I can’t remember the last time I made anything fancy. By fancy I mean other than stew. Bean stews are my go to when I am pressed for time.

I have been a pesco-vegetarian for a while and I have decided to go proper vegetarian as I pray about transitioning to being full vegan (remind me to tell you about that another time).

So the family was having burgers, beef on Friday evening and I did not want a plain tomato and cucumber sandwich. I have been procrastinating restocking my legumes from my favourite shop, dewnlily, so I didn’t have any chick pea and even if I had it would have taken a bit of time to cook them (don’t get me started on tinned food).

I absolutely love chickpea and I knew that it would not be the same without chickpeas but it would be close enough. So out came my dried lentils, a few chopped vegetables and 40 minutes later I was having an amazing lentil falafel pita experience.

Ingredients:

1 cup brown lentils (boiled, not over cooked)

1/2 cup onion

1/2 cup green pepper

1/2 cup red pepper

1 grated carrot

1 spoon chopped garlic

1 spoon chopped ginger

2 spoons flour

Herbs and salt for seasoning

Method

Preheat the oven

I still don’t have a food processor (don’t ask), so I blitzed everything except the flour, together in my jug blender.

Removed from blender into bowl and mixed in with the flour.

Dusted a pan and spooned into the pan. Put in the oven for about 15 minutes, flattened them a bit and flipped them. Took them out 5 minutes later and allowed to cool for about 3 minutes.

Yum is an understatement. It was delicious. I put in fried onions, fried tomatoes, a bit of cheese and some sauce and I was on cloud nine. I had about 16 falafels from this batch.