The Lunch You Can Make To Eat All Week When All Your Pots And Pans Are Dirty

Ah flatmates. They’re great aren’t they? They steal your clothes, behave like this in the bathroom and keep you up until all hours listening to minimal hip hop while they smoke weed with their questionable mate ‘Boggles’.

Perhaps the most irritating housemate behaviour is though a lack of washing up. We’re finding as we get older this ignorance of general cleanliness is becoming less and less of the thing but still, the amount of times we’ve had to boil rice, steam veggies and fry an onion all in the same pan thanks to a stack of dirty pans from our flatmates that we’re certainly-not-cleaning-up-thank-you-very-much, is staggering. Lesson learned – boiled onion is not as good as fried onion. Even if it’s a red one.

So anyways, this weekend, when you’re dutifully making your lunch for the week (you are good aren’t you?) how's about doing a one pot recipe? Because even you can find ONE clean pot in your house.

You're going to want to make this Vegetarian casserole

Making this ahead to improve the flavour of this Mediterranean stew of peppers, courgettes, tomatoes and lentils. Then you can just reheat it when you want it. Takes 50 minutes, traditionally serves 4

You'll need:

1 tbsp olive or rapeseed oil

1 onion, finely chopped

3 garlic cloves, sliced

1 tsp smoked paprika

½ tsp ground cumin

1 tbsp dried thyme

3 medium carrots, sliced

2 medium celery sticks, finely sliced

1 red and 1 yellow pepper, deseeded and chopped

2 x 400g cans tomatoes or peeled cherry tomatoes

250ml/9fl oz vegetable stock

2 courgettes, sliced thickly

2 thyme sprigs

250g/9oz cooked lentils

wild and white basmati rice,

mash or quinoa, to serve

Here's how to make it:

Heat the oil in a large heavy-based pan. Add the onion and cook gently for 5–10 minutes until softened. Add the garlic, spices, dried thyme, carrots, celery and peppers, and cook for 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes, vegetable stock, courgettes and thyme sprigs, and cook for 20–25 minutes.

Take out the thyme sprigs. Stir in the lentils and bring back to a simmer. Serve with wild and white basmati rice, mash or quinoa.

Recipe taken from BBC Good Food: One-Pot-Dishes is published 9th October priced £4.99

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Follow Jess on Twitter @jess_commons

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.