More Lentil Soup, Now with Heavy Cream

Remember how much I loved the lentil soup with bacon from JoyI made a few weeks ago? I found another soup lentil soup recipe to love: the Cream of Lentil soup from the Daily Soupcookbook. I might even like this soup better, as a good creamy soup on a cold winter's day (well, as cold as it gets in Phoenix - I went running yesterday in shorts and a tank top) ranks way up there on the comfort list. The soup doesn't involve any complicated cooking procedures and is really quite easy; even the fact that I was short a full cup of heavy cream (due to an awesome inability to fully read recipes sometimes) didn't detract from the soup's goodness (and might be a useful thing to know if you're trying to watch your weight).

Why all the lentils lately? They're cheap - a pound of normal lentils will never run you more than a dollar, even at Whole Foods (I think...). I'm frugal. They're really easy to cook in that they don't require any soaking, and cook in less than an hour. They're good for you with plenty of protein and no fat and are high in fiber (as the package of lentils I got from Fresh & Easy boldly proclaimed). They have a long shelf life. They don't make me fart. They might not make you fart. Lentils are good!

There's 2.5 Pounds of Fungus Among Us

I love mushrooms. I love mushrooms so much that, as alluded to in my introductory post, my perfect meal at a previous point in my life would have included a bowl of cream of mushroom soup. Hell, it still might, but it probably wouldn't be that Campbell's slop I ate all the time as a kid. There's just something awesome about how they can sop up all the flavors around them and retain their own meaty earthiness. I'm also entertained by how some people I know are completely terrified by them since they grow in the dark! I guess mushrooms growing from some forgotten spilled beer in a closet would give me the heebie-jeebies too though. Maybe.

The Mushroom Barley Soup recipe from the Daily Soup Cookbookcalls for 2.5 lbs of mixed wild mushrooms. The thought of buying that much shroomage seemed a bit daunting to me, but I went off to Whole Foods and stood in front of their mushroom section for an inordinately long time, trying to decide what would be the most tasty and cost-effective mushroom combination, since I'm a cheap bastard who is now in debt again with a car loan (we'll talk finances another day). I ended up with a pound of regular white button mushrooms, about 3/4 lb criminis, and then a few oyster mushrooms and two portabellas, which I guess don't properly fall into the wild mushroom category for some reason but hell, I like 'em.

Hacking off the stems and then slicing all the mushrooms took a fair amount of time. The stems went to making mushroom stock, and then the rest of the recipe was pretty basic - the usual mirepoix and aromatics, then dump everything in the pot and let it hang out for a while for Maximum Flavor Infusion. The pearl barley kind of scared me since I've never used it before, and they were tiny, but after about an hour or so they became the fluffy barley things I'm used to, and they lended a nice grainy flavor to the soup.

Overall, it was pretty good but I think I'd not use the portabellas again - they were a bit too meaty for me in the soup. Also, using lots of parsley makes for some nice green colors in pictures but doesn't actually taste that great. Woops. I thought the soup could have been a little richer than it was - maybe a touch of butter at the end might help, or maybe adding... something to the mushroom stock. Maybe I should just take out the barley and dump heavy cream in it, which seems to always make things better if I'm going to eat something. I'll have to think about that one.

Beans and Greens, Good for Your Heart

When I was vegetarian, Progresso Lentil Soup was one of my dietary staples. It wasn't that expensive (as far as filling processed food meals go), and it was tasty, mostly due to its high salt content. I've tried making lentil soup a few times before, and it never matched up to the Progresso, probably because if I couldn't actually bring myself to put that much salt in the pot as I cooked it. It's like how cooking scrambled eggs was for me for a long time - it wasn't until Joytold me a few scrambled eggs used a quarter stick of butter to taste the way I liked that I got brave enough to use it all. Yikes.

