which take around 50 mins to cook, allowed them to cool completely and reserved them in the fridge. That’s the only part of this dish that I prepped beforehand. The cooking time of the lentils is the only thing that stops me for making this dish more often so having them cooked and ready to go was great!

Prep time: 10 mins (provided that lentils are pre cooked)

Cooking time: 30 mins

Serves: 3-4 (I make this for two people but we always have leftovers which we take with us for lunch the following day)

Ingredients:

1.5 cups cooked lentils

2 carrots

2 stalks of celery

1 large or 2 medium sized onions

2 cloves garlic

400 ml tomato puree / chopped tomatoes

2 tsp tomato paste

1 tsp Sugar

Method:

Chop up onions, garlic, carrots and celery sticks finely and set aside. In a large pan, heat up some oil (whichever oil you prefer to cook with) and add onions, once onions have cooked for a couple of minutes, add garlic. Cook together for an additional two minutes, until you can really smell the garlic and then add carrots and celery. Make sure that you’ve chopped these finely as both celery and carrots take quite a bit of time to cook and to become tender, unless cut in very small pieces. Add the tomato paste and sugar to pan and mix well with veggies – the sugar allows the acid in the tomatoes to neutralize. Finally, add the tomato puree or chopped tomatoes and lentils and season with salt, pepper and chili flakes (optional). Cover and cook for about 15 -20 mins. In the meantime, cook whatever you are going to be serving the bolognese sauce with.

This time, I used chick pea pasta; you could use regular pasta, zucchini noodles, pour sauce over steamed veg (which sounds really boring I know but in a pinch, makes quite a decent meal) or spiralized sweet potato is really nice with this too, especially is you use the chili in sauce making it more spicy to contrast with the sweetness of the potatoes.

I’ll be posting more meals I made using prepped ingredients very soon 🙂 Hope you’ve enjoyed this one. If you try making this lentil bolognese, let me know how it turned out and if you like it 🙂

As always, thank you for taking the time to be here and read this, please let me know what you’d like to see more of in the comment section below and don’t forget to follow this blog by clicking the ‘follow’ button below and follow instructions that follow to make sure you don’t miss any of my posts!

Until my next post, be well xXx