Meatless Mondays: Mujaddara Revisited

Welcome back to Meatless Mondays! I’m happy to welcome Christine of A Kitchen Hoor’s Adventures to the party. She’s been a Meatless Mondays blogger for awhile. If you pop over to her blog, you’ll find all kinds of good stuff to eat with your eyes.

For my part, I’m revisiting a favorite recipe I’ve been meaning to update. I can’t get enough of mujaddara a Lebanese lentil and rice dish. I first wrote about it last May, you will find the original post with the instructions and updates here.

Mujaddara is one of those recipes where all the components are cooked first, then assembled into the finished product. That sort of thing just drives me crazy although I’m rarely able to get around it. It’s not that it takes that long or is especially difficult to make…lentils, rice and caramelized onions all take about the same amount of time to cook. It’s the extra pots and pans that need to be cleaned that gets to me. The best I’ve been able to do is use canned lentils, pre-cooked and frozen caramelized onions and leftover rice. Most often I have leftover lentils and cook the rice and the onions at the same time. At least I save ONE pan!

In the end, the clean up is just one of those things in life as I never get tired of the spice blend: cumin, cinnamon and ground coriander. For the latest batch, I ended up grinding my own cumin with a mortar and pestle after a cabinet search revealed plenty of cumin seeds, but no ground cumin! I have enough for a couple recipes now. FYI it was easier for me to grind the cumin seeds in small batches rather than dump a large amount in all at once…with the added benefit of better control over errant seeds!

After the mujaddara cooled down, I packed it into smaller containers so we can just grab and go for meals over the next couple days. I served it with some steamed broccoli for dinner tonight.

What are you planning for your Meatless Monday? Share your link below. We’re keeping it open all month long and the entries are randomized so everyone has a chance to featured in the top row. If you have a blog and want to co-host, drop me a line in the comments! The more the merrier!