This is a guest post by Sonja Overhiser, author of A Couple Cooks blog and her newly released cookbook, A Couple Cooks – Pretty Simple Cooking.
Cooking the “Pretty Simple” Way
My husband Alex and I get this question a lot: “How do you do it? How do you find time to cook healthy real food at home on the regular?”
We tell them: “It’s pretty simple.”
From the outside, it seems like there’s some magical answer to it all: like a secret cookbook with perfect recipes or a diet plan to follow. Or maybe finding the right grocery delivery service. (Ok, we do use those from time to time!) But to us, it wasn’t like a light bulb moment where we suddenly cooked together daily. It was a process, first with baby steps to get there, and then falling in love with cooking itself.
Don’t get me wrong: I would not say cooking real food at home every day is easy. (In fact, I’d say the opposite, especially if you don’t have a cooking background.) However, once Alex and I started to embrace the process, it became more like a creative outlet than a chore for us. We started to invite friends and family into the cooking process and found that it could be a source of entertainment at the same time. Instead of beating ourselves up about recipes that didn’t taste right or took too long to make, we’d give ourselves the grace to try again tomorrow. And we learned how to slow down and prioritize to make time for cooking and eating well. These lessons over time helped us develop a style of cooking and eating the “pretty simple” way.
A Simple Vegetarian Recipe that We Love
In our new cookbook Pretty Simple Cooking, we share those lessons–10 of them–that helped us start cooking and eating the pretty simple way. And, we share 100 of our favorite pretty simple vegetarian recipes as well. This red lentil coconut curry is one of our very favorite recipes from the book–it got top reviews from testers and it continues to get rave reviews to this day! The creamy, full-flavored lentils are studded with nourishing spinach. Topped over brown rice, it’s an incredibly filling and inexpensive way to do dinner. The star of the recipe is the cilantro chutney: it’s sweet, tart, and the perfect pair to the lightly spicy lentils.
This red lentil coconut curry recipe has no difficult techniques: just pretty simple, time-tested ways to combine and make flavors pop. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do!
Absolutely delicious! Prep time took me ages longer than the suggested time, but it was worth it.
Excellent recipe! I have made this several times because we love the flavor!