Tag Archives: sweet potatoes

Creamy Thai Lentils with Sweet Potatoes

With the holidays behind us and only two weeks left of my maternity leave, I feel like I’m spinning uncontrollably towards a Big Unknown. Which I am. What will it be like to take my baby to work? Will I feel invigorated by getting out every day, or exhausted? Full of purpose or drained of emotional resources? And more importantly, what will it be like to have to put away the gauchos I’ve lived in for the past 3 months and actually wear *shiver* real pants? Like, pants pants? (Know what I mean?)

It’s hard to say . . . so why keep thinking about it? What will happen will happen, so in the meantime I’ll keep gazing at my baby . . .

. . . (and putting lotion on her poor dry skin!), reading on the couch, doing my morning coffee/devotional/Pilates routine, and I’ll even write a couple blog posts. But before posting recipes for 2 fabulous soups that I’ve discovered, I bring you these lentils. I don’t even remember when I made this dish–in fact, I had this post ready to go and saved to my drafts from some time last spring or summer. It’s appalling how long it sat there, and I’m happy to finally resurrect it, because it was really awesome.

I really loved this dish, modified from Lindsay’s already-fabulous recipe. Because I misread the recipe though, I used 1 lb of lentils instead of 1 cup, so it was much more of a lentil-heavy dish than she intended. But I didn’t realize my mistake until I referenced the original recipe before writing this post, because it was fantastic even with my flub!

I also was wary of the cabbage she included, mainly because I intended this dish to last as leftovers through the week, and cold leftover cooked cabbage really tends to . . . well, it stinks, folks. So I went with spinach instead.

It’s truly delicious, a meal that can be made fairly cheaply, and pretty darn healthy to boot. And it’s almost vegan–fully vegan if you skip the butter.

Enough said–let’s cook!

Ingredients

(Serves 6-8)

1 lb lentils, rinsed
5 cups vegetable broth
2 large sweet potatoes
1 tsp turmeric
3 TBS oil
1 TBS butter
5 cloves garlic
1 onion thinly sliced
1-9 oz bag spinach
2 jalapeños
1 TBS fresh minced ginger
1-14.5 oz can diced fire roasted tomatoes
1 1/4 cups coconut milk
Salt and pepper, to taste
Cilantro, to garnish

Peel and dice the sweet potatoes, and add them to the pot along with the broth and rinsed lentils.

Bring it to a boil, then simmer over low heat for 30-40 minutes, or until the lentils and potatoes are just done cooking (soft but still holding their shape). Stir the pot a few times during this cookination to make sure the lentils don’t burn to the bottom of the pot, and add extra water as needed.

Add the turmeric, tomatoes, and ginger, mix it all about, and cook for another 10 minutes, adding a little more liquid if it looks dry (or another can o’ tomatoes if you want to walk on the wild side!).

Slice the onion, mince the garlic, and de-seed and mince the chilies.

Like zees!

Heat the oil and butter in a large skillet. Cook the onion, garlic and chilies until softened.

Add the spinach, and stir until just wilted (sorry, a little short on step by step pics today). Add the spinach/onion combo to the pot of lentils along with the coconut milk. Stir until evenly incorporated and heated through.

Excellent! Looks like a pot full of gross mush. Exactly what I was hoping for.

But your taste buds will tell you otherwise! Yost clois yor ais and troist me.

And don’t ask what accent I was trying to speak in–it’s entirely of my own making.

Taste and season, and serve garnished with cilantro (by itself or over rice).

You will love these flavors!

At least I did.

Now dig in!

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Split Pea Soup

I think this split pea soup is the very soup about which was written:

Pea porridge hot, pea porridge cold, pea porridge in the pot nine days old.

After an hour on the stove, it gains a thick consistency, like a porridge. And the quantity of soup produced is so large that I definitely understand how it could sit around for 9 days. Ours sat around for at least 6–though in the fridge, mind you. And in a nice airtight container, for those concerned.

In her original recipe, Tracy says you can use bacon or ham, but I’m completely advocating the use of ham. Because the bacon, after simmering for an hour, is bound to get floppy–and who likes floppy bacon? The chunks of ham are totally satisfying and delicious. Troist me. This is a great comforting soup with awesome flavor, and very little prep work.

The ultimate test: the man of the house. He said (and I quote):

“Why don’t we eat things like this all the time?”

Bless his ever-loving soul. I love it when he says that.

And it’s a good thing he loved it, since we ate this soup all week long and it yielded no less than 4 meals for the two of us–plus a little extra for some hungry members of our Bible study.

Ingredients

( Serves 8 )

2 sweet potatoes or yams, or 1/2 butternut squash
1 large onion
2 carrots
2 stalks celery
2-3 cups ham cut into 1″ pieces
8 cups water
2 vegetable bouillon cubes
16 oz dried split peas
1/2 tsp ground thyme
1 TBS dried sage
1 TBS fresh basil
Salt and pepper, to taste

Before we jump in, I must explain that my flash temporarily decided to be broken. I switched out batteries a few times, prodded it, swiveled it around–but it would not work. The lighting in my kitchen is very bad, but I was also very hungry and not willing to waste any more time messing with the flash, so I gritted my teeth and took some very bad pictures. Bad light . . . bad focus . . . bad color balance. Man, I’d really grown dependent on that flash unit for my food photography.

Anyway–less about Mr. Speedlight SB-600 and more about the veggies at hand!

Peel the sweet potatoes or yams, and chop ’em up (along with the carrots for OrangeFest 2011) into smallish cubes.

Dice the onion and celery . . .

. . . and cut the ham into 1” cubes.

Dice the basil and pretend I took a picture.

Thoroughly rinse and clean the split peas.

Combine all the ingredients in a very large pot.

Oooh, a shred of light is coming through the window!

It’s the first decent picture of the lot.

Don’t forget the herbs and spices, along with a generous amount of salt and pepper!

Bring to a boil over medium high heat . . .

. . . and rejoice that your flash suddenly decided to work again!

Once the soup boils, turn the heat down to low, cover the pot, and simmer it for about an hour, stirring a couple times to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom and creating a layer of burnination. Remove the cover of the pot during the final 10-15 minutes of cooking. Taste, and add salt and pepper as needed.

Serve hot!

You can also freeze it within 5 days. Or hope for the best and polish it off on day 6.

A note: the soup looks a little watery here, but after a night in the fridge it was so thick it definitely qualified as ‘porridge.’

It was so good that after eating it all week long, by the time I scooped up the very last spoonfuls from the very last bowl, I was actually disappointed.

I actually started plotting when I could make it again.

True story.

I think you guys will love this one!

Click here for printer-friendly version: Split Pea Soup