Curing the November Blues, Again: Lentil Soup with Speck & Kale

Another rerun. But until my Warrior gets out of the hospital. Reruns it is. Delicious nonetheless. 

Lentil Soup with Speck & Kale is a great lunch for a
gloomy, cold late Fall day.

I have the November blues. The cold is starting to already get to my Mediterranean  genes. We're halfway through November and I'm already looking for "Signs of Spring". The garden seed catalogs are still at least 6 weeks away, and since I'm planning a fallow year so I can work on the soil, I will be planting very little, and probably in Earth Boxes. The frost on the brown leaves on the ground makes them look like frosted cornflakes, but that just makes me think of the snow to come. It's getting dark way too early in the evening. That is not good. Am trying to think of things that will cheer me up. Maybe putting up the Christmas tree over the weekend will help. Maybe. This lentil soup, with speck and kale, though, and my favorite yellow, happy tablecloth will probably do the trick.

This is the kind of healthy soup that doesn't taste "healthy". Chock full of good stuff like lentils and kale, it'll warm you up without slowing you down. You could make this a vegetarian soup using olive oil in place of the bacon fat or butter, vegetable stock, leaving out the speck and adding about 2 drops of liquid smoke; also remember to use a vegetarian Worcestershire, or the Pickapeppa which has no animal ingredients. This is also gluten free.  A great carry-to-work-lunch, too, that will have your coworkers swooning around the microwave when you heat it up. Don't share unless you've brought extra.

Note: Speck is smoked proscuitto, and if your grocery or good deli doesn't carry it, use smoked bacon instead. It does not taste the same, but will still be delish.


Ingredients:

Lentil Soup with Speck & Kale
Serves 6

2T bacon fat or butter
3 oz. diced speck (can sub minced, smoked bacon)
1 lb. regular brown or green lentils, washed and picked over
1 large onion, diced finely
2 celery stalks, diced finely
1 large carrot, coarsely grated
1/2 cup minced red bell pepper
1 quart of homemade or no  salt added chicken stock
1 quart of water, plus extra if needed
2 bay leaves
1T dried marjoram leaves
1T dried thyme
2 tsp. Worcesteshire sauce or Pickapeppa sauce
Coarse salt and pepper

1 lb. kale, leaves and small stems only, blanched, squeezed out and chopped

2T good quality balsamic vinegar

Instructions:

1. Heat the bacon fat or butter in a deep soup pot, and sauté the speck until brown. 

2. Add everything else through the worcestershire sauce and bring to a simmer. Cook about 45 minutes to an hour until the lentils are tender .

3. Taste for salt and pepper and add as needed, stir in the kale and the balsamic vinegar, and heat through.  Serve piping hot.

Fee, Fie, Foe, Friday: Why Doesn't My Kale Look Like This?

Mixed color kale at Chanticleer in Wayne, PA.

Why doesn't my kale look like this? Maybe because I don't have 12 gardeners looking after it. I took this photo yesterday at Chanticleer, which is a hidden gem in Wayne PA. The most beautiful gardens, ever. And the lotus are blooming too. Go if you can.

Another Green Smoothie: The Great Green Morning Goo

A couple of days ago, I was sitting in my little red Subaru, stopped at a traffic light, when I notice a kid up in the big SUV beside me staring intently at me. What the heck??? After the light changed, and the vehicle sped off, I realized the kid wasn't looking at me, he was looking at my bright green breakfast, the green smoothie, AKA the Great Green Morning Goo I was sipping while stopped. Nothing like grossing out a kid first thing in the morning. Made my day.  I drink one of these virtually every day, because, well, as the day goes on, my eating gets worse. From my healthy start in the morning, I'm usually eating chocolate by bedtime. And it's something I can consume on the way to work. It gets in a good dose of all sorts of nutritious things, it's quick to make and it tastes won-der-ful. 

