A happy accident

Imagine the following scenario – you’re partway through cooking a standby recipe that calls for standby ingredients that you always have in your kitchen. Except, when you go to add that one ingredient you realize that you’re either going to have to turn off the stove or the oven, drive to the store and buy that vital missing link or you’re going to have to get creative. This is what happened to me a few weeks ago and I’m actually pretty glad, because it turned me on to a new version of an old recipe I’ve been making for at least ten years.

I make lentil soup pretty frequently, and I have never altered the recipe. I’ve pretty much been making the same recipe over and over and over, and couldn’t have been happier with the results. All you need is lentils, an onion, a few cloves of garlic, a can of tomatoes, a couple of bay leaves, some salt, a little oil and enough water you’ve got a hearty and delicious soup in about half an hour or forty-five minutes.

On that fateful day a few weeks ago I had all of those ingredients except for the can of tomatoes. This soup needs tomatoes. It begs for tomatoes. It just doesn’t make sense without tomatoes. I literally stood at the pantry with a quizzical look on my face for at least a minute or two wondering how on earth I was going to fix this dilemma when I spied a can of salsa.

You have to realize that I don’t like store-bought salsa all that much. I much prefer freshly made salsa with all fresh ingredients, but recently I’ve been on a chipotle kick and have been enjoying the chipotle salsa from Trader Joe’s. I grabbed the jar in my pantry, thought “Why not? I make this all the time, so what’s one bad batch of soup if this doesn’t work?” I added in a few tablespoons, then I threw caution to the wind and dumped the whole thing in there. That plus a can of corn, and I knew that this was truly a great solution to my kitchen dilemma.

Southwestern Lentil Soup
This makes enough to serve about four people.

• 1/2 pound dry lentils, sorted and rinsed
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2-4 cloves garlic, chopped coarsely
• 2 or 3 bay leaves
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 tablespoon oil
• Water
• 1 16-ounce jar of your favorite salsa (i.e. Trader Joe’s Garlic Chipotle Salsa) or 1 16-ounce can crushed or diced tomatoes
• 1 16-ounce can sweet corn or 1 10-ounce bag frozen sweet corn

Ingredients for a southwestern style lentil soup

Sort and rinse your lentils, then put in a large cooking pot. Add water to about an inch above your lentils. You may need to add more water later, which is fine. Add your salt, oil and bay leaves and turn on the heat to medium-high.

First steps in making lentil soup

Chop up your onions and garlic.

Chopped onions and garlic

Add the onions, garlic and frozen corn to your soup and stir everything together.

Adding ingredients to vegan lentil soup

Allow it to cook for a few minutes, then pour in the jar of salsa (or can of crushed or diced tomatoes).

Adding salsa to the lentil soup

Allow the soup to simmer, and stir occasionally. At this point you’ll want to turn down the heat to about medium so that the liquid will not evaporate more quickly than the lentils have time to cook.

After about twenty minutes check the lentils to see if they have cooked through. You want to be sure that they are soft but not mushy. The liquid may have still cooked off a little bit, so you may want to add an extra cup or two to make sure it is still soupy.

Vegan lentil soup

Once the soup is done, discard the bay leaves (don’t eat them), then serve with vegan buttered bread or toast or with tortilla chips. For a creamier soup, add about a tablespoon of Vegenaise to an individual serving of soup.

Southwestern lentil soup

Do you make lentil soup? If so, how do you enjoy making it?

P.S. Check out my new vegan community on www.Lunch.com, Vegan Living. I am going to be sharing more about this in a future post, but wanted to let you in on the secret a little bit early.

Pasta with a kick

Remember almost a year ago how I wrote a post about the woes of moving? Remember how I wrote about how disappointing it was to have to pack away your kitchen and become severely limited in what you could bake or cook? Remember how I wrote later how nice it was to finally get more settled into our new apartment? Those were the days, weren’t they? I think I am remembering it all too fondly because …drumroll… we’re doing it again. Except this time we aren’t moving around the corner – we’re moving to the other side of the country.

Look! We saved boxes from our last move!

Yep – after eight years, we’re saying good bye to the Big Apple and saying hello to the Emerald City (translation: Seattle, WA) or at least one of its neighboring towns. This is something that we have wanted to do for a few years now, but circumstances were never really in our favor to do it. Then we realized a few months ago that the circumstances would never be in our favor. We’d always have an excuse to stay in New York – the work, the food, the restaurants, the familiarity, et cetera, et cetera. We’re grown ups, though, and we finally decided that we couldn’t let any of that get in the way of living a life we’ve been dying to try for a long time.

At this point we’re in the final stages of packing which means our kitchen is reduced to memories of baking cookies and rolling out hand made tortillas. I am in that quandary of “what can I make that’s already in my cupboard?”, also known as a science experiment that could go horribly awry.

Lucky for me, though, I still had the right ingredients to make a pasta dish based upon a recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen, called Enraged Penne – except I had rigatoni, so I am calling this one Enraged Rigatoni. It’s a simple dish, but has a nice kick to it which you can increase or decrease as you like. The original recipe calls for fresh tomatoes, but if you don’t have them the canned variety works well.

Enraged Rigatoni

• 1 package rigatoni or penne pasta (I used whole wheat pasta)
• 2-3 tablespoons olive oil
• 3-5 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
• ½ to 1 teaspoon chili flakes
• 1 16-ounce can diced tomatoes (do not drain unless you want a drier pasta dish)
• 1 teaspoon salt

Boil the pasta according to package directions.

While the pasta is boiling, put your olive oil in a hot pan then add the chopped garlic. Continuously stir the garlic around until it starts looking slightly toasted.

Freshly prepared garlic

Stir in the chili flakes, and stir around for another minute or so.

Add as much or as little kick as you like

Pour in the diced tomatoes and salt, then stir. Let the liquid reduce somewhat because you do not want the pasta to be too soupy. You should have a nice balance between pasta and sauce.

Canned tomatoes are a fine stand in for fresh tomatoes in this dish

Once the sauce is done, stir in the drained pasta and then serve with chili peppers and/or basil as a garnish.

Stir the rigatoni and the tomato sauce together

I really love the simplicity of this dish, but if you like yours with a little extra flavor I’d suggest trying any or all of the following variations.

How about frying up onions with your garlic and pepper? You could also add mushrooms, but to avoid the sauce becoming too soupy I would saute the mushrooms in a separate pan first, then drain the water off, and then add the cooked mushrooms at any point in the cooking. I’d also recommend adding chopped basil to the dish just after the heat is turned off, so that it will wilt, but not be overcooked. A final suggestion would be to add a little bit of red cooking wine (about ¼ cup) for your garlic to soak up before adding in the tomatoes.

A nice, spicy pasta

When you move, what do you do for food? Do you try to use up what is in your cupboards or is it take out all the way?