Kale, Sweet Potato, and French Lentils with Madagascar Pink Rice and Guacamole

For dinner tonight, I wanted to use up a head of fresh kale. I decided to use my Instant Pot and try making a kale - lentil - sweet potato dish. Here is what I did.









Ingredients

• Three cups packed kale leaves, hand cut from the stems to about 1" in size
• Two green onions cut into 1/2" pieces
• 1 1/2 cups French lentils
• Two medium sweet potatoes (I used one purple and one white) cut into 3/4" cubes
• Vegan bouillon cube
• 2 cups water

Process

1. Under high pressure, French lentils take 15-20m, kale takes 3-6m, and cubed sweet potato takes 7-9m to cook; I am still new to pressure cooking and am thinking that I should cook ingredients together that need about the same amount of time. But I thought I'd try cooking this combination of ingredients at the maximum time (15m for the lentils) and assume that the other ingredients would be fine, just soft. So I put all the ingredients in my Instant Pot, selected the manual program, and ran the pot on high for 15 minutes.
2. I let the pressure slowly (about 10 minutes) come down, then opened the pot and served with Madagascar pink rice (1 : 1 2/3 or 1 : 1 3/4 rice to water ratio, cooked with a vegan bouillon cube for 20m) and some guacamole (avocado, Meyer lemon juice, rosemary, garlic, shallot, green onion, salt, and pepper).

Results

I was correct that I should have better matched ingredients based on their time for cooking. The lentils were barely done (the chart that I used said 15-20m, but I'll try 16 or 17m next time), and the potatoes overdone; the other ingredients were fine being very soft.

The taste of the lentil dish was acceptable but not up to what I usually make.  The guacamole, as always, was very good, as was the rice.

Ideas for the future

I will be more careful putting ingredients together with similar cooking times in the pressure cooker.