What did I do wrong!

[SparePartz]

So, as you know from my other thread, this is my first foray into vegan food.

Saturday we had spinach pasta for lunch.

In the evening, as I couldn't find a decent lettuce in the shop, I made this: Jamie Oliver stew

I scaled it up for 8 servings as I thought we could eat it Saturday and Sunday evening. OMG, there was so much, it almost overflowed my 7L pan! It also fed DC and me on Monday with leftovers.

Are these quantities right? Do you just need to eat loads more food volume-wise if you're a vegan?

To make it easier (I hope) I'm going to make separate posts.

On Sunday I cooked this for lunch Also from J.O.

I couldn't find black eye beans so I used black beans, and only 200g [recipe says 2 x 400g tins which I translated as 1 tin being 200g beans and 200 g water]
I had only dried lentils rather than tins so used a 500g packet
[recipe says 2x400g tin --> 1 tin being 250g lentil and 150 water]

There was sooooo much! Is it totally wrong what I did?

DH took an extra portion to work and there was still loads left.

As I can't stand mushy food, and this was at the absolute limit as it was, I tried to make the leftovers into a soup. I swear you could have built a house with it. It looked like concrete, it smelled like concrete and the consistency was...solid 😂

What should I have done with it? And more importantly, what quantities should I have used? Something has to be wrong?

Without knowing what quantities you used, it’s difficult to say what you did wrong. Do your dc have adult sized portions? And did you serve this with anything, or eat it as a meal in itself?

Probably the dried lentils rather than tinned! 500g lentils is a hell of a lot, not equivalent to 2 tins of lentils. They soak up a huge amount of water (hence the consistency of concrete) and they provide a lot of bulk. If you're going to follow a recipe probably best following it exactly at first. Also don't scale up recipes for leftovers unless you're sure you're going to like them! I also find that it's very easy to make a mistake when scaling up/down and use either half or double what you're meant to for at least one ingredient which can ruin a dish.

We are vegan and there are three of us in the house. If we make a recipe that says ‘serves four’ it will often do us for two nights so we freeze the left overs and eat them the following week.

I find Jamie Oliver portions to be huge, there are lots of other people to try. I love Meera Sodha & Anna Jones or if you're on Instagram there are soms great vegan accounts there - Borough Chef, Nats Nourishments, School Night Vegan (although his recipes can be really technical!)

When I first became vegan I found the Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall book 'Veg' to be a great starting point - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/26/vegetable-recipes-fearnley-whittingstall - some good ones here.

BTW - Anna Jones & Borough Chef not strictly vegan but pretty much all the recipes can be made so.

500g dried lentils is a lot more than two tons of fresh.

Some Jamie recipes are a bit weird on amounts - my books have lots of amendments handwritten on.

Tins! Not tons.

https://saffronandherbs.com/ - also a great account (although not all vegan)

500g of dried lentils is going to give you over a kg of cooked lentils.

I'm making a big pot of soup today and am using two thirds of a cup of red lentils.

500g of dried lentils?!

That is a vast amount of lentils 🤣

Yep I made that mistake with dried lentils. Made the soup I was making that thick I had to just portion so much into a bowl and then add weakened down stock to it to try and thin it down each time.

Oops just realised it was 50g of dried lentils I used not 500g. That would've been a mega thick soup then 😅

That is a vast amount of lentils

That's what I thought when I saw it cooked 😂😂

Ok, I'm glad to hear that other people find his recipes not true to serving size and that it's obvious what I did wrong!
We're 4 and all eat adult portions (one eats more, he's a growing teen!).

What do you eat with a salad instead of cheese/meat/fish? We often had salad, bread and cheese/meat as a meal and now we've had twice spinach falafels with salad but I'm not sure the Dc will want to eat that every day.

Salads
Make a grainy salad with quinoa, buck wheat, peas and broad beans
Chick peas,
beans and roasted peppers and balsamic dressing
Tahini dressing
Walnuts (might not go down well with the kids)
Pakora (gram flour and any old veg)
Teriyaki tofu strips

Is there any way to cook lentils and beans so they're not mushy inside? Do you just not cook them for as long as the packet says? Is this dangerous (from either a food poisoning or excessive gas perspective?)

Red lentils are always mushy. Tinned green lentils and tinned beans are cooked already so don't need to be cooked for long. Add them toward the end when all your veg are cooked and they shouldn't get mushy.