Family Recipes

This past Sunday, my shopping list looked like this:

• eggs
• milk
• dish soap
• something soup-y

It had been a long day, and I didn't want to make decisions - I just wanted something warm and comforting and, well, soupy. So I called my mom from the produce section to ask her about her lentil soup.

If I had to pick one food that sums up home, it would be this soup. I'd be tempted to choose something flashier, like lobster, or more locally traditional, like a mug of thick New England clam chowder or a heaping plate of fried clams. But this soup is the quiet, steady constant. My mom has fed it to me when I was in bed with a fever, sent me off to school with a tupperware arsenal full of it, and served it up piping hot with hot chocolate on snow days. I honestly can't remember this soup ever not being a part of my life.

The recipe she gave me over the phone was appropriately vague and unscientific for a meal she's been making for at least two decades. No measurements of cook times - but whole tomatoes, not crushed (crushed aren't nearly substantial enough, just cut the whole ones in half). Forget vegetarian and get chicken broth - that sort of thing. Here's what I ended up using:

• 2 cans whole tomatoes, halved
• about half a bag of baby carrots, sliced like coins
• 1 box chicken broth
• several garlic cloves
• 2 large onions, diced
• 2 bags green lentils
• thyme

After sauteing the onions and garlic, everything else just went into the pan to bubble for maybe an hour or so. It looked like this when I started out:

I hadn't realized just how much liquid the lentils would soak up and ended up needing to add a whole lot of water to keep things from drying out. About an hour and a half later, the soup looked like this:

I may have made slightly more than necessary. But on the bright side, it freezes wonderfully!

While I was making my mom's recipes, I figured I should throw in some baked apples too, as these are another one of those comforts of home foods. My roommate usually eats apples at a rate that suggests she has a serious fear of doctors, but this week she's been falling behind, so we had some extra apples that were starting to lose their crisp. I was going to just core them and pop them in the oven with some cinnamon sugar, but I figured since we were going with family cooking wisdom, I should probably follow the whole buttah makes it bettah mantra. So I stuffed the apples full of creamed butter and sugar and cinnamon and some nutmeg and ginger for good measure and stuck them in a 375˚ oven until they started falling in on themselves. 

And look at these saucy little bastards.

I had one for breakfast today. Well, second breakfast. It's my day off and I was feeling hobbit-y.