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I have been looking for baking projects that I can make over the weekend, freeze and then take into lunch during the week. I found this recipe on The Kitchn for Spiced Lentil, Sweet Potato and Kale Pockets which seemed to fit the bill.
Think of a pizza pocket, but instead of the stringy cheese, you have spiced lentils and sweet potato. The wonderful thing about these pockets is that they don’t need to be reheated, you can just let nature defrost them for you.
I didn’t stray too far from the original recipe only swapping in regular white floor for the wholewheat variety and switching kale for spinach. The one problem I had is that I had some leftover cooked puy lentils and as the recipe didn’t state the amount of cooked puy lentils I had to guess. I don’t think I guessed right.
The end results was that I had the sweet potato to lentils ratio all wrong. As the lentils were the spiced section of the pocket the flavour overall was a bit bland. Next time I would add way more puy lentils, and mix the sweet potato and lentils together to get an evenly spiced mixture.
To get over the blandness I ate mine with a huge quantity of mango chutney, which to be honest was probably the highlight for me. I could probably eat anything with enough mango chutney on top of it.
On defrosting I would say that while in Anjali’s post it seems to suggest they will defrost fairly quickly, I found that after 4 hours they were still pretty icy in the middle. I ended up microwaving mine to heat through at lunch time, which did overcook the edges of the pocket and make it quite chewy and tough.
Next time, and there will be a next time, despite the limited praise, I will mix up the flavours a bit. I made 6 of these, Matt had one, and I had the other 5 Monday to Friday – so every day for an entire week. Identical food every day got a little tiresome. I am thinking indian spiced pockets with chickpeas, tomato and lentil pockets, roasted med veggies etc there must be millions of veggie combinations to make these freezable pockets.
I am never going to be one of those people that gets up 20 minutes earlier to make lunch on a regular basis, so the wonderful things about these pockets is having a healthy homemade lunch that is zero-fuss in the morning.
What types of pockets would you make? I am @coffeemuffins on twitter.