Lentil Salad

This lentil salad recipe is a delicious vegan dinner option, it's incredibly simple to make and perfect for meal-prep. 

We have one word for you: meal prep.

Nothing saves you like a bunch of healthy meals made ahead of time when you are having one of those days (uhm, weeks?) that have you running around leaving to time for cooking.

Having a home-made meal just makes us feel that little bit better about ourselves. And sometimes, especially when life gets hectic, that is exactly what is needed.

What is also needed are tasty recipes that make prepping easy. Something that keeps well. Maybe something that be eaten hot or cold. Something like.. a lentil salad! (you saw where we were going with this, didn’t you?).

Now, why lentils, you ask? Let’s get into this. 

1. Protein. Lentils are a great source of vegan protein, coming in second amongst the legumes right after soy beans. While they are not a complete protein source and should best be combined with other vegetables or legumes, a protein content this high is a still a definite win!
2. Fibre. Where do we even start on the benefits of fibre? It fills you up, stops cravings and overeating, keeps your digestion going, feeds the good bacteria making up your microbiome… do we need to go on? Point is, fibre is good. And lentils have plenty of it.  
3. Iron. This one is for all the vegetarians and vegans out there. Iron levels can be tricky to keep up if (let’s stress this if) you skip the meat and don’t balance your diet well. Lentils are a fantastic source of iron, which is essential for haemoglobin formation and distributing oxygen throughout your body.
4. Folate and Potassium. Folate supports the formation of blood cells too, and is important for proper nerve function. As for potassium, it helps reducing muscle cramps by helping to regulate your fluid balance. If you ever had a cramp on leg day, you know this is to be avoided at all costs. Eat up!

Lastly (but of course not least) lentils have a beautifully subtle flavour that goes well with whatever you throw at them.

They will soak up anything – for example that fresh and herby lemon-parsley dressing we’ve got here!

We give this salad some bonus points because the flavour actually gets better after a day or two (hello meal prep).

That being said, on top of being healthy and tasty, this dish makes a brilliant dinner party food.

Because it so easy to prep and because it keeps so well, you get to make a big ol’ bowl ahead and be completely stress-free on the day. Need more arguments? It’s easy on the wallet too!

All the ingredients are cheap in most places – lentils, tomatoes, a lemon, a little feta – easy to find and easy to afford.

If you have doubts that these simple ingredients will deliver on our promises, fear not!

It is very easy to get that zing with the lemon, parsley, and garlic. But there’s more, a little secret weapon to making this salad irresistible, if you want. Ready?

You flavour the lentils while cooking. Whoah.

This of course only works when cooking your own lentils rather than using canned ones (which is perfectly delicious too, if you don’t have the time), but it is worth it.

Simply throw in a bit of lemon peel, a few sprigs of thyme, a garlic clove, or whatever your kitchen scraps provide. Shrivelled up celery? Into the pot. Onion peel? In you go. Left-over bay leaves you found at the back of your shelf? Yes please.

The sky is your limit here. Top it off with vegetable broth and you’ve got yourself some lentils that will make you forget all about cans.

This will also be the only real effort (if you want to call it that) going into this salad.

Everything else about this recipe is a piece of cake as long as you don’t mind chopping a little. Chop that shallot, chop that garlic, chop that parsley. Squeeze a lemon. Crumble some feta. Done. See? We said it’d be easy.

Now go and get yourself some lentils, we can’t wait to hear what you think and if you enjoyed this lentil salad recipe then let us know in the comments!

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