Lentil soup with andouille sausage, lentil soup with lemon and dill

 

I enjoy a good red lentil soup. Green or brown lentils? That seems to take more work. I'm not sure if it's just a visual thing for me, or an actual taste difference. Red lentils are said to taste slightly sweeter, although nutrition-wise they're pretty much the same. Being hulled, red lentils cook faster and break down more readily. I think I react as much as anything to the fact that the green and brown lentils look bland so I expect them to taste that way.

But yet I had partial packages of brown and green lentils on hand, so here are two takes on lentil soup, one meatless and one not.

This first soup is one of the recipes you read and think, hey, I have every single one of those ingredients in the house. It's a sign.

Lentil and andouille soup
Adapted from Meredith Deeds as printed in the Star Tribune Taste section. Basically the only change I made was in reducing the amount of sausage because once I’d chopped two links’ worth it looked like plenty compared with the vegetables I’d just chopped.

Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
8 ounces andouille sausage, sliced lengthwise and then crosswise into ¼ -thick slices.
1 large onion, chopped
2 medium carrots, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
3 tablespoons tomato paste
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
1⅓ cups brown or green lentils
4 cups broth
2 cups water
3 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Directions
in a large Dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add sausage, onions, carrots and celery and cook until vegetables are softened, stirring occasionally. Add garlic, tomato paste, salt and pepper and cook for about 3 minutes. Add lentils, broth, water, thyme and bay leaf. Bring mixture to a simmer and let cook until lentils are tender but not falling apart. How long that takes depends on the type of lentils you use; green lentils usually take closer to 45 minutes, so keep checking. Remove thyme sprigs and bay leaf. Add vinegar and parsley at the end and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper as needed. 

Rating: This soup tastes like smoked paprika to me, which I like, although it has none in it. The sausage infuses this soup thoroughly, and the tomato paste adds enough color that the soup is almost red lentil colored, so I don't have the sensation that I'm eating pebbles in muddy water. As brown lentil soups go, this one has reasonable merit.

Lentil soup with lemon and dill
Adapted from Better Homes & Gardens March 2016. (I would link to it, but I can't find it on their website anymore or at the address they listed, BHG.com/LentilSoup.) Makes 4 reasonably hearty servings.

Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
4 quarts broth
2 cups water
1½ cups green lentils
3 carrots, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons lemon juice
½ cup fresh dill springs, coarsely chopped
2 green onions, finely chopped
Crème fraiche or plain yogurt for garnish

Method
Heat olive oil in a large saucepan. Add cumin seeds and cook until fragrant. Stir in broth, water, lentils, carrots, garlic, bay leaf, ground cumin and salt. Cover and bring to a simmer. Cook until lentils are tender, 25 to 35 minutes. Add lemon juice. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve topped with a dollop of crème fraiche, dill and green onions. 

Rating: Worth trying but probably not repeating. It was better the second day once the flavors had time to intensify a bit, but it's not a wower in the flavor department.

Pumpkin bread pudding

For a person who never in her life has faced true want (despite being technically financially eligible for free government cheese back in our 20s while we were working, poorly paid professionals), I still have an ingrained sense that food is precious and must not be wasted. Whether that stems from parents raised in the Depression era or the idea that you needed enough pantry stores to outlast the blizzard du jour growing up in the sticks, I couldn't say. It's particularly important to me when it's produce I grew, probably some farm kid holdover.

So this recipe immediately called out to me. It's tailor made to use up those precious pumpkins plus making a dent in the containers of bread cubes I stash into the freezer corners before the end of a loaf gets away from me. Besides, it sounded like a really tasty Sunday breakfast with make-ahead bonus points.

Pumpkin bread pudding
Adapted from King Arthur Baking. I added orange peel because I had some that needed using. Like the bread and the pumpkin. And the milk won't last forever.

Ingredients
8 cups bread cubes
6 eggs
2 cups cream or half and half
1 cup milk
2 scant cups pumpkin puree, or about 1 can prepared
¾ cup sugar
⅓ cup brown sugar, packed
¼ cup rum, optional but tasty
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cloves
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg, plus more for garnish
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Zest of 1 orange
Crystallized ginger for garnish, optional
Whipped cream for garnish, optional
Maple syrup for serving, optional

Method
Preheat oven to 350 if baking immediately. Spray a 9- by 13-inch baking dish with cooking spray. Spread bread cubes across the bottom of the baking dish.

