Bulking out Meals?

Fruball

I usually put them in at the end of frying off the mince, onions and peppers. Then I fry them off in that so they can absorb some of the flavour... then add my wet ingredients.

Remember that lentils will expand and take up a LOT of the fluid so you will need to add extra.

To start with, I would do a 75/25 ratio of lentils as some people find it takes a while to adjust to the slightly different texture.

HTH

Fruball

Oh, sorry, forgot to answer .....

Am sure you will have seen them before. They are very small (smaller than petit pois peas) bright orange and split in half. (altho you can get them in other colours) A great source of protein and fibre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentil

You will find them eventually I NEVER remember where to find them and i've bought them for years!

You can also use soya mince to bulk out mince dishes. I always add that at the frying off stage so it can absorb juices as they come out of the mince.

JulieGeorgiana

I am thinking about starting to use lentils.... I was going to put them in a slow cooked curry next week...!

I made a lentil soup and it was too much... so we are all nervous about using them in my cooking LOL

Penelope_Penguin

LittleLauz wrote: »

Hi, I've seen a lot of posts about how lentils can be used to bulk meals out in place of meat etc. But I have no idea how they'd be cooked and even what they actually are!!

If I'm making bolognaise I add a couple of handfuls of red lentils with the tomatoes.

I've bought a big bag of green lentils and cooked and frozen them in portions, as they need longer cooking. I'll add a block to curry or chilli.

There's lots more in this thread (I'll merge this later).

exlibris

As we don't eat red meat I use a lot of chicken. I use breast as mince in Shepherds Pie (should it be poulterer's pie) and pad this with lentils and soya mince. I use half chicken and then quarter soya and quarter lentils. I soak the lentils and the soya seperately in boiling water for the length of time it takes to mince the meat. I use the measurements on the soya pack for both quantities of padding eg. 50g mince to 150ml water/ 50 g lentils to same amouont of water.(Sorry this is metric but the instructions were metric an I had to buy new scales recently which are also metric so I am having to lear foreign!)

HTH

LittleLauz

Great, thanks everyone. I'll have an experiment with lentils this weekend and see what I can do!

pixie1

Ive recently had to give up my job as Im battling depression and the stress of work was making things just too much for me. Obviously this will bring some additional financial pressures so Im trying to work out how to cut our food bills.

I know food here in Oz costs different amounts from the UK, but Im looking for ideas with regards to which joints of meat I can stretch the furthest? I already do rubber chicken and I can make mince beef go a long way with chillis, spag bol, lasagne, cottage pie etc but i was wondering are there any other joints of meat that people could recomend and ways to make it go further?

Im going to join the storecupboard challenge and use up things we have in the freezer but Hubs and I are big meat eaters so I would like to be able to cook a few nice new things up for him, rather then living on pasta which is what my cupboard is full of right now.

Any help would be great.

Many thanks

Pix

sandraroffey

over here at the moment, pork is on offer in a lot of stores. and i buy it sometimes anyway, even without the offers. yesterday, my daughter bought in tesco a pork loin joint, on price reduction, that is big enough to cut into 3 roasting joints, for £5. wish i had been there!!!!

a pork joint can be a million things; get one big enough though. cut a piece off for roasting, slice to make a couple of pork steak, cube the rest for a casserole. or make a pork stroganoff.

or roast it all, and use whats left to make sweet and sour pork and casseroles. or minced up and make a pork cottage pie or lasagne. or cold sliced pork with roasties and apple sauce.

Alittlesad

Gammon joints for me are great value. I boil it and then oven cook it. Slice some into chunks and freeze for pie and pasta dishes. Freeze some slices in the ham jices to give a quick roast dinner and very thinly slice some and freeze for sandwiches. Even better if it's on the bone and you should get enough stock for a couple of soups.

suzybloo

Whatever the joint is I would recommend when you have some spare cash buying a meat slicer - cost is approx £25 but it certainly means that you get so much more out of a roast. I bought a half price gammon joint out of Tesco (£6) .This would have normally been used up in two meals, but with the meat slicer there is enough for three meals and certainly some to put away in the freezer for sandwiches later in the week.