SereneCooking

I think this is the best fat-free lentil soup I've ever made. You could cut back on the pepper, but I kind of liked it this way. It looks like a lot of ingredients, but most of them are spices.

Peppery Lentil Soup

1 onion, chopped
3 carrots, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 cup dry lentils (the regular brown ones), rinsed
5 cups water
1 Tbsp. miso paste
1/4 tsp. pepper
1/2 tsp. celery seed
1/4 t. fines herbs
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp. ground coriander
1-2 packed cups chopped fresh spinach

Bring everything but the spinach to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer approximately 45 minutes, until lentils are as soft as you want them to be. A few minutes before serving, stir in the spinach, allow to wilt a few minutes, remove the bay leaf, then serve the soup hot. Also excellent as leftovers.

Leftover potato soup, heated with some chicken stock and kim chee. Very good stuff. Cleans out the sinuses, too.

This chicken soup is so good! I boiled a chicken, made a simple chicken stock with the bones and some additional chicken feet, added diced onions/celery/carrots, tossed back in the chicken and some pastina (tiny little pasta BBs), and simmered it for a bit with a little salt. Oh, man, perfect January food.

Bought a coconut, some lime leaves, some lemongrass, some galangal, enoki mushrooms, and a jar of shrimp/chili paste. Have some chicken and a bottle of fish sauce already. Made coconut cream out of the coconut with my stick blender (lots more fun than it sounds). Guess who's making tom kha gai tomorrow? :-)

Went to Costco today. Mostly bought staples -- sugar, toilet paper, butter for toffee, that kind of thing. But chicken (whole or parts) was 99 cents a pound, so I went kind of nuts. Bought two whole chickens and a big pack of thighs (our favorite part). Here is its fate so far:

Chicken #1: Skinned (reserved skin for schmaltz), boiled, saved the resulting yummy liquid for soup. Made chicken salad from the white meat. Saved the dark meat for the soup. Saved the carcass for the next batch of stock. Added onion, garlic, carrot, bell pepper, mushrooms, the dark meat, fish sauce, curry paste, ginger, and some shrimp to the stock to make a lovely Thai-inspired soup.

Chicken #2: Frozen for future knaedlach soup (see chicken skin, below)

Thighs: Skinned (reserved skin for schmaltz), packed two-or-three at a time into bags, frozen. Six meals' worth of chicken for about six bucks.

Chicken skin: Frozen until I get ready to make knaedlach soup (chicken soup with matzoh balls). My mother will walk me through it -- I've really only made it alongside her before, but it's really my favorite soup, and for the first few years that I was a vegetarian, I took my birthday off to have some of her matzoh balls (I was never a fan of the chicken, and eventually, mom found a brand of vegan "schmaltz" and started making me a veg version of knaedlachs).

Maybe next weekend there will be knaedlach soup. I've been on a total soup kick lately.

I had cream sauce left over from the shit-on-a-shingle experiment, and mentioned to James that I was trying to think what to do with it. He suggested creamed peas on toast, an old childhood favorite of his. We also had a salad and some homemade veggie barley soup.



( more photos )

The soup is an onion, a tomato, 2 carrots, 2 ribs of celery, a cup or two of sliced mushrooms, garlic, bay leaf, seasoned salt, a tiny bit of red miso, homemade veggie stock, and barley that had already been pressure-cooked before adding.

Berberé spice mixture is a standard Ethiopian spice blend. I add it to lentils, other legumes, and anything I want to call "Ethiopian". :-)

Ethiopian Pumpkin Stew

2-3 Tbs. olive oil (more or less to taste)
1 onion, diced
2-3 Tbs. berberé spice mixture
1 quart veggie broth (or use 2 veggie buillon cubes and a quart of boiling water)
1 1/2 cups EACH pureed pumpkin and sweet potato (or 3 cups of any combination of squash/sweet potato, mashed -- canned or frozen is fine, too)
2-3 medium potatoes
1 handful of cilantro, chopped

Sautee onions in olive oil until translucent. Add spice mixture and cook another minute or so. Add broth and pumpkin/sweet potato and stir. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for at least 30 minutes. 30 minutes or so before serving, peel and dice the potatoes and add them to the soup. Simmer at least 20-30 minutes, until potatoes are soft. Add water to soup, if desired, to thin it down. Just before serving, stir in cilantro.