Seriously, though, most of the Green Smoothies I see are nothing but a giant carbohydrate load, generally having too much fruit in them just hide the flavor of the added leafy greens. It's a lousy way to start the day, because in order to be sustained for a few hours, i.e., until lunch, you need some protein, fiber and fat, not a bunch of carbs your body converts quickly to sugar. A standard fruit and greens smoothie is not an adequate meal replacement. Somehow, the delivery system for nutritious greens has turned into a sugary drink.

While a Green Smoothie, or a Green Monster is a great way to get a good dose of healthy greens, the rest of it is pretty much, like it or not, sugar in the form of fruit. All fruits and vegetables are carbohydrates, but the ones most commonly used in these drinks are especially high carb ones --bananas, orange juice and pineapple.

The one I like to make in the morning is delicious, relatively low in calories and carbs, and high in protein and fiber. It's a real breakfast. Keeps me going for a good 3-4 hours, and I work on my feet not sitting at a desk. I do use fruit, but always berries, which, besides being considered super foods, are lower carb choices. Greek yogurt (2%) is included for both its high protein, and some good fat, and it makes a really rich, creamy tasting drink. Rather than load it with bananas for sweetness, a packet or two of vanilla stevia makes this pretty green drink both sweet and healthy. As the Goo stands for a few minutes, usually while I look for my keys, it actually changes to a very pretty color green, from dull green, as the acid in the berries makes the green "greener".

Just like for any sort of green smoothie, you need a blender for the great Green Morning Goo, and if you are neurotic like me, a scale, as I weigh all the ingredients right into my blender container. And yes, if you have a VitaMix, this is a perfect drink to make in it.  The more powerful your blender, the smoother this will be. I get my psyllium powder at Trader Joe's, and my vanilla stevia at Whole Foods Markets. And if you like my BPA free travel cup, you can get it here--it can handle either cold OR hot drinks...

Keys, check, purse, check, Green Goo, check...ooops, where
are my sunglasses??!!

Great Green Morning Goo

1 cup (140g) frozen strawberries
2T (12g) psyllium powder
6 oz. (3/4 cup) 2% plain Greek yogurt
2 cups packed baby spinach or baby kale
1-2 packets of vanilla stevia powder
8 -10 oz water or unsweetened vanilla almond milk

Place in the blender in the order given, and puree until smooth. Pour into a glass, and enjoy.

Serves 1

Curing the November Blues: Lentil Soup with Speck & Kale

Lentil Soup with Speck & Kale is a great lunch for a
gloomy, cold late Fall day.

I have the November blues. The cold is starting to already get to my Mediterranean  genes. We're halfway through November and I'm already looking for "Signs of Spring". The garden seed catalogs are still at least 6 weeks away, and since I'm planning a fallow year so I can work on the soil, I will be planting very little, and probably in Earth Boxes. The frost on the brown leaves on the ground makes them look like frosted cornflakes, but that just makes me think of the snow to come. It's getting dark way too early in the evening. That is not good. Am trying to think of things that will cheer me up. Maybe putting up the Christmas tree over the weekend will help. Maybe. This lentil soup, with speck and kale, though, and my favorite yellow, happy tablecloth will probably do the trick.

This is the kind of healthy soup that doesn't taste "healthy". Chock full of good stuff like lentils and kale, it'll warm you up without slowing you down. You could make this a vegetarian soup using olive oil in place of the bacon fat or butter, vegetable stock, leaving out the speck and adding about 2 drops of liquid smoke; also remember to use a vegetarian Worcestershire, or the Pickapeppa which has no animal ingredients. This is also gluten free.  A great carry-to-work-lunch, too, that will have your coworkers swooning around the microwave when you heat it up. Don't share unless you've brought extra.

Note: Speck is smoked proscuitto, and if your grocery or good deli doesn't carry it, use smoked bacon instead. It does not taste the same, but will still be delish.


