Disrupted Plans

We had planned to head to the Outpost Cafe in Opheim on Valentine’s Day for their steak and shrimp special. Mother Nature intervened, disrupting our plans with a short but intense snowstorm. Our home is only about 50 yards from the highway, but in the midst of this mini-blizzard that highway disappeared into a wall of white. We’ve been caught out on the roads after dark in blizzards before. It’s not an experience we care to repeat, so we stayed home. I found a package of rib steaks in the freezer. The defrost cycle on the microwave was employed to save the day.

On Sunday, the BPA, Opheim HS division, hosted a steak dinner from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. as a fundraiser. There wasn’t a repeat of the snowstorm (although Mother Nature gave a weak encore performance Saturday evening), and this event was held during daylight hours, so we did attend that meal. I do appreciate all meals I don’t have to prepare nor do the clean up afterwards.

I haven’t had to do much cooking (and therefore not much cleaning up after, either) this past week. We had a trip to Billings for a medical checkup. This trip was extended by a day for - you guessed it - bad weather. We had planned to leave on Wednesday for the Thursday morning appointment. Dennis is a weather geek (I swear, if he wasn’t such a dedicated farmer, he’d be a meteorologist) and saw what nastiness was predicted. In order to beat the rain/snow/slush/icy road conditions, we headed out Tuesday afternoon. Of course, we drove home on snow-packed, icy roads Thursday afternoon, but it was mostly daylight, and it wasn’t actively snowing at the time, so visibility was good.

All of this brings me to my lone recipe(s) to offer in this week’s column. I’ve been wanting to try this soup for some time. Cold weather is soup weather.

Red Lentil Soup, version 1

1 C red lentils

1/4 C rice

6 C chicken broth

1 medium onion, chopped

1/8 tsp red pepper flakes

2 Tbl oil

1 small onion, chopped

Bring the broth to a boil. Add lentils, medium onion, rice, and seasoning. Simmer one hour. Fry small onion in oil. Pour into soup just before serving.

Red Lentil Soup, version 2

3 Tbl olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 Tbl tomato paste

1 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp kosher salt

1/4 tsp pepper

Pinch of cayenne

1 quart chicken OR vegetable broth

2 C water

1 C red lentils

1 carrot, diced

2 stalks celery, diced

1 bay leaf

Juice of half a lemon

Heat oil, saute onion and garlic about 4 minutes. Add the paste and seasonings and saute an additional 2 minutes. Add broth, water, carrot, celery, and bay leaf. Bring to a strong simmer, then partially cover pot and reduce heat to low. Simmer until lentils are soft, about 30 minutes. Puree half the soup, then add back to the pot. Stir in juice and serve. Drizzle with olive oil and dust with Chile powder if desired.

Again, I kind of combined the two versions into one, and put my own spin on it. I’d already started version one (with 1/3 C wild rice pilaf), but it seemed too tame. I found version two, so decided to add to the first. I didn’t have any celery, so I sprinkled in some celery salt. I did use 4 cups of chicken broth, but only added about 1/4 cup of water. I didn’t saute the onion or garlic, or even the carrot, so there isn’t any oil in my version. In place of the tomato paste, I cut a large tomato into fourths, and threw that in.

I grated the carrot directly into the simmering soup. I threw in about 1/4 cup of chopped red pepper I had leftover from a taco salad. I also added some lemon zest with the juice. Half the soup was pureed (making sure I pureed all of that tomato) and added back. It simmered much longer than 30 minutes simply because I’d started preparing it too early. When dishing up my bowl (Dennis heated up leftover Eugene’s pizza) I added chopped red onion and sprinkled a tablespoon of sliced almond on top for a bit of crunch.

If you can’t bring yourself to having an occasional meatless meal, I don’t see why you couldn’t add some chopped ham to this soup. Or bacon, for that matter. Bacon makes everything better. If you go with bacon, you could saute the onion, garlic, carrot, and celery in the bacon fat, thereby getting more bacon flavor into your soup. I’d crumble the bacon on top of each serving so it stays crispy.

Spring is coming! The calendar says so. So does the amount of seed catalogs clogging up the mailbox, as well as the constant barrage of emails from those same seed catalog companies. One of these days I’ll even look at some of those.