Still, salt is a different animal than butter (which makes everything better), and I still hesitate to go crazy with it. Going back to Joyyielded a great idea to spruce up my soup: bacon. Bacon makes everything better (like butter)! I actually had some leftover bacon in my fridge from the incident, so I chopped it up and threw it in my soup. An hour later, I was slurping up wonderously salty, smoky, tasty lentil soup, and I didn't even have to put much salt in myself. I was a little worried that I forgot to rinse my lentils, but I don't think any rocks or weird grit got through. The recipe yielded something like eight monstrous bowls of soup, and given the cost of the materials, it's way cheaper (and possibly better) than the Progresso of lore.

The lovely spinach on top came from Z's garden, which is growing spinach faster than we can eat it. I'm going to have to do something with it soon before it all dies or gets eaten by insects.

I wonder if the bacon in my soup negates the truthfulness of my title. Hrm.

The Mixer Test

I tested out my fancypants new mixer(thanks again, Z) for the first time by making a batch of a classic - basic brownies. I got the recipe out of the Kitchen Aid Great Baking and Morebook that Z's mom got me for Christmas (it was actually a happy coincidence), which details step-by-step exactly at what speed and for how long to run your Kitchenaid mixer while baking things (apparently, they're convinced their mixers take half the time of other mixers and whatnot). Being the sort of person who's a stickler for such exact instructions, I followed them to the letter and they turned out the best brownies I've ever made. I wonder if letting the machine decimate the eggs and butter and sugar into fluffy goodness really makes that big of a difference... and now I'm never going to know otherwise because I'm convinced these Kitchenaid folks do not screw around! Super-fudgey, awesome chewy brownies. Okay, they were actually a bit sweet for me, but I now know how to achieve my favorite brownie texture in the universe. I gave them away to avoid getting cavities (I might already have some, as I haven't been to the dentist in three years or so, but that's another story). More mixer experiments are sure to come.

To test out Z's brand new food processor(I have the same one without the nifty wide-mouth feed tube), we made a batch of latkes. Well, mostly, I made a batch of latkes because Z was helping a touring Japanese cyclist who hadn't had a tune-up since he started his trip with a new bike in Canada three months ago. Yosuke, best of luck and we hope you make it to Tierra del Fuego in one piece and well-fed! Frying latkes is a lot of fun, though I forgot how fast potatoes turn a sickly pink color after you shred them.

In a final meal recommendation, the Broccoli Soup with Cheddar from Epicurious is really good. You might want to cut the stock a little. I have this 2-lb block of Tillamook sharp cheddar (yes, from Costco), and broccoli was on sale at Whole Foods, and I really wanted ONE of my cookbooks to have some directions for me to mix it together to make some cream-laden cheesy soup, but alas - I had to turn to the internet.

Next up: adventures in herb growing (culinary herbs, silly), more mixer fun, and more complaining about trying to cook through all of my cookbooks.

Holiday Food

Christmas came and went, and nary a blog entry was written, even though I finished shopping the night after I wrote my procrastination post predicting gloom and doom. To prepare for that night of furious internet shopping, I made Dduk Bok-kee with a recipe from Slashfood. Now, to be honest, I've been buying these little rice cake things for almost two years now, though I never called them anything but "rice cakes" (even though they bear no resemblance to the styrofoamy nightmares of my grade-school lunches), and I've always cooked them the same way - either dumped in soup or fried in some peanut oil with soy sauce with a healthy few squirts of sriracha or chili-garlic sauce. Although pretty tasteless on their own, they are awesomely chewy with a smooth, meaty texture and easily take on the flavors of whatever you're cooking them in. I had no idea of their place or origin in culinary world, and decided to do some investigating last week since I didn't feel like making soup or my generic fry-dish.

Apparently, in Korean, these rice cakey things are called duk, or dduk (the "dd"sound is one that is beyond my comprehension level, so don't ask me). Us Chinese folks apparently eat them too, but I didn't find a name that I could remember. Lots of Asian-folk eat them around the new year, and in Korea they're served as comfort food in dishes like Dduk Bok-kee, which is what I made. Spicy, sweet, chewy - how can you go wrong? You can go find dduk in the refrigerated section of your local Asian market. I'm itching to make some with fish balls instead of beef, which is apparently another traditional way of serving them.

