My house smells vaguely of curry

Last night for dinner I made Curried Butternut Squash and Red Lentil Soup from the fabulous food blog: Eat Live Run.  It claimed to serve 4.  Instead it made 4 gallons.

Well, I may be exaggerating....but still.  It was quite a bit of soup and a good portion of it is now in our freezer awaiting further rainy days.  But it is so pretty and delicious that I will definitely make it again- just a quarter of it...

Here is the recipe:

• 1 medium yellow onion diced
• 1 (3lb) butternut squash peeled and cut into chunks
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tbl minced ginger (I found a squeeze tube of this in the produce section and now I need to find many more uses for it- I had forgotten how amazing ginger smells!!)
• 1 15 oz can of diced tomatoes
• 1 cup red lentils (fun fact: when you get them wet, say to rinse them, they turn into cement which is very difficult to dump from one container into the next)
• 1 qt chicken or veggie broth
• 2 tsp curry powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

The best part?  You don't have to worry about how even and bite sized your cuts are.  You blend it all together at the end so prettiness in prep doesn't count- it ends up pretty in spite of your inability to cut things nicely!

And now for some pictures of the process:

Some of my ingredients- check out the tube o ginger!

First step: saute the onions in a bit of olive oil until nice and soft

Nice aromatics: ginger and garlic

Dump the garlic and ginger in and saute for a few more minutes- remember that garlic burns a lot faster than onions!

Add the butternut squash and mix it up, then add everything else in with wild abandon! Please note that the lentils are not falling happily into the pot.  No, we had to add some water to the bowl and work loose the now hard-as-rock lentils.  They came apart as they cooked thankfully!

Oooh yeah.  So full of goodness.  Bring this mixture to a boil.

Then reduce heat, cover, and let it simmer away for 20 minutes until the squash and lentils are nice and soft.  I was dubious that it would only take 20 minutes.  And I was pleasantly surprised when my spoon hit a squash chunk and it melted in half.  Perfect!

This is tricky.  Transfer the soup to a blender.  Now: blend it up.  The exciting part of blending hot soup is that if you fail to remove the middle part of the cap to let steam escape, the entire lid will try and explode off of the blender.  We kept the clear thing partially on and covered it with a dish towel.  The spatter is because it is too full- and this was only half of the soup!

All smooth and delicious now!

Second half of the soup ready to be blended.

Look at that technique!  Look at that concentration!

We transfered it all back to the Dutch oven because it is prettier there.

All gone!  The sandwich too!

We made some sandwiches (turkey and cheddar with homemade bread!) and they were very filling so we couldn't eat very much soup in the end- a real bummer considering how much is leftover AND how tasty this was.  I love the kick the cayenne gives this soup and I love the surprising complexity of flavors.  It starts out very squashy and then all the other elements start coming through.  Delicious!  I have trouble eating soup without chunks so bread or crunched up pita chips are a must for me.  This might be very very good with chunks of sausage and maybe some noodles or rice for something to chew on.  

All in all, a great weeknight dinner.  Especially a weeknight that is cold and rainy and crappy.  This is an excellent comfort food!

Utter waste of life? Or productive human being?

This is a question that has plagued me on this, my last vacation of vet school.  I knew immediately that the way the schedule shook out in the end would mean that I will be climbing walls by the time I graduate, but now I am in the last few days of the last three weeks of vacation before I become a doctor...and it is even more scary.

Especially since I have been hard pressed to do anything worthwhile with this free time.

What have I done?  Well, I visited family in my first last week of vacation.  That was pretty good.  On the second last week of vacation I made some awesome bread and did a whole bunch of dishes (although, I am pretty sure that they are breeding, because I am not sure it is humanly possible to have done as much dishes as I have in the past two weeks and still not be able to enter my kitchen for fear of being crushed under a pile of dirty dishes).  And THIS week, the LAST week of my last vacation, I have finally sent out my resume to my Preceptorship (only 1.5 weeks later than I should have...and I just found out today that I may have needed an extra stamp on there.  Potentially embarrassing).  And TODAY...after much agonizing, after sending approximately 324973205 emails to Dr. Bryan, after reworking my resume and cover letter and business card again and again...I have sent out my first official plea for employment.  At a clinic in Silverdale that sounds, frankly, awesome.

