Roasted Vegetables
This blog posting inspired me to roast vegetables for dinner on Wednesday. I cut up sweet potatoes, onion, yellow squash, carrots, and added the leftover mushroom stems from my stuffed mushrooms. I'm not sure what sort of flavor we'll use in our quinoa veggie bowls, I could make an Asian dressing out of miso and tahini sauce like the blog poster, or we could use Trader Joe's horseradish hummus since that's the container we've got open right now (yes, Sonny D likes horseradish hummus), or I could make something a little more Southwestern by adding cumin and chile powder. Or maybe add some feta cheese, olive oil, and lemon juice and make it Mediterranean. I've even got a jar of eggplant-garlic spread that would probably be excellent. So many possibilities.  |
| Hot soup. Check out those bay leaves hanging out in the back. |
Soup for Dinner
I tend to prefer simple foods for dinner on Sunday, usually this turns out to be soup and sandwiches. This week, our Sunday dinner was kimchi jeon (an appetizer/snack kimchi pancake, not sweet like American pancakes), Cajun sausage-lentil soup, leftover frozen coconut rice to go in your soup or on the side, and freshly-made peanut butter cookies (from dough I had frozen previously).I made the soup the way the poster did, with only two Cajun chicken sausages. I added a can of tomato sauce for more depth of flavor instead of using all water. I tasted the soup in the middle of cooking and determined it needed more flavor so I added a little Cajun seasoning. Before serving I added some frozen chopped spinach instead of chard or kale.
It made a lot of soup -- 2 full servings for dinner, 2 lunch-size leftovers, and another full meal's worth that I froze.
Verdict
It's a good basic soup. Since I haven't made this recipe before, I figured I'd mostly follow what it said, and it called for one cup of lentils. I like lentils a lot but I don't cook dry lentils often to know how it will turn out, and it turns out this soup was loaded with lentils. In the future I would be ok to make with the same amount, but 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup might be good next time.
Next time I would definitely use four sausages, the meat was my favorite part. And more vegetables might be nice.
We grated fresh Parmesan cheese on our servings, that added just the right finishing touch. Sonny D didn't even taste his, so I have no idea if he would eat it again.