Recipe Contributed By Garnish and Glaze
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Red Lentil Mushroom Ragu
servings
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 onion, diced
- 2 stalks celery, dices
- 3 carrot, diced
- 12 oz mushrooms, bella; roughly chopped
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 1/2 cups lentils, red, dried; picked over and rinsed
- 1 28 oz can tomatoes, crushed
- 1 15 oz can tomatoes, diced
- 2 cups vegetable broth
- 3 tbsp tomato paste
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp thyme
- 1 tsp oregano
- 1/2 tsp basil
- 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
- 12 oz pasta, rotini (gluten free if desired)
- 1/2 cup reserved starchy pasta water
- parsley
- parmesan cheese, optional
Instructions
- Cook the onions, carrots, and celery in oil over medium heat in a large skillet for 6-8 minutes or until translucent, stirring occasionally. Add in the mushrooms and garlic and cook another 5 minutes.
- Stir in the lentils, crushed tomatoes, diced tomatoes, broth, tomato paste, and seasonings. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes until lentils are soft.
- Meanwhile, cook pasta according to directions on box until al dente. Reserve 1/2 cup of the pasta water before draining.
- Add the pasta water to the ragu sauce and then mix the pasta and ragu sauce together. Serve topped with parsley and parmesan.
Comments
Hi, I can’t tell from this recipe if there is supposed to be 1 can of crushed tomatoes or 2 cans? (It looks like the entry for 1 can of tomatoes just got repeated – if it was meant to be 2, I would have expected there be “2” in left column as opposed to 2 separate entries).
Sorry about the confusion! We’ve updated the recipe to be correct.
Great, thank you!
To Loco for Lentils: I had the same question. But I tracked the recipe back to the source at “Garnish and Glaze” and there it calls for 1 x 28-oz can of crushed tomatoes and 1 x 15 ounce can of diced tomatoes.
To the editors of this page: PLEASE CORRECT the recipe! Thanks!
Hi, we’ve updated the recipe. Thanks!
I made this tonight. Quite tasty and seems very healthy.
A few notes about the recipe:
– This makes a huge amount of ragu. It says it serves six, but it could easily serve eight, but you’d have to make more pasta. In fact, the 12-oz of rotini called for is really only enough for four servings, so there is a disconnect between the amount of ragu and pasta.
– You’ll need a gigantic skillet. I used a 12″ pan that’s almost three inches deep and it was filled to the brim before I even got to the pasta. I ended up finishing the dish in the pasta-cooking pot (i.e., I put the pasta back in the deep pot and then ladled ragu on top of it).
– There is no way the prep time is “15 minutes.” It takes longer than that to clean and dice an onion, two ribs of celery, three carrots, a bin of mushrooms, and four cloves of garlic, then rinse and pick through a bunch of lentils. And cooking time is way more than 30 minutes. Just cooking down the veg took more than 20 minutes (unlike the 6-8 + 5 indicated). You want to let the mushrooms in particular cook down and release their moisture, so 5 minutes it totally insufficient, especially in an overloaded pan. For me, this recipe took about 90 minutes from start to finish.
– (As indicated in comments above), there is a mistake in the ingredients. The original recipe (click the “Garnish and Glaze” link to go to it) calls for one 28oz can of crushed tomatoes and one 15oz can of diced tomatoes (not two 28-oz cans of crushed, as written above).
– Another mistake, this one carried over from the original recipe: the ingredients call for vegetable stock, but the instructions call for chicken stock. No biggie, as either will do, but just be aware of the typographical mistake.
All that said this was really tasty. I suggest reserving a full cup of pasta water BTW. You might not use it all, but on the other hand you might and it’s better to have more than you need than less. In my case I cooked 12 oz of pasta (4 servings) and dressed it with about half of the ragu, and was happy to have 3/4 cup of pasta water for finishing. I will freeze the rest of the ragu for later use (I suspect it will freeze well).