Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Welcome to Chaos Central!

Our big stuff was finally all moved to the farm today. We have been moving boxes we packed ourselves for the past week. There is still lots to do to really 'be out' of our old house, including sorting the toys, etc, etc, but now we are also unloading boxes at the farm and setting up house!

For two years we have made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at home and taken them to eat for lunch at the farm along with some fruit and cut up vegetables, eating on the floor, on steps, and sitting on our swing or front porch when the weather was warm enough. We took everything in a cooler because we had no refrigerator at the farm.

Today we had our first lunch together at the farm, actually sitting at our kitchen table complete with a tablecloth.  We had home-made red lentil soup (made at the farm in our crockpot) and hummus with whole grain baguette. It was very simple, but completely satisfying and delicious.

Tonight we may just fall into bed (after we get it made up), but we'll first celebrate with a toast, "at last". :-)

Red Lentil & Pumpkin Soup Recipe

I made my typical vegetable broth in the crockpot using vegetable peelings, etc, but then after filtering the broth, I added a pint of locally-grown frozen pumpkin puree to the broth thanks to our share in a local winter CSA called Locavorious, heated until the pumpkin was soft, and then put the broth plus pumpkin puree (and a few hunky pieces of pumpkin) in the blender.  To be honest, I was very tempted to not use this broth for soup, but just drink it instead because it was SO delicious both warm and chilled.

I made about 6 cups of broth, added the 1# of red lentils to the broth and cooked on low in the crockpot until the lentils were soft, then added 1 quart of canned tomatoes (still finishing from our 2009 harvest), and finally added 2 Tbsp. of a sweet curry. That was it. Heat until warm enough to eat.

We could taste a hint of the pumpkin, and it was so good with this serendipitous addition, that I will always try to have some pumpkin on hand to be able to add some to this very easy recipe in the future. The blend of the flavors and the color was truly delicious.

We said our simplest of blessings, gratitude for finally eating a real meal at the farm and to all hands who helped bring this food to our table.

Still no internet service at the farm (not as easy as we were 'promised' - long saga!), so blog posts will continue to be sporadic. However, our hope is that each day from now on will be less chaotic than the past two years have been. :-) That's the vision!

"Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row"

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds absolutely delicious, Diana! I will definitely be adding pumpkin to my next batch of lentil soup - perhaps even attempt homemade vegetable broth as well :) Thanks for the inspiration!

- Jessica Butcher, RD

Diana Dyer said...

Hi Jessica
Thanks for dropping by and your comment. We just had some of this soup for lunch again (4/16) and my husband said it was the best lentil soup I've made.

I reminded him that this time I added the pumpkin, but he also said that this time he was worried that I would think the lentils were 'overcooked' (i.e. I actually left them cooking on low in the crock-pot overnight), but he thought they were just perfect!

Diana