Lentils - An everyday food

Growing up on the northern coast of Colombia, South America, Claudia Krevat ate lentils, a lot of lentils, because the small bean is a food staple across the country. Now, after 30 years of cooking and catering - 18 of those years in Bozeman - Krevat is going on the road to promote the qualities of the little legume to people across Montana, the number one lentil-producing state in the U.S.

Using a $1,000 grant from the Red Ants Pants Foundation to partially fund her Lentil Caravan tour, Krevat is speaking and educating about and handing out samples of lentils this year.

The grants from Red Ants Pants aim, in part, to promote women's entrepreneurship, and Krevat said part of what she hopes to get back from her lentil promotions tour is input from people of all ages for a lentil cookbook she is developing.

"I am just going to do what I am meant to do, which is to introduce people from Montana to lentils because, while we are the largest grower in the United States, everybody I run into in the farmer's market, I do the Red Ants Pants concert ... they don't even know what lentils taste like," she said.

After Krevat first moved to the U.S., she had to hunt out sources of ingredients for foods like those she grew up with in Colombia. She learned to cook not just the dishes of her childhood, but those she liked from other cultures as well, she said, including Mediterranean, Spanish and Italian. Along the way she became a proponent of both local food sourcing and what is called fusion cuisine, a style of cooking that brings together foods, spices and cooking techniques from different cultures.

During her visit in Havre April 22, Krevat made three presentations, including two for children at Hi-Line Home School Co-op and Boys & Girls Club of the Hi-Line, as well as a third at Bear Paw Meats.

The kids at the first two stops were given a geography lesson on how to locate Colombia and where lentils grow, but the treat of the day Krevat designed especially for them.

"I wanted to do recipes that people in the place I visited would like, and I thought what kid doesn't like pizza, so I created a lentil marinara sauce. It has a little bit of a look of meat sauce," she said, "or you can put it on pizza or make a lasagna or a spaghetti out of it."

Club Director Tim Brurud of the Boys & Girls Club said they limited the lentils class to 20 kids so Krevat would have a set number of servings to make in preparation "or she might've had 60 there."

"She gave them samples first, then told them the sauce was made with lentil beans," Brurud said. The kids were surprised a bean pizza sauce would taste so good, he added, and when offered another piece of mini-pizza at the end, they all asked for more.

The kids were surprised the lentils were grown around Havre, said Crystal Manuel who, with her husband, Jody, farms organic lentils south of town and who accompanied Krevat on her Havre stops. The kids, who all said they spend time in Beaver Creek Park each summer, were also surprised to hear they had been traveling past the lentil crops every year on their way to the park, she added.

Brurud said that the club will be starting construction of a raised garden area on the club grounds within the next week or so. They expect the gardens to be completed some time in June and the kids are already planning to plant lentils, he said, adding though it may be too late to grow lentils to a mature bean, they will plant them to watch them grow.

Krevat served up samples of an Irish stew at Bear Paw Meats. The store sells locally grown lentils, grains and dry goods in bulk, along with locally grown meats.

Lentils, which are tricky to harvest since they grow very low to the ground, are second only to soy beans in protein content of all the legumes.

A quarter-cup of beluga lentils has 12 grams of protein, similar to 4 ounces of red meat, Krevat said, but with more fiber, plus folic acid, iron and lower fat content. The lentils and a half-cup of rice or whole grain, such as farro, provide a complex carbohydrate, which is good for diabetics, because it doesn't spike glucose, she added.

Because of the high protein content, lentils are popular with vegetarians, she said, though more vegetarians need to know about lentils. She said she has seen many vegetarians in her travels who are overweight because they eat too many breads when their bodies are really just hungry for protein.

too many breads when their bodies are really just hungry for protein.

Ironically, one of the attendees of Krevat's presentation at Bear Paw Meats was Ligia Arango, a Havre resident who also grew up in Colombia.

Arango said she didn't know that Krevat was originally from Colombia until meeting her, but the meeting gave her a chance to talk about lentils and foods they each grew up with.

"I grew up eating lentils and nobody here in the states knows about lentils," Arango said, adding, "The food is so (common in Colombia). There is no recipe, you just kind of make it."

Americans might have a problem with eating lentils on an aesthetics issue, she said.

"Part of the problem with lentils in American cooking is that they don't look pretty. They cook kind of a brownish blah," she said. "Unless you know that they're good, you may not want to cook and eat them."

In Colombia, though, part of the legume's popularity is the convenience of lentils along with their nutritional value.

Both women said that in impoverished countries people don't have easy access to protein foods or means of storing perishable foods. Lentils are cheap, easy to store, easy to prepare and offer a high protein food source, that these people might not get otherwise due to the cost and scarcity of meat choices, but they are also an incredibly healthy choice.

"If we increase the number of lentils in our diet," Krevat said, "We are doing something really good for our bodies, we're doing something really good for our Earth ... and we're doing something good for our farmers because the more demand we have, the more our lentil growers in Montana are going to have sales."

The marinara sauce and other recipes can be found on Krevat's website http://www.claudiasmesa.com.