Sloppy Joes

I was in the mood for some good old fashioned sloppy joes this evening. I went shopping today and picked up some Morning Star brand ground beef style crumbles from the freezer section. I thought I had picked up sloppy joe sauce as well, but apparently I looked at the label and cringed at all the additives and put it back on the shelf, because I didn't end up with any when I got home. I did buy some hamburger buns, though.

I also wanted to try to make the sloppy joes with lentils. I just had this idea that it would work really well. I mixed half my homemade sauce with the crumbles and half with the lentils, that way I could see which I liked better.

Sauce:
1 (15oz) can tomato sauce
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp red pepper powder
1 tsp ground mustard
1/2 tsp dried green pepper, which I ground to a powder (of course you can just add diced green pepper, you'd just have to cook the sauce longer)

I just heated the sauce through.

To cook the lentils, I put 1 cup rinsed dry lentils in a pot with 2 cups water. I added some garlic powder and onion powder. I heated the pot until it began boiling, then covered and simmered for about 1/2 hour until they were tender. This actually makes plenty of lentils, so there were leftovers. If you cook it and don't want leftovers just cook half as much as I did.

I mixed half the sauce with half a package of heated crumbles and half the sauce with enough lentils that they stayed thick. The crumbles look a lot more like authentic beef sloppy joes. The lentils look like, well, lentils in tomato sauce. I suppose I could have pureed them and they'd look a lot different, but I don't mind the look of lentils. Put in the hamburger buns, I thought they both tasted pretty good, but, I did really like the lentils best of the two kinds. It had a more mild flavor than the crumbles. Corwin and Tiffany seemed to like the crumbles best.

I'm rather glad my experiment was a success. On a related note, bean burgers and lentil burgers have been on my mind lately. I don't really care for tvp and seitan. It's probably mostly mental, but it just seems wrong to me to take one ingredient (protein) out of a food to eat and throw the rest away. You don't get all the nutrients you would otherwise receive if you don't eat the whole plant. It's not that different to me than taking the sugar out of beets for our use. So, I'm thinking bean burgers would be a good alternative since you're using the whole bean seeds. I want to make some patties sometime, because once in a while, you just need something good and solid to take a bite out of.