Pellets! With Lemons and Leaves!

This summer, David and I had this approximate conversation.

Him: I'm interested in learning how to cook those...pellets. 

Me: (elipsis)

Him: You make indian food out of them... You boil them...They turn into soup...

Me (further elipsis)

Him: They're little, and round. I don't know what they are.

Me: You mean beans?

Him: No! They're flat.

Me: Lentils. (hysterical laughter) "Pellets"!

Him: Whatever. They come in different colors.

Now I tease him by saying I'm going to feed him pellets for dinner. This is a good recipe for soup made out of pellets which I made because there is a cafe downtown that serves something very similar to it. It's particularly nice on a rotten rainy day. I eat it with bread and butter.

1 cup of pellets, the orange kind

1 onion, cut up rather fine

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper

1/4 teaspoon turmeric, optional, but fun

1 small carrot, cut into 1/2 inch bits

1/2 cup user-defined* leaves

juice of a lemon

Put the pellets in a large-ish pot. Rinse them several times to get rid of any dust or foreign objects. Add about 8 cups of water, the onion, bay leaf, cumin, turmeric, and salt & pepper. If you want a slightly richer flavor, add a pat of butter or a couple tablespoons of olive oil.

Bring to a medium boil for about 20 minutes, or until the pellets start to dissolve, then add the carrots and leaves. Taste for salt. Boil until the pellets are totally dissolved, and the soup is as thick as you want it. If it starts getting too thick, just add a little more water. 

Right before serving, add the lemon juice.

*User-defined leaves: I have used frozen chopped spinach, and leftover "baby power greens", whatever those were. Spinach is usually what is found in lentil soup, but there is no reason you could not use kale, chard, baby bok choi, arugula, lambs quarters, purslane, or any number of other things, as long as you remember that some leaves take longer to cook and have slightly more pronounced flavors.

Cheap Grub

 

 
Last year or so I was talking about how most green leafy vegetables come in strangely large units. Cabbage, napa, collards, that stuff. Kale seems to be the exception to the rule, at least lately. I go to Fred Meyer and they're asking a buck-fifty for like, 6 meager leaves. Pfffft! That's maybe a serving? Ridiculous. Back to Trader Joe's. A big bag of kale there is about $2, and it's ready to go in the pot when it gets home. This soup is unremarkable looking, but it's tasty as well as cheap, and you only need one big pot to cook it.

Kale and Sausage Soup with Lentils and Things

1 italian sausage link, mild or hot- about 1/4 lb
1 onion
1 clove garlic
6 or 8 mushrooms
2 tsp broth concentrate
2 T tomato paste
1/4 cup brown, black, or green lentils
water, of course
2 carrots
1/2 bag of kale
salt & pepper

Use a 4 or 5 quart sauce pan with a fairly heavy bottom. Heat about a tablespoon of oil in it, and put in the sausage to brown. Meanwhile, dice the onion & mushrooms. Add the onions and mushrooms to the pot and stir them around. As the onions brown, start cutting little bits off the sausage. This will make the sausage into unevenly sized lumps, from little tiny grains to maybe half-inch chunks. When the sausage is browned, crush in a clove of garlic. Fry the garlic just until it is barely browned then add about 6  cups of water, the tomato paste, broth concentrate, and the lentils. Stir until the tomato paste is dissolved, and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer, cover, and leave it alone for about 45 minutes. Peel and chop the carrots, then add them and the kale to the pot. You may need to add a little more water, due to evaporation. Cover the pot again and cook for another 45 minutes or so, until the kale is tender. It takes a long time. Taste for salt and pepper, serve with a dollop of greek yogurt if you feel indulgent.

Notes:

1. Yes, this recipe takes at least a good 2 hours. It's soup. Proper soup often takes a long time to develop flavors.
2. You could just squeeze the guts out of the sausage link instead of dinking around with it in the pan. But I happened to want the extra texture from the bits of sausage casing. Kale is very assertive, it needs plenty of assertive, bumpy, things to go with it.
3. Kale also cooks down quite a lot. Let it wilt into the soup pretty well before adding any additional water during the second half of cooking, or you may get an inaccurate idea of how much water you need to put in.
4. This soup needs a good bit of salt. The long cooking time causes the vegetables to become quite sweet, and the tomato paste adds plenty of sugar also. If you don't salt it, it will be very disappointing.
5. Likewise, do not use sweet italian sausage. It usually has too much fennel, and will not give the peppery kick the soup needs.
6. Brown, green, and black lentils hold their shape well when they're boiled. If you just want to thicken the soup, use red lentils, which dissolve rapidly during cooking. I used green ones, incidentally.

You need some nice crusty rolls with this, I think.