In other news, I made my grandma biscotti for Christmas, using a recipe from Joy of Cooking(apparently she hasn't touched any of the presents we've bought for her in the last five years or so, so a perishable favorite food seemed like a wiser investment). They turned out surprisingly well, though I found that Joy's recommended bake time of 10 minutes on each side after the initial slicing was waaaay too much, as my little dudes started burning.

A few nights ago I made Cream of Spinach soup from Joy and found it to be pretty lacking. Admittedly, I used frozen spinach and I didn't puree it all the way since I'm not a fan of totally pureed soups (and I wanted to test out the cheap immersion blender I found in my cabinet and it wasn't very... efficient). However, after letting it sit for a few days and then sprinkling a pile of parmesan on it, I have to say it's actually pretty good.

In Christmas news, my family must think I'm an alcoholic because I got wine stoppers and a cocktail shaker. My youngest sister got me a book about cooking seafood, I kidnapped another cookbook from my mom's dollar-bin books cabinet (don't ask), Z's mom got me silicone baking sheets and two more cookbooks, and Z got me The Mixer. I have the best boyfriend ever. Lots of baking to come in 2008!

Curried Potato, Spinach, and Chickpea Soup

Thanksgiving is upon me, and I am stressing out because for the first time ever, I am cooking and Thanksgiving is going to be at my house. This calls for easy, fast, no-brainer comfort food so that I can figure out what I am going to do for Thursday and scour my house so that guests don't get covered with the ever-present Ralphy-shed, even though they have a 160-lb Great Dane that sheds just as much.

I made this soup from epicurious a few months ago at Z's house and it was simple and delicious. I made it again tonight, adding some celery that I had left over in my fridge, and it wasn't quite as good - I think the Trader Joe's curry powder has a bit more kick than the Whole Foods brand. (The same can be said about their dark chocolate, by the way - the Whole Foods dark chocolate actually verges on being... crunchy. Uck.) Still, it's a quick dish and it's really hard to mess up to the point of being bad, so give it a whirl and use your favorite curry powder.

Quick leftover report: the polenta-kale-mushroom stuff from last week makes for fantastic leftovers! I reconstituted the polenta with some chicken stock over the stovetop, then nuked it with the kale and mushroom on top. Definitely will be making that again.

Okay, back to cleaning and Thanksgiving brainstorming. I want to make a pie but I've never made a pie before and making my first pie ever for Thanksgiving sounds like a Bad Idea. Maybe some Indian Pudding is in order instead. Also, I don't like how as soon as I rid my house of fur and dust it comes back within two days. Sigh.

Senegalese Peanut Soup: Lessons about Peanuts

I have to admit that before making this, I didn't exactly know where Senegal was. Senegal is apparently a hot place.

I got this recipe from my trusty copy of the Daily Soup Cookbook, from which I've made a fair number of super tasty soups. I love soup. I eat hot soup in the dead of the Arizona summer and I never break a sweat.

Some things I learned while making this soup:

• Chopping peanuts with a knife and cutting board is a bad idea (hellllo, flying peanuts of doom! Thank god I wear glasses, because a peanut almost took my right eye out). Use a food processor.
• You can apparently make peanut butter in your food processor. This is cool and not hard.
  
• There's apparently a difference between roasted peanuts and dry-roasted peanuts, that being regular roasted peanuts are roasted with oil, and dry-roasted peanuts are not.
• Taking unsalted peanuts and putting salt on them is not like just buying salted peanuts. Z says the peanuts absorb the salt into them while they roast. Sigh.
  

The recipe called for salted dry-roasted peanuts and I managed to buy unsalted (woops, memory lapse) roasted (no idea they were different) peanuts. When you have a pound of fucking peanuts in your soup, you need to buy the right kind of peanuts, which can be done by reading the recipe and remembering it properly when you go to the store, but uh... yeah. I'm not always good at following directions. I ended up with some pretty bland soup. I need a do-over for this one.

Anyway, look out for the leftovers report over the next few days. I'm going to try to figure out how to doctor it to taste better after it sits for a bit.

P.S. Upon reading the recipe again, I realized I also put in double the amount of heavy cream called for. Dear Donger, learn2read! Fixing this will be fun. Yipes.