Ever since COVID hit, my workplace has been fully remote — we still have an office but there’s no requirement to be in it — and given my commute is an hour on the train, plus a fifteen minute walk to the station in the first place, I opt to work from home unless I particularly want to go into the office for whatever reason. Even prior to COVID, we had free lunches provided in the office and so I’d just throw together some veggies and meat and sauce into a wrap and toast that to have while we played our regular daily Magic the Gathering over our lunch break.

Since I’m now working from home the vast majority of the time, though, I have to provide my own lunches (::dramatic hand to forehead::), and since I like having enough time to get a good drum practice session in over my lunch break, I mostly make a big batch of something on a weekend, freeze it into individual serves, and then bung a serve into the microwave each day for lunch. Unlike Kristina I have no qualms about having the same thing for lunch every day, it’s mostly just a delicious thing to put into my face while I’m catching up on my RSS feeds and forums and so on, prior to going out to the back room to play drums.

We use the hell out of our pressure cooker in particular for rice-based things (our is a Crockpot Express), and Kristina had introduced me to this conconction that has rice, chicken stock, lentils, and kale in it and I’d started making batches of that. I wanted to expand the variety a bit and really like the typically Mexican seasonings of smoked paprika and cumin, and through a whole lot of trialling and mucking around have come up with an absolutely delicious recipe for Mexican-style lentil rice.

Serves

This recipe makes nine serves of around 350g each.

Ingredients

⚠️ I use Australian measurements, so a tablespoon is 20mL instead of the 15mL that the rest of the world uses (don’t ask me why it’s like this), and 1 cup is a standard 250mL metric cup.

• 2 cups of medium grain rice
• 2x 420g tins of brown lentils¹
• 1x 400g tin of black beans
• 2 large onions, finely diced
• 5 cups (1.25L) of water
• 45g of Vegeta chicken stock²
• 450g sliced green beans³
• 250g corn²
• 4tbsp tomato paste
• Healthy serving of garlic paste⁴
• 1 tbsp smoked paprika
• 1 tbsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tbsp cinnamon

1. Coles-brand lentils are actually surprisingly decent here because they don’t turn to mush.
2. You don’t have to use this specific brand, but I’ve found it to be very tasty.
3. I use frozen beans and frozen corn and defrost them under hot water from the tap before putting them into the pressure cooker pot.
4. I use garlic paste rather than chopped up fresh garlic solely due to laziness, and give it about ten good-sized dollops. You can adjust it to taste.

Directions

1. Dice the onions and start them cooking in a pan.
2. Drain the lentils and black beans, rinse them off, and put them plus the rice, green beans, and corn into the pressure cooker pot.
3. Boil the 4.5 cups of water in a kettle and dissolve the chicken stock and tomato paste in it, then dump it into the pressure cooker pot.
4. Once the onions are looking good and caramelised, add the garlic paste and cook a bit further to allow the flavour to infuse.
5. Add the onions to the pressure cooker pot, along with the smoked paprika, cumin, and cinnamon, and give the whole thing a solid stirring.
6. Set the pressure cooker on regular “Pressure Cook” mode, low pressure, for 13 minutes.

Additions

To add some freshness, while I’m defrosting an individual serve in the microwave to have for lunch, I’ll chop two good thick slices of fresh tomato and dice it, along with about half as much in volume of diced red capsium. At the half-way defrosted mark I’ll stir in some shredded cheese (Perfect Italiano’s Perfect Bakes is a particularly tasty option) then pop it back into the microwave for the rest of the defrosting. When it comes out, stir the tomato and capsicum in and for some extra flavour and kick add two teaspoons of La Costeña chipotle sauce (or whatever hot sauce you’d like).