In a large bowl, mix eggs, cream, milk, pumpkin, sugars, rum, cinnamon, ginger, salt, cloves, nutmeg and vanilla. Pour over bread cubes. Let stand for at least 30 minutes until the bread has absorbed much of the liquid. Or you can cover the dish and refrigerate it for up to 24 hours, then uncover it and proceed. (If your baking dish isn’t Pyrex and up to abrupt temperature shifts, set it out to let it come closer to room temperature before baking.)

Sprinkle with grated nutmeg and bake for 40 to 50 minutes until set and starting to take on color. (Mine definitely needed the 50 minutes, but it had come from refrigerator temperature.) Serve warm topped with maple syrup or whipped cream and sprinkled with crystallized ginger. 

Rating: Tasty, tasty. Not overwhelmingly pumpkin-flavored, with the spices starring the show. When prepped the night before, a grand brunch option. I opted for maple syrup rather than whipped cream since I was serving it for breakfast rather than a dessert, but I'm sure that would be dandy as well. I could see making this one again, since if you have canned pumpkin it would be fairly pantry friendly.

So that took care of one container of pumpkin puree, two of bread crumbs and the small jar of orange zest. Now explain to me why the refrigerator seems even harder to put things away in. Darn structural leftover containers.

 

Mashed potato soup with Cheddar

 

This recipe was designed to make use of Thanksgiving leftovers, from mashed potatoes to turkey stock. It's certainly a fine use of leftover mashed potatoes, but if you don't have any, using some from the refrigerator case or deli at the grocery store would work.

Spicy Cheddar mashed potato soup
Adapted from Food & Wine magazine’s  2001 Cookbook. The recipe did not specify the amount of cayenne. I kept sprinkling on more and I’m not sure I ever got it to any stage where it would qualify as spicy, so don’t be afraid to be liberal with it. Serves 4 to 6 depending on whether you’re using it as a smaller first course or more of a main at lunch.

Ingredients
4 cups mashed potatoes
1½ cup heavy cream
3¾ cup broth
1 teaspoon onion powder
Cayenne, salt and pepper
¾ cup shredded Cheddar cheese
Chopped green onion or chives for garnish

Method
Combine mashed potatoes and cream in a large sauce pot. Heat through and add broth, onion powder, and cayenne, salt and pepper to taste.  Heat through. Serve garnished with chopped onions or chives.

Rating: This makes a nice soup that's super fast to make and reheats well. With that much cream and broth, it's more liquid and less gluey than some potato soups can be, with none of that mealy, spoon-coating mouthfeel. Spicy, it was not, at least as I made it, despite getting fairly reckless with the cayenne jar shaker when taste-testing found it still quite bland. I found adding the onion powder helped amp up the flavor in a more useful way and made it less one dimensional.It's sort of a blank slate as a recipe base that you can flavor as you like. I found I preferred chives as the garnish over the green onions called for. Certainly a viable option for leftover mashed potatoes, although I've never thought leftover mashed potatoes were a problem that needed solving by anything other than heating them up with a tad more butter.

Cranberry pumpkin muffins

 

Ready or not, it's daylight savings time. We eased into the morning with these muffins. Now if it would just stop snowing already.

Cecile’s cranberry pumpkin muffins
Adapted from the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers website, which naturally has recipes to encourage you to use their product. It does not explain who Cecile is, but she makes a decent muffin.

Ingredients
¼ cup butter, room temperature
1¼ cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup pumpkin puree
1½ cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 cup chopped fresh cranberries
½ cup chopped walnuts

Method
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line or grease 12 muffin cups.

In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar until creamy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Blend in pumpkin. Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Blend into pumpkin mixture until just moistened. Fold in cranberries and walnuts.

Divide among 12 muffin cups. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes  until done. 

Rating: These were fast to assemble in the morning because I'd mixed the dry ingredients the night before, chopped the cranberries and set the butter out to soften.I don't know that they're super looky, but they're reasonably tasty and have good texture. They remind me of eating spice cake in muffin form, which is a perfectly fine way to start the day. 

What they don't taste like is pumpkin, which mainly seems to serve to give the muffins a touch of color and plenty of moisture. That somehow surprised me, but I guess it shouldn't have, because looking at other pumpkin muffin recipes, they tend to contain a higher percentage of actual pumpkin. This could be to its advantage in being repeated as a recipe, however, because so often you get a recipe that only uses part of a can of pumpkin and you have an odd amount left to work with. I wonder if that's how this recipe got its genesis.