When Life Gives You Lentils, Get Cooking!

Ah, winter. A time of crisp days, cold nights, and the sun sparkling on the snow! We have to admit what we love most about this season is the excuse cold weather gives us to start cookin’ up some seriously scrumptious soups. Is there anything more comforting than a healthy, hearty soup on a crisp winter evening? That’s a rhetorical question and I beg to differ if you answered yes.

Making soups can be a very simple process as long as you’re cooking with the right ingredients. Too often these days we see hardworking homemakers purposefully avoiding a homemade soup in lieu of canned (i.e. processed) products often presumed the easier alternative. Like we said, you just need the right ingredients! And in the case of cooking up some fresh winter favorites, we suggest starting with lentils.

There is likely no easier grain to prep and cook with than lentils – especially Black Beluga Lentils®. Aliza Abarbanel over at Bon Appetit Magazine summed it up when she wrote, “Lentils may not have the glory, but they do have a few tricks up their sleeve.” These tricks include benefits like faster overall cook time, as well as versatility. Lentils don’t fit just into ingredients lists for soups; they can be utilized in a variety of meals and side dishes. A single browse session for lentil recipes on Pinterest will quickly prove it. But, let’s get back to black lentils and why they happen to be the easiest of heirloom grains in terms of meal preparation:

• For starters, Timelesss Black Beluga Lentils® are easy to find, no doubt from being universally beloved for their multi-functionality and effortless handling.
• Once you have them properly stowed away at home, they have a shelf life of four years (or more) thereafter.
• When you’re ready to make something with your black lentils, it only takes about a twenty to thirty minute boil to get them up to par and prepped for eating.
• Contrary to similar families of foods like beans, black lentils require no preliminary soaking prior to being cooked, and if you’ve prepared a batch bigger than you and yours could manage to devour completely, no concern is necessary regarding leftovers.
• Cooked black lentils will keep just fine in the refrigerator for more than a few days according to the Bon Appetit article, “Black Lentils Are the Best Lentil for Meal Prep, Period.” 

If you’re wondering why such a fuss over lentils and heirloom grains in general, and what on earth makes them such a benign addition to the human diet, take a quick click over to another of our blogs, “The De-stress Diet: Four Stress-Free Reasons to Start Eating Lentils Now”. Now, if you’re already convinced and cooking with lentils is a bold bullet point on your to-do list, we have some great recipes to get you started, including a Montana-style Mexican Lentil Soup recipe we loved so much that we wrote a whole blog about it!

If the current day and age isn’t already a natural excuse to find new ways of bringing more healthiness into our homes, then we suppose we must revamp our interpretation of current events. Despite everything going on the world, however, it’s always going to be important to make health a number one priority in our lives. So make improving your dietary health an absolutely painless task by way of specialty pulses and heirloom grains.

It’s going to be so easy that you’ll be asking yourself why you never checked into the world of heirloom grains before. And, it’ll be a pleasure to your palette that’ll make this winter season’s dinner line-ups no less than the talk of the dinner table for many seasons to come.