The Lustful Vegan

For some strange reason there’s a conspiracy of lentils this week. I certainly didn’t set out to make an all-lentil dinner, but that’s what I ended up with. How can you go wrong with lentils, though?

First there was lentil soup. Lemony lentil soup. I had a small heap of lemons in the crisper, and a shiny new bag of beluga lentils (which at 24% apparently boast the highest amount of protein of all the lentils). I figured these had to go together. The results? Zingy! Fabulously zingy. I won’t be getting scurvy anytime soon. Served with sweet potato fries, it was very hearty. This might be my new favourite soup; the recipe’s below.

And after dinner? Lentil cookies. As soon as I knew such a thing existed, I had to make them. And omg, yum! Fresh from the oven they were light and crispy on the outside, and full of cranberry-cherry tastiness. Instant love. The original recipe is easily veganized (sub Earth Balance for butter, egg replacer for the egg). For extra flavour I simmered my lentils in light coconut milk with a goodly pinch of nutmeg and maybe a half teaspoon of mace. (Vanilla rice milk would probably be equally good.) I also toasted my oats in the toaster oven while doing other things. (325F, stirred twice, maybe 6 minutes?) For some reason my cookies took an extra couple minutes to bake, but that might just be an oven variation. Regardless, these are fabulous, particularly when toasted for a few minutes to crisp them up. I suspect they’ll make my top-3 list of cookies long before I finish eating them all. Besides, they have protein and fruit in them, so they’re healthy, right?

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In the beginning, there was the snowstorm. We’ve had 37cm of snow since yesterday evening, and the whole world is white. I did manage to get as far as the market, though, and staggered home looking like a vegetable-laden snowman. Errr, snowwoman.

Cold weather calls for hot soup. Well, hot chocolate, then hot soup. I decided to fight the chill with Isa’s Ancho Lentil Soup, because it sounded tasty and I had some leftover pineapple kicking around for once (and let’s be honest, I was eager to try out the new cast iron grilling pan I found during my rambles).

Thus began a bit of an adventure. See, I had no ancho chilies with which to make the spice mixture. Nor, for that matter, a seranno pepper. I did have chipotle peppers, though, and what I thought looked like a hungarian pepper, and even a bag of evil-looking dried red chili peppers. And if worst came to worst, I had a box of White Death (aka White Chilli Powder, which is actually made from dried green chillies — it’s spicy as all hell). Surely some of these would serve as workable substitutes?

To be safe, I did some research, and thus became Edumicated about hot peppers, their chemistry, and the Scoville heat scale. Aha, a non-subjective means of comparing different hot peppers! Excellent! Comparing Wikipedia’s chart with a variety of other charts, I deduced that my chipotles were roughly twice as spicy as the ancho chillies called for in the recipe. Okay, thought I, I’ll just use one instead of two, and the spice levels will balance out. Right? And my hungarian pepper promised to be roughly equal in spiciness to a seranno, so that left me all set for soupy goodness.

Oh, I was so very, very wrong.

I made my spice mixture (homemade chili powder, yum!) and started my soup. I added a few extra veggies, because why not? Eventually I took a taste, and *poof!*, my taste buds combusted.

*gasp gasp wheeze* Egads, the spice! And I hadn’t even added the hungarian pepper yet! I can’t explain it, but my single tiny chipotle pepper was a veritable dynamo of fiery spice. Too much spice.

Thus began education effort #2: How to neutralize spiciness in an over-spiced dish. *sigh* But hey, the internet is my friend, and I discovered some good tips:

• Add honey. Doing so definitely took an edge off the heat without actually adding any sweetness.
• Increase the volume of ingredients. Add ‘neutral’ ingredients to mitigate the spice. Hmmm. Sadly I needed to thicken my soup, and most of the ‘neutral’ ingredients these sites mentioned were dairy products. Still, I had some cooked rice kicking around, and that struck me as a potential solution. I pureed it with some water and soup, added the mixture, and the spice level dropped a few notches.
• Add a potato. Peel it, cut it in half, and drop it in. Remove it once it’s cooked. I tried it, and the potato absorbed a small amount of the spiciness.
• Add lemon juice. This I didn’t do, because the original recipe called for adding lime juice at the very end, and I figured that would serve.

The resulting soup? Still spicy, but finally edibly spicy. Even more so once I added the lime juice the recipe called for — it added a lovely burst of flavour, and took the spice down one last notch. Ha!

Then came the grilling of the pineapple, which was easily the best part. Fun, pretty, and tasty. Et voila, a very unusual twist on lentil soup — all yummy, spicy, tropical flavours.

I think I’d try it again, but hopefully with fewer spice issues. And possibly with a bit of coconut milk…mmmmm…

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I have a confession to make: I don’t really like kale very much.

*gasp*

I know, I know. Somehow this makes me feel like a Bad Vegan. If I was ‘real,’ if I was ’serious,’ then surely I’d like the stuff, right? All my hardcore vegan friends seem to love it; they eat it raw or just plain steamed. I’ve tried to like it that way, but no such luck. Kale and I just didn’t seem made for each other.

Tonight, I changed my mind. This recipe piqued my interest, because it uses arame — a type of seaweed that’s stringy, with a nutty taste. I luuuuuurv arame. There’s also garlic and ginger, and what’s not to like there? So tonight I wandered into the kitchen, eyed my kale somewhat dubiously, and had at it.

My version turned out both similar to and different from the original recipe, because I wanted a single portion with a lot more veggies. And hey, it also produced Surprise Soup! (It was a suprise because I didn’t plan to make any.) The results were tasty. Hear that? I dubbed kale tasty. Ha! Success! I are teh hardcore vegan now!

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