These baked flautas are filled with a tasty vegan filling plus perfect sautéed vegetables and cheese (if you aren’t going for a fully vegan meal) and baked to a crisp!
I don’t know about you, but after my mortgage, food is by far the biggest expense in our budget. We’re pretty frugal people overall…we don’t spend a lot of money on clothes and we spend a lot of time agonizing over other expenditures before making them. When it comes to food, though, we don’t cut an awful lot of corners.
I tried couponing for a while, back before the blog days, but found it to be a major time suck that really didn’t save me a whole lot of money, especially considering that the kinds of foods that I buy a lot of are NOT the kinds of foods that it’s easy to find coupons for. After starting the blog I all but abandoned coupons. No way do I have time for it these days. Now, we buy everything we can at Aldi (which we found a little bit scary before we started shopping there regularly and discovered that the food is great quality on the cheap) or Costco and then pick up the rest at Publix.
One of the ways that I save on my groceries is to incorporate meatless meals into the menu several days a week. We generally eat meatless more days than not, and when you have foods like these baked vegetarian flautas on the table you really don’t miss the meat.
The lentil-walnut taco filling is a recipe that I borrowed from Angela at Oh She Glows, but I bulk these up by adding sautéed onions and peppers (yellow peppers in this case) and a little bit of cheese. Sprayed with a little oil and baked until crisp, these baked vegetarian flautas definitely satisfy my (Americanized) Mexican cravings, and while I’m not going to pretend that lentils and walnuts fool my palate into thinking that I’m eating ground beef, it doesn’t need to, because these vegetarian baked flautas are just as good as they would be if they did have meat in them!
Yield: 4 servings
15 minPrep Time:
45 minCook Time:
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Ingredients
- 1/2 cup uncooked French lentils (also known as lentils de puy)
- 1/2 cup toasted walnut pieces
- 3/4 teaspoon dried oregano
- 3/4 teaspoon chili powder
- 1/4 teaspoon table salt or 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 tablespoon water
- 1 tablespoon canola or vegetable oil
- 1/2 medium onion, thinly sliced
- 1/2 red, yellow, or orange bell pepper, thinly sliced
- 8 fajita-sized flour tortillas (I like Old El Paso because they are very thin and pliable)
- lentil-walnut taco filling
- 4 ounces (one cup) Monterey Jack cheese, grated
- olive oil spray or 1 tablespoon olive oil
- sour cream, for serving
Instructions
- In a fine mesh sieve, rinse the lentils. Place them in a medium sauce pan with about 3 cups of water. Bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer. Cook for 20-25 minutes until tender. Drain. Add to a food processor with the rest of the ingredients for the filling. Process until it reaches a texture similar to taco meat.
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. In a medium skillet, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Cook the peppers and onions until tender and beginning to brown, about 10 minutes (reduce heat if necessary to prevent burning...you want a little bit of a "char" but you don't want them to burn to a crisp!).
- Divide the taco filling (about 1/4 cup per tortilla), vegetables, and cheese (2 tablespoons per tortilla) among the tortillas. Roll up the tortillas and brush or spray the seam sides with oil then place the tortillas seam side down on a baking sheet. Brush or spray the opposite side with oil as well.
- Bake, turning once, until crisp, 7-10 minutes per side. Serve immediately with sour cream for dipping.
Click here to print the recipe for baked vegetarian flautas!
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