6-16-2011
I made an improvised lentil soup with Swiss chard. To go with the soup, I made buttermilk biscuits.
I have been busy this week and this meal was pretty easy to put together after a full day of work. I had to swing by the Checker’s on the way home because I was out of onions—and while I was hurriedly shopping, I saw some Swiss chard that looked like a perfect addition to the soup I was planning. These two ingredients were the only items I didn’t already have on hand. The rest of the ingredients were things I’m trying to use up. I had carrots and celery left over from all the salads I made for the Summer Birthday-Party Picnic. Olive oil and canned tomatoes and garlic are usually on hand. There’s thyme growing in the garden. I bought 5 bags of lentils recently when they were on sale for 45 cents a bag and my soup used up maybe half a bag. I recently made three full batches of stock from the saved components stuffed into one of my freezers, so now I’ve got a lot to work through (15 quarts are waiting on ice in my chest freezer; add this to the lentils and we might be looking at the summer of improvised lentil soup; maybe I could just throw in a variety ingredient to each batch and call each one a new creation: lentil soup with red bell pepper and green onion sounds good). The Swiss chard was very tasty after a long simmering and I think it lent the soup a richness it might not have had otherwise. This was all very “Mediterranean,” this combination of greens and beans. After I made the soup, I flipped through my copy of Shulman’s Mediterranean Harvest to see if I could find a similar soup and I found one very much like it just sitting there in the soup section. Shulman added a bay leaf. I always forget the bay leaves when I make stuff up. I’m not sure why.
The buttermilk biscuits were another use-it-up recipe. I’ve got a bunch of buttermilk leftover from the potato salad I made for the picnic. When I was last in this position, I made a big batch of waffles (which is what I often do with left-over buttermilk). We’ve still got a lot of those left, so I had to do something different. I used Madison’s recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.
