Lentil Soup
(Serves 4)
A hearty, satisfying lentil soup for those chilly winter days. If you want to make it vegan, omit the bacon, and use vegetable stock instead of chicken stock. You can also add 1-2 cups of diced carrots before you lock the pressure cooker lid on. If you make this without the bacon but still want a smoky flavour, you can add about 1 1/2 teaspoons smoked paprika to the onions and garlic while they are sautéing.
This recipe is gluten-free and dairy-free
- 3-4 strips bacon, cut into lardons
- 1 large onion, finely diced
- 3-4 large garlic cloves, minced
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup French Lentils (Lentils de Puy)
- 1 14 1/2 oz. can diced tomatoes (low sodium)
- 6 cups chicken stock
- 1/2 cup white wine (optional)
- 1 teaspoon dried thyme
- 2 whole bay leaves
Over medium heat in a pressure cooker at least 4 quarts, cook the bacon until the fat is rendered out and it starts to brown slightly. Add the onion, garlic and salt and sauté until the onions are translucent. Add all the other ingredients and lock the lid on the pressure and cook under pressure for 25 minutes. Bring the pressure down and remove the lid.
- 1 tablespoon Sherry vinegar or Balsamic vinegar
Taste for seasoning and add more salt if needed. Stir in the vinegar just before serving.
]]>The other day, I had a hankering for something filling and satisfying like a donburi, but didn’t have any of the conventional ingredients for making beef/chicken/pork or even tofu. We did, however, have some leftover turkey [...]]]>
The other day, I had a hankering for something filling and satisfying like a donburi, but didn’t have any of the conventional ingredients for making beef/chicken/pork or even tofu. We did, however, have some leftover turkey sausages from a previous dinner, so i figured I would give it a try. I already had the ricecooker cranking out some brown rice — i make large batches and put it in the freezer, as i’ve been trying to eat more brown rice, but hubby can’t.
Donburi is pretty easy to pull together once you have all the ingredients — onion sliced and wilted in a frypan, sake, mirin, soy sauce, ginger and garlic, cooked up until the sauce thickens a bit, toss in the thinly sliced sausage meat — really just had to be heated through, as the sausage was already cooked. Since the rice was ready, this only took about 10 minutes, and I had a great warm lunch. I cracked an egg over the hot rice and sauce — the heat of the rice cooks it slightly (kind of like pasta carbonara, but japanese).
And now for something completely different! On the Saturday afternoon cooking lineup, Cooks Illustrated has started airing a tv version of Cooks Country. I love the permutations and combinations of recipes they go through to get the final result. Anyhow, I digress! The episode was about “forgotten cakes”, and included a chocolate blackout cake, which is basically iced and filled with chocolate pudding, with cake crumbs over the whole works. Well, that got me hankering for chocolate pudding. One of the interesting things they did with the pudding recipe was to use unsweetened chocolate, so I thought I would give it a try. i halved the recipe, so we wouldn’t be swimming in pudding (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).
As I was making it, there is a point at which it looks like everything is going horribly wrong and the chocolate might be breaking, BUT, I just kept whisking as per the recipe, and at the very end, it all smooths out and you get lovely smooth, satiny chocolate pudding. I think the unsweetened chocolate makes for a more intense flavour. And its pretty fast to pull together. We didn’t wait for it to cool down!
Lots of garden prep going on with the recent sunny weather, so I’ll have to take pictures of the garden evolution.
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