I have a bad habit of shopping for the ‘sale’ stickers when wandering the aisles of the grocery store.  A good deal is a good deal, right?  That’s what I tell my wife.  She reminds me of course, that a bargain is only a bargain if you were planning on buying that item anyway.  If you’re buying something that wasn’t on the list…you’re just spending more money than you intended!

Such a buzzkill, right?  Well, I saw a good deal on lentils the other day and picked up a bag of red and green.  I do after all live in the Province that accounts for 95% of all lentil production in Canada, which as a whole, accounts for 51% of all lentils produced worldwide!  That’s not too shabby.  I guess I should try and familiarize myself a bit more with this domestic crop.

After a bit of google searching I discovered that green lentils are the ones that hold their form more when cooked, while red lentils soften a fair amount and are therefore used more for soups and such.  With our first snowfall hitting late last week, a nice hearty soup sounded like a great idea!

Carrot, Red Lentil and Ginger Soup

While I already had the lentils in hand from a previous trip, I made a special trip to the store to pick up the fresh produce to be used in this recipe.  One thing I learned?  Scallions is just a fancy name for green onions.  I couldn’t find scallions in the store no matter how hard I looked, so I split the difference and picked up some green onions (which LOOKED like the picture of scallions I found on my phone) and shallots (which sounded like a better match).  I went with the shallots in pot when I made this.  Honestly, I think you’re just going for a bit of an ‘onion’ flavour in the soup, and I already had some green in the mix with the jalapeno.  There’s a fair bit of chopping and shredding with this.  After that, it’s really a matter of tossing everything in the pot to simmer.  On the whole?  The recipe is a bit bland as outlined.  The ginger sticks give you a real kick when you hit one, but I wound up stirring a bit of chili powder into my bowl after a few spoonfuls as it felt like it would pick things up a bit.  My wife went for the salt.  In defense of the recipe it DOES say ‘season to taste’.  Just a heads up, you’ll want to do that before serving because IT NEEDS IT.

With all that said, this is a very warming and healthy soup.  Lots of veg in here and the lentils pack a protein punch.  Very filling.

Budget –

There’s a fair amount of fresh veggies in this.  That said, lentils are a very affordable source of protein and I barely touched what was in the bag I bought.  I’m going to guess that this one ran about $7 all tallied.

But oh!  We’re not done yet.  If there’s one thing I enjoy more than busting up some crackers into a bowl of soup, it’s a nice warm ‘fresh-out-of-the-oven’ biscuit.

Easy Homemade Biscuits

Look at the lamination on those babies!  While the lentil soup was simmering on the stove top, the oven was feeling a bit neglected.  I stumbled across this recipe for a quick and easy biscuit, and I AM KEEPING IT!  They’re fluffy with a great rise, the lamination worked out great.  I think I really just need to follow the instructions better and make them circles, as, you can plainly see…if they start expanding with one side still ‘crimped’ they’ll just puff up and fall over.  Hey, that’s why you’re reading this right?  Learn from my mistakes!  As explained in the recipe…the key is to keep your butter cold and not overwork it.  You could probably chill the dough after a few folds and before cutting.  I folded it until things were starting to warm up and get a little sludgy.  That probably resulted in a few more layers than required, but I’m not knocking it.  After baking the layers just peel apart.  Again, not a lot of salt of ‘flavour’ built into these biscuits, but they’re designed to sop up the soup or stew, so that’s probably a good thing.

As for the family score-card?  Kids weren’t exactly sold on the soup.  The adults loved it.  The biscuits were a 5 thumbs up from the entire clan.

-g