Finding tiny bits of beauty

To be fair, I did warn you. I said that I could live on soup through fall and I wasn’t lying. As I also seem to have come down with the latest strain of the plague making its rounds of my office (why are students so germy? even college students, eesh), I was craving a soup flavorful enough that I could have some chance of actually tasting it.

For about a year lentil soup was my shoot-I-forgot-my-lunch lunch from a little Mediterranean kinda-fast-food-but-not-really joint: a cup of lentil soup, a fresh pita, and three falafels for under $5. I was so sad when the place closed, and still haven’t found a good cheap-and-reasonably-healthy lunch replacement. This lentil soup is nothing like theirs, except for the hit of lemon at the end, but it’s delicious in a totally different way. (I don’t think there were enough hyphenates in that paragraph so here’s an I-need-another-hyphen hyphen: – )

This soup is creamy (without any cream), rich (with a minimum of butter and oil), so packed with flavor I can still taste it with a compromised olfactory system (thanks onion, garlic, and curry powder), and just so simple (all the ingredients were in my cupboard). Perfect.

Can I stop for a second and point out how beautiful French lentils are? Indulge your inner child, scoop up a handful, and really look closely–tiny saucers of deep olive green with blue-black speckles, stripes, swirls remind me of pictures of Jupiter and its whirlpool of clouds or the jar of spotted, striated river stones my mom keeps in a glass jar on a shelf.

Just gorgeous. How can you not love food and cooking when it involves tiny bits of beauty like this?

I also love that this soup gives me an excuse to use a lot of really good curry powder, breaking one of the cardinal rules of cooking in an apartment: no seafood or curry if it’s too cold to open a window.

Oh well, I can’t smell anything right now anyways, and my neighbors can just indulge me for a day.

Peak summer chili

As I was making a ridiculously oversized pot of my favorite chili earlier this week and began planning to share the recipe here, I started thinking about the recipe’s origins and all the memories associated with it.

That may sound like this is some treasured family heirloom recipe, passed down through generations. In fact, the recipe is from Emeril Legasse and his show on the Food Network back when it was in its “celebrity chef-catchphrase” phase. But it made me remember when the network first started and the Saturday afternoons when my mom, sisters, and I would all cram onto our big white couch in our little house and watch a show called, so simply, Taste.

Playing hostess

Growing up, one of my favorite things to do was help my mom get ready for a party, and it’s now one of the things I miss most living 600 miles away from home. Sorting through my mom’s recipes and cookbooks to come up with a menu, creating grocery lists and trips to Wegmans (and I miss Wegmans!), serving as sous chef to my mom’s head chef role, getting the house ready, chit chatting with guests, and cleaning up after everyone left–each part of the process had its own challenges and rewards, but I learned a lot in the process about being organized, being flexible, but most of all, making people feel comfortable and welcome.