Soups On.

After 3 consecutive weeks of holiday themed Thursday night dinners, tonight’s theme is BACK TO REALITY winter comfort.  Sunday, I made a huge pot of lentil soup, sans any animal products, and actually froze most of it for just a few days, took it back out of the freezer last night.  Tonight we will have a healthy, relatively low calorie, entirely plant-based meal consisting of the soup, a very grainy bread, a big garden salad, some grilled or baked vegetables and probably baked potatoes, too.  The soup was a combination of several recipes, from a couple of books that I got for the holidays 🙂  I LOVE MY VEGAN COOKBOOK COLLECTION!  Thanks Carole and Mitch for the additions…

I diced up a couple of cloves of garlic, about 5 carrots, a few stalks of celery and 2 onions and sauteed them all together in a little olive oil, with some basic spices.  (Thanks again, Carole, for the Braggs spice mix which I use on just about everything).  Then I added 2 cups of dried lentils, about 6 cups of vegetable broth and 2 or 3 cups of water.  After it came to a boil, I turned it down to simmer for a least an hour.  Then I added about 1/3 of a jar of tomato sauce and let it cool enough to put half of it through the food processor before adding it back into the pot.  This is a great way to get soup thicker without adding any animal products or any extra calories.  While soup is always better the second day, Mitch and I both agreed this one was even delicious the first night!  Low in calories, high in fiber and protein and so comforting on a cool night, I highly recommend!  My take on soup is that you can really put in anything you want and there is no right or wrong.  How un-intimidating is THAT?

For those of you that will be able to view this photo, I am happy to report our garden is doing well.  Lisa brought me a great mini-garden in a tub for my birthday and while the basil and kole-rabi got replanted in the dirt, the cherry tomato plant is doing ridiculously well in the tub.  For now, we have a few Better Boy tomatoes ripening as I type…

Our herbs are doing really well and we look forward to some peppers, brussel sprouts, carrots, zucchini and much more to come.  Mitch has already started expanding the garden and I hope to be using some of the newly cleaned space for a lettuce patch.  Growing food to eat was once something that I only dreamed about.

Going back to Deepak Chopra’s meditation from last week, I will keep my promise to re-post his verbal cues, verbatim.  Today, I will transcribe the segment and re-post soon.  Doing it every day, takes only about a minute or 2 and personally, I enjoy the break in the day.  Sharing it with my students and clients, many are letting me know that they, too, are enjoying the time to “pause,” and work on rewiring the cranial neurons.

On a totally different note, while I resisted watching the President speak about the tragedy in Tuscon last night, (because it’s just too sad) Mitch was glued so I joined him.  In my opinion, Barack Obama, though not the best speech reader, is so smart, poised and well spoken and did a fantastic job of paying tribute to those we lost as well as those that helped.  He certainly made me feel proud to be an American and desirous to be a better one.  He made a fantastic point about how none of us should let down one innocent, hopeful, 9 year-old girl, Christina, who believed in our country, the political process and all America stands for.  ALL OF US should be reminded of this and challenge ourselves to be the people she believed we are. Never forget, we are all connected.