The Slow-Simmered Lentils with Kale and Goat Cheese from Smitten Kitchen Keepers didn’t initially catch my eye, but when I saw someone mention them online somehow they immediately got on my list.

We wound up with bagged, pre-chopped kale in our grocery order, so I didn’t try out including the steps. (They are in the bagged stuff, but it’s already a pain to sift them out and strip the leaves off the bigger stems.) Other that that I made it as directed, adding half the cheese at the end since I only needed two servings.

The only real thing to be aware of if you make this is that it needs to simmer for close to an hour, so don’t start it too late in the evening. (You could easily do your prep ahead though – sort through your lentils and prep the veg and it’d be very fast to throw it all in the dutch oven.) Deb doesn’t cue for this but make sure to check your lentils a couple of times and taste to see if they’re cooked through or not. I didn’t need the entire hour, I think mine took about 45 minutes.

I didn’t have the recommended country bread or sourdough to toast alongside this, so on a whim I made some corn muffins since I happened to have everything I needed for a recipe that had floated across my radar recently. In my opinion the bread would have been better, providing ore contrast than the muffins. But my husband liked that he could break pieces of the muffin up and scoop it along with the lentils.