This recipe comes from Caldwell Esselstyn's Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. I chose it because I'm having trouble getting Simran to transition from baby food yams and carrots and squash to "real food" versions of orange vegetables. She eats them more readily when they're cooked into other dishes, so I thought I'd give this one a try. She's usually pretty good about eating soup.
Ingredients
1 large acorn squash, baked, seeded, and cut in chunks
2 sweet potatoes or yams, baked, peeled, and cut in chunks
1 large onion, chopped (1 cup)
3 carrots, chopped
3 ribs celery, chopped (3/4 cup)
6 garlic cloves
2 cups red lentils
8 cups water
1 tsp dried rosemary
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
3 or 4 handfuls fresh spinach (or more) or chopped kale with the spine removed
3 zucchini, chopped
1 large bell pepper, chopped (1 cup)
1 bunch cilantro, chopped
3 green onions, chopped
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Bake acorn squash and sweet potatoes for up to 1 hour, until soft.
3. In a large soup pot, over medium high heat, stir-fry onion, carrots, celery, and garlic until soft and carrots are beginning to soften. Add a little water if anything seems to stick. (To save time, skip this step and go straight to step 4.) [I'll be skipping this step. I've never managed to cook garlic over medium-high heat without causing it to brown and go bitter, and it certainly doesn't have the heat tolerance of onion, carrots, and celery, so this step sounds ill-conceived. All the vegetables will cook through in the boiling soup anyway.]
4. Add red lentils, 8 cups of water, rosemary, and crushed red pepper. Increase heat to high and bring to a simmer [I think this is supposed to say "boil"]. Reduce heat to low and simmer 20 minutes, until lentils have almost dissolved.
5. Add acorn squash and sweet potatoes to the pot and mash into the soup. (A potato masher works well.) Cook 10 minutes more. [I wish I could see a photo of this because the texture of mashed potatoes and squash thrown into soup sounds absurd.]
6. Add spinach and stir into the soup until it wilts. If you use kale, it needs to cook a little longer than spinach.
7. Stir-fry zucchini in a nonstick pan over high heat until just beginning to brown. Add red pepper and stir-fry 1-2 minutes more. (If you are in a hurry, you may omit this step; add uncooked zucchini and red pepper in step 6.) A few minutes before serving, add stir-fried zucchini and red pepper to the soup mixture.
8. Add cilantro and green onions just before serving.
[I have some thoughts on how I would change this before even making it. I plan to omit all the pre-cooking except for the acorn squash and yams, and even those are just to save time, not because it's essential. A lot of the Esselstyn recipes call for superfluous browning of onions and vegetables in a nonstick skillet and I don't really get why because it rarely adds anything. I plan to omit the zucchini altogether from this soup. And I plan to puree all the non-green vegetables into a sort of bisque rather than mashing some of the stuff together and letting the rest just float there. I'll add the bell pepper with the squashes just before pureeing. I'll add the cilantro and green onions just after the kale. I'm a little hesitant about the kale -- maybe I should puree it too so that it isn't impossible for Sim to eat. I wonder what that would do to the color of the soup.]
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