Spanish Lentils, Sauteed Beet Greens

Yesterday I had shopped at Trader Joe's, and found a convenience vacuum packed food, Spanish Lentils with Vegetables. It consists of lentils, water, tomato, onion, red pepper, green pepper, sunflower oil, carrot, salt, and paprika, and just needs to be heated. Though it would be easy to make something like this from scratch, I thought it would be good to have this on hand for a quick meal, and its description sounded good:

This classic Northeastern Spanish dish from the Rioja area can be enjoyed tapas style with many other savory dishes or just enjoy it on its own. The lentils are slow cooked in a broth called Sofrito, made with tomatoes, oil, onion, and red and green peppers. Ole!

Tonight, I used it as a key element of my dinner, adding some freshly grated ginger when I heated it. I started some Lundberg Farms Black Japonica short-grained black and medium-grained mahogany rices and their Jubilee brown and black rices cooking in my rice cooker, along with a vegan bouillon cube, and gave the rice about 50 minutes. When the rice was done, I served it, made a big bowl indentation in it, and put the lentils into that crater.

Yesterday at Whole Foods, I purchased golden beets. I hope to cook with them in the coming days, but today I took their greens and made a simple dish. I started some medium diced red onion sauteeing along with the stalks of the beets, cut into maybe 3/4" lengths. When the onion started turning clear, I added the leaves that I had roughly cut into approximately thirds. I sauted just a few minutes till the leaves cooked down, adding whole cumin in the last half minute and then, before serving, mixing in freshly ground black pepper and salt.

Along with the salad, we had some watermelon radish slices (it's attractive - you can see some pictures of mine, such as this one or others in the same gallery). We enjoyed dinner - I'll have to come up with a Spanish Lentil dish with my slow cooker.