Ingredients:

Lentil Soup with Speck & Kale
Serves 6

2T bacon fat or butter
3 oz. diced speck (can sub minced, smoked bacon)
1 lb. regular brown or green lentils, washed and picked over
1 large onion, diced finely
2 celery stalks, diced finely
1 large carrot, coarsely grated
1/2 cup minced red bell pepper
1 quart of homemade or no  salt added chicken stock
1 quart of water, plus extra if needed
2 bay leaves
1T dried marjoram leaves
1T dried thyme
2 tsp. Worcesteshire sauce or Pickapeppa sauce
Coarse salt and pepper

1 lb. kale, leaves and small stems only, blanched, squeezed out and chopped

2T good quality balsamic vinegar

Instructions:

1. Heat the bacon fat or butter in a deep soup pot, and sauté the speck until brown. 

2. Add everything else through the worcestershire sauce and bring to a simmer. Cook about 45 minutes to an hour until the lentils are tender .

3. Taste for salt and pepper and add as needed, stir in the kale and the balsamic vinegar, and heat through.  Serve piping hot.

Kitchen Magician Trick #1: Blanching

It's hard to follow a healthy diet every day when those darn $5 foot-long hoagies (subs to all you non-Philly folks) look so good. Making a meal from scratch seems so daunting when it's late, you're tired and there are still things like baths and bedtime stories, or a lawn to mow before dark. Or, there's a hammock and a glass of wine with your name on it.

It's easy enough to pop a chicken breast or a steak on the grill, but if the thought of having one more bagged salad combo on the side makes you want to dial Dominos, I have a good trick for you. The big TV food gurus always tell you to wash and prep your vegetables and fruit as soon as you bring them home, but I want you to take it one step further. Blanch your vegetables in bulk in advance. Blanching partially cooks your vegetables, and usually brightens the color. If you like them on the firm side, you can even use the blanched vegetables in salads or quick pickles.

So if your family will eat green beans twice in a week,  buy 2 pounds, trim and blanch them in boiling, well salted water for about 4-5 minutes, until just on the verge of being cooked, and then immediately shock them in ice water to stop the cooking. Now you are ready to go. This technique works for most harder, crispy vegetables like broccoli, green beans, carrots and cauliflower, though you may want to blanch sliced carrots or cauliflower a minute or two longer than beans. Tougher greens like kale and collards are great stored blanched, ready to use. You probably only think of blanching when you want to freeze vegetables, but blanched vegetables will keep well in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.  This week I did a batch of green beans and a big bunch of kale.

When mealtime rolls around, and your chicken is on the grill, or the tuna is in the broiler, all you have to do is heat some of your favorite fat in a saucepan, add some aromatics--onion, garlic or pepper, cook for a minute or two, and then add a meal's worth of your blanched vegetable. Toss it in the hot oil until heated through and as tender as you like. Less than 5 minutes to the table. There are innumerable combos to try with your vegetables. Bacon is always a favorite, it goes with virtually everything, and if you save bacon fat like I do, you already have the start of a tasty side dish.

I'm not going to tell you how to blanch your vegetables, you can Google for plenty of info on that; I am telling you to partially gook your vegetables ahead to speed getting a delectable, nutritious dinner on the table in no time flat.

Here's a favorite recipe of ours that uses blanched green beans; in our house the green beans are usually haricots verts, because I grow them and we prefer them. Feel free to use whatever bean is fresh and beautiful in your market.

Just about everything is better with bacon.

Green Beans with Bacon, Fried Onions & Tomato
Serves 4

1 lb. green beans or haricots verts, trimmed and blanched
4 slices of bacon, minced or 4 slices of cooked bacon crumbled, and 2T of saved bacon fat
1 small red onion, quartered and sliced thin
1 medium tomato, seeded and diced small
salt ,and black pepper to taste

In a 12" non-stick frying pan,  cook the bacon over medium high heat until beginning to crisp, about 2 minutes. Lower the heat and cook about a minute longer, until there is a little more than a tablespoon of rendered fat in the pan. Remove the cooked bacon and set aside. Add the onion to the bacon fat, and cook until beginning to soften. If you already have the bacon cooked, just heat the bacon fat and cook the onion. When the onion is beginning to turn golden, add the green beans and toss in the bacon fat. Cook a minute or two until heated through, then add the tomato. Toss well, season with salt and pepper to taste, and place in serving bowl. Sprinkle the reserved bacon over the top.