I am trying not to get my hopes up too much, because I know the job market is crap and I know there are many other fish in the veterinary sea, but I can't help it.  I want a job and I think that this one would be really amazing.  So my hopes are high even with a healthy dollop of pessimism and an even healthier dollop of realism.  Regardless, please please please keep your fingers, toes, and eyes crossed for me.  And if I don't get this particular job, I will grind my teeth and determine that it was not meant to be.

Dinner tonight: Curried Butternut and Red Lentil Soup.  Updates later.

Dinner tonight

This blog entry is brought to you at the request of my husband, who wanted to make sure I recorded the recipes I used so he could eat it again in the future.  Isn't that sweet?

So the menu was:
*Oven-fried chicken
*Quinoa with apples and cranberries
*Leftover french bread (home made!)

Unfortunately this was all eaten before I thought to take pictures, so you will just have to imagine the delicious images in your mind.

The Quinoa is what knocked Andrew's socks off, so I will start with that.

• 1/2 c Quinoa (rinsed)
• 1 c chicken stock (home made in our case.  That makes me sound so much more gourmet than I probably really am!)
• 1/2 of a granny smith apple chopped into reasonable sized chunks
• A good handful of dried cranberries
• A shake of cinnamon (1 tsp if I had to guess)
• A dash of cayenne pepper
• A squirt of honey

All of this is brought to a boil and then allowed to simmer until the liquid is all absorbed and the grains are translucent and the outer shells have separated.

If I had to do it again, I may have given an extra dash of the cayenne and added some salt- it was just a bit too sweet I think.  But Andrew made numerous happy noises while eating it and insisted repeatedly that I write down how I did it.  Maybe I shouldn't show him this entry...I wouldn't want to become redundant!

Now for the chicken, which was MY favorite part of the meal.

• Two chicken breasts, pounded flat and cut in half to make 4 manageable chunks
• Salt
• Chile Cocoa (this was in Andrew's stocking and I was excited to try it out)
• Flour (I used whole wheat flour and threw in some flax seed meal)
• Bread crumbs (I made this with the heel of my first- very dense- loaf of wheat bread.  I filled it out a bit with commercial bread crumbs and also threw in some flax seed meal because we need more omega 3s in our life)
• Oil
• 1 egg, beaten with a small amount of water

The base of this recipe is from Cooking Light- it gives me my most consistently cooked chicken and is delicious.  I use it all the time- adding various flavorings to the flour and bread crumbs (I often put garam masala in the flour, or I put mustard in the egg wash and dried onion in the bread crumbs.  The possibilities are endless!  This is the first time I have pre-flavored the chicken with anything besides salt). Making sure the chicken is nice and thin means that it cooks quickly and evenly so you end up with perfectly done chicken that doesn't get all dried out in the process.

You pat the flattened chicken dry (actually, I patted it dry before taking the mallet to it since the bag I was defrosting it in had a leak and it was wetter than most chicken) and salt it a bit.  Then sprinkle the cocoa mix over the first side pretty thickly.  Dredge the cocoa'd side in the flour and cocoa the exposed side since it is staring up at you anyway.  Then finish coating the entire thing in the flour.  Shake off the excess flour and dip it in the egg wash.  Then dredge the chicken boobie in the bread crumbs.  Repeat for all of the chicken chunks.

Meanwhile, of course you've been heating some oil on the stove in an oven-safe pan and it is all hot and ready for your breaded chicken boobs.  You have also very cleverly pre-heated the oven to 425- good for you!  Fry the breasts until one side is brown and tasty- it doesn't take very long at all.  Then flip the chicken over (I sometimes have to add a bit more oil at this point because I never put in very much to begin with and it disappears fast) and pop the whole kit and kaboodle in the oven for 10 minutes.  Voila!

Andrew thought the chicken was just a bit dry (a result of the breading- the chicken itself was quite juicy and perfectly cooked.  Thank you Cooking Light!) so we had a spoonful of apple butter on the side to dip it in.  But I really enjoyed it just alone- you could really taste the cocoa and the subtle bite of the chile side of the mix.