Mjeddrah (Middle Eastern Lentils and Rice)

For this week's entry in Vegaloca's Weekly Vegan Cooking Challenge, I continued exploring my fabulous Peaceful Palate cookbook.  This time, I went with the Mjeddrah (pronounced "mu-jed-rah"), a Middle Eastern lentil and rice dish.  The foundation is an oh-so-delicious mix of lentils, rice and onions cooked  until creamy.  It's supposed to be topped with a salad consisting of lettuce, tomatos, cucumber, avocado and green onions but, since I realized I did not have lettuce, I improvised with the remaining veggies:

All in all, I really enjoyed this dish and plan to make it again.  I had lots of left-over lentil-and-rice mix so I did try the dish later on with some newly purchased lettuce and it was very nice.  The dressing is an olive oil-and-lemon "vinaigrette" with paprika and dry mustard as the spices; I'm not a huge paprika fan so perhaps that prevented me from being wild about the dressing but it was still tasty.  I do think you need to make a lot more than what the recipe says, as 2 TBSP olive oil and 2 TBSP lemon juice really isn't much to go with the big pot of lentils-and-rice.  

Also, when I'd gone through all my fresh veg I still had some of the lentil-and-rice mix left and took it to work for lunch.  It was very tasty all on its own!  All in all, an easy, delicious and hearty meal with lots of room for versatility.