Vegetarian Sloppy Joes

I love falling asleep when it’s raining outside. Seriously. It’s like one of my top ten favorite times to sleep. And yes I do have more than ten favorite times to sleep. Oh hush! Anyway, since I was totally lame yesterday and fell asleep early…because of the rain; I’ll post twice today. This is the post I actually meant to share with ya’ll yesterday.

I totally had a moment of nostalgia the other day. One of the local radio stations does “Throwback Sundays” or “Sunday Rewind” I can never remember what they call it, but they play old music from thee early eighties through the mid-2000s. Though I’m not sure “Yeah” by Usher is exactly a throwback…I’m pretty sure I was in college when that was popular. Anyway, last weekend I was running around doing errands listening to the old-school music and they up an played “Tearin’ up My Heart” by *Nsync. I was such a huge *Nsync fan when I was a tweenager. I actually went to see them in concert with one of my really good friends from middle school. My Dad took us and he was such a good sport about the whole thing. Thinking about that brought up a lot of really fun middle school memories and made me super excited to cook this recipe.

I don’t actually remember eating Sloppy Joes in middle school, but eating them now is another thing that reminds me of that time in my life. This is a dressed-up vegetarian version I got from the interwebs.

A few Notes on the Recipe:

* I used pre-chopped onions and peppers; because I am lazy and I hate prep-work

* I ended up added about an additional ½ cup of prepared tomato sauce from a jar I had in my refrigerator and some extra tomato paste, this was to make the Sloppy Joe mixture the consistency I wanted.

* I skipped the yellow mustard and substituted approximately 1 teaspoon of ground mustard (see this post about my dislike of mustard).

* I used I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (Light) because it has significantly less WW points than olive oil. If this does not matter to you use, olive oil.

Vegetarian Sloppy Joes

I found this recipe at Post Punk Kitchen. They're awesome go check them out!

1 cup uncooked green lentils
4 cups water
1 tablespoon I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (Light)

1 medium yellow onion, diced small
1 green pepper, diced small
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 Tablespoons chili powder
2 teaspoons oregano
1 teaspoon salt
8 oz can tomato sauce
1/4 cup tomato paste
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1 tablespoon yellow mustard (or if you’re me 1 teaspoon ground mustard)

Put the lentils in a pot with the water. Cover and bring to a boil; once boiling, lower heat and simmer until lentils are soft. Approximately 20 minutes. Drain and set aside.

About 10 minutes before the lentils are done boiling, preheat a skillet over medium heat. Sauté the onion and pepper in the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter until softened and lightly brown; approximately 9 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté a minute more. 

Add the cooked lentils, the chili powder, oregano and salt and mix. Add the tomato sauce and tomato paste. Cook for about 10 minutes. Add the maple syrup and ground mustard and heat through.

Turn the heat off and let sit for about 10 minutes, so that the flavors can meld, or go ahead and eat immediately if you can’t wait.

Serves: 4 (6 WW Points) – 6 (4 WW points)

Y’all these were so good; spicy and sweet and just sloppy enough. BFFMandy and I ate them with roasted Butternut Squash “french fries” and roasted brussel sprouts, it was a pretty awesome dinner.

=)