Boston lettuce was one of the required items and I had no idea what it was. Apparently it's a type of butterhead lettuce, like Bibb, and actually was readily available at the grocery store. I sauteed the lettuce (I've never sauteed lettuce before!), an onion, celery, and parsley:
It was go green! I added frozen peas, chicken stock, and a handful of sugar snap peas (mine were from the farmer's market but it would be a perfect use for your garden veggies).
I smashed some of the peas and then added a little more chicken stock and some salt and it was done. This soup is amazing! It was so fresh and healthy tasting! I had never had a pea soup that was made out of fresh peas and it was such a good experience. This would be an absolutely perfect recipe for someone with a lot of peas in their garden. If you like peas, this is the soup for you. Make sure to add plenty of salt, it really enhances the flavor.
Josh doesn't like lentils (and I don't particularly love them either) so I decided to make Lentil soup with greens (p. 134) for mom. Lentil soup with sausage and potato was good and filling, so I was optimistic about this variation.
Essentially, it's exactly like the linked version, except instead of sausage and potato, I added spinach.
It was good! There are a lot more lentils in the dish than the picture would suggest (they all sunk to the bottom). This is a main dish soup and was amazingly cheap to make, so it's perfect for those on a budget. It's also could easily be vegan if you didn't add the bacon (I, of course, added the delicious bacon).
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel on the "Stocks and Soups" chapter! Unfortunately, I have chosen not to make most of the soups that are left for various reasons. Either I don't have the equipment (ovenproof bowls for french onion or roasted garlic soups), am not excited about the main ingredient (cream of chestnut soup), or it's a seafood soup (Colorado does not have cheap, quality seafood). Even so, I'm probably at 50%! I'm pretty excited about that. I imagine this will be the first chapter that I actually finish.
Seems to me (though I'm not looking at the recipe) that you could make french onion without ovenproof bowls: just toast the bread and cheese in the oven or a toaster oven and plop it on top of the amazing oniony soup! I have onion soup bowls from cheap second-hand stores and if it weren't for the tears involved in slicing so many onions, I would be making (vegetarian) French onion soup regularly.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I recently read on someone's blog that contact lenses are a wonderful guard against the onion weeps so maybe I'll get my contact-wearing boyfriend to do the heavy labour...