Lentil Soup with Grilled Pineapple…

I’m a little freaked out right now, Little-bit isn’t feeling well and I’m worried. I don’t want to go into the details right now, it won’t make me feel better at this point. I have a vet appointment soon but need to calm down in the interim so I thought I’d talk about food. Being a foodie, it should help calm my nerves. I’ll probably post this evening with the news on Little-bit, but for now I want to think of other things. Sometimes reading stuff on the internet makes you feel better about symptoms, right now it has only made me feel worse. I’m partially calmed by the fact that they didn’t say ‘get him here now!’… but they did say let us know if he gets worse and we’ll squeeze him in. New city, new vet… only adds to the stress I’m feeling. 😕

Ahh hell, the previous paragraph seems so cryptic but trust me, the topic is not something that should be discussed while eating, or talking about food for that matter. So how about we talk about something else for a bit… make me feel better, ok?

Let’s see… when was it, Wednesday, I think, I made an awesome soup from Veganomicon (p. 127) and I also made some bread dough that made the best loaf of bread I’ve made to date.

Luckily the recipe for the soup is online (from Isa herself) but I did make a few changes, only because I seem to be incapable of making a recipe as written, including my own.

Changes made:

I decided not to make my own chili powder and use what I had on hand instead, here’s what I used:

1/2 Tbsp. ground cumin

1/2 Tbsp. ground corriander

1 Tbsp. chili powder

4 dashes chipotle chili powder

I had some veggies that I needed to use up, so I added them to the soup.

orange bell pepper, chopped

7 baby carrots, sliced

zucchini, diced

I added kombu because in Terry’s book she mentions that it helps reduce gas when eating beans (as I mentioned before).

I grilled a whole pineapple instead of using pineapple rings. The pineapple is why I went looking for a recipe to begin with. 🙂

Lentil Soup with Grilled Pineapple

I don’t know how you juice a lemon or a lime… but I like to slice it up first then squeeze the crap out of each slice… I think it gives me more juice this way… or perhaps I just get my jollies off destroying citrus…

Don’t forget to pull out the 2 bay leaves and the kombu before you start to blend the soup!…

Grilled pineapple ‘steaks’…

… cut into bite size pieces…

Dinner’s almost ready!…

This was a really good, might I even say, awesome soup! The soup itself is great as a different version of lentil using chili spices instead of your usual tame lentil… the pineapple and lime juice somehow just make this soup. The spicy with the citrus and the sweet… phenomenal…

For the bread, I even amazed myself. I’ve been tinkering with the no-knead bread for sometime, but it wasn’t until this week that I really started to tweak the recipe. I made a half batch, because that seems to work best for us, and kind of combined two recipes into one and veganized it… somehow it was the best bread I’ve baked to date. It was on a day when I had made an online order for King Arthur Flour… I guess I was inspired by all the baking goodies on that site… whatever the reason, I hope that my next batch is just as good, if not better!

Light Whole Wheat Bread
slightly adapted from ABin5 (p. 74-76)
[Light Whole Wheat Bread and 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread]
yields: 2 loaves

1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
3/4 Tbsp. yeast
3/4 Tbsp. salt
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 1/3 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup agave
2 1/2 Tbsp. canola oil

Follow the usual method of making the no-knead bread.

On baking day:

let rise 40 min

preheat oven 450°F

bake 27-30 min on a pizza peal