It's been a while since I had a recipe on here. This is a new one I tried tonight and was pleasantly surprised by. It's from that Mennonite cookbook I have (The More-with-Less Cookbook).

Honey Baked Lentils:

Start by combining 5 cups of water, a pound of dry lentils (pick over and wash them first), a small bay leaf, and 2 teaspoons of salt in a large saucepan or Dutch oven. Bring to a boil and then turn the heat down to a simmer, and simmer for 30 minutes.

Pick out the bay leaf at the end of the 30 minutes.

Then take some kind of large oven-proof dish with a cover, and put in 1 cup of water mixed with 1/4 teaspoon of powdered ginger, 1 teaspoon of dry mustard, 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, and 1/2 cup of finely chopped onion. Then add the lentils (don't bother to drain them).

Pour 1/3 cup honey over the whole thing. (Vegans could use a cane syrup, like Lyle's Golden Syrup. I suspect that would give a more-similar flavor than agave nectar would.)

Cover the dish tightly and bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for one hour. Take the lid off 10-15 minutes before the end of the hour to let some of the water cook off and so you get a "crust" on the top lentils.

A note to people without much lentil-cooking experience: lentils, when they're cooking, often don't smell very good. But they taste fine.

I was really pleased with how the recipe turned out - the flavor is very subtle, you can't pick out any one component of it. The lentils are slightly sweet from the honey, there's a little warmth from the ginger and mustard - it's just a good combination.

I ate these with rice. They would also probably be good heaped into some kind of flatbread like a chapatti. (And I suspect you could mash up leftovers, make "cakes" of them, and fry them as patties and eat them like a veggie burger).

You can also, if you like, add some kind of meat - the original recipe calls for four slices of bacon cut into 1" pieces and some mixed with the lentils and some laid on top (and then, you really do want to be sure to take the lid off towards the end, so the bacon can crisp up). I didn't have any bacon on hand so I didn't do that. But I think they'd also be good with cooked, crumbled sausage (like breakfast sausage) added. Or the cookbook suggests browned ground beef.

At any rate - if you do them "vegetarian," they're very cheap - I think with all the ingredients (I had everything but the lentils on hand already) it comes to maybe $2 or $2.50 to make the whole thing, depending on how expensive honey is. (I paid just under $1 for the lentils and, as I said, had the rest of the ingredients on hand)

The recipe says it serves 8 but that seems like it would be pretty generous servings. I'm probably going to wind up freezing some of this, and next time I do it I'm going to see if I can successfully cut the recipe in half.

You could probably also do them in a slow-cooker; I'm just not quite versed enough in slow-cooker recipe generation to judge how long they'd need to cook after the initial boiling - maybe 3 to 4 hours on low, I don't know. (If you don't put meat in them - or put in precooked meat, it probably matters little. Just don't overcook them until they fall apart.)