Since my husband and I started with ‘Meat-free Mondays’, I have tried to make something different every time. Being a big meat lover, and taking into consideration my husband’s dietary preferences (no pasta or bread during the week), it sometimes gets difficult to think of something we have not tried before. My brain simply does not want to go into vegetarian mode.

My husband goes through these stages where he obsesses over something and eventually when he has had enough, he is (almost completely) over it (for what feels like forever). Let me give you an example. A few years ago he started to obsess over canned beetroot. He had it every single day for about 2 weeks. Being the thoughtful person I am, I made him some canned beetroot by spending my entire weekend cooking and canning them. I probably made 5 or 6 large glass jars full. He was really happy about it, until after the second day he decided that he has had enough of beetroot. Needless to say, we gave most of the glass jars away to friends and family.

Well, this time around he started to obsess over chickpeas for Meat-free Monday. He had chickpea salad at work for a few weeks and I eventually made him some chickpea salad, but after a few weeks my husband fell into old habits, and chickpeas were a thing of the past. Trying to incorporate some kind of protein in our Meat-free Monday dishes, I turned to brown lentils. Lentil bobotie sounds great, right, but let’s save that option for winter! 😉 While it is still sunny in South Africa, let’s keep it cool and refreshing. That is when I decided to take a simple salad (a Greek salad) and just mix it up a little – hence, brown lentil Greek salad.

Lentils are a really inexpensive form of protein and have a wide variety of health benefits. If you would like to know more about the health benefits of lentils, read this article.

Lentils are so easy to cook and we should all include them in our diets more often.

 

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