Lentil Barley Soup With Paprika and Rapini

I'm forever making soup with lentils and barley because they are super for you, inexpensive, taste good, and cook quickly. And you can marry them to a variety of herb and vegetable combinations to make healthy eating more interesting from day to day.

Sometimes it's sage and butternut squash, other times oregano and diced Italian tomatoes, or rosemary, bay leaf and parmesan rind with a pinch of cayenne or crushed red pepper flakes. Sometimes I'll leave out the barley, sometimes I'll use cooked leftover long grain brown rice instead. Soup is flexible.

In this recipe I use a little sweet Hungarian paprika with chopped rapini, otherwise known as broccoli rabe, a relative of the turnip family, a dark green leafy vegetable loaded with nutrition and a unique flavor.

When thinking soup, think three steps: the boil, the sweat, and the finish. The boil is where the "hard" cooking occurs, in which you avoid adding the more delicate ingredients which will suffer for the experience. The sweat is for softening the base vegetables like garlic, onion, carrot, and celery. In the finish, you add your herbs, spices and showcase ingredients to heat them through and simmer for a shorter period.

Lentil Barley Soup With Paprika and Rapini

3 quarts prepared Quick Chicken Stock

1 cup lentils, washed (French green lentils du Puy hold up best)

1 cup organic hulled barley, washed (use pearled barley if you must)

3 cloves garlic, pressed

1 large onion, diced

3 large carrots, peeled and diced

.5 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 t salt

.5 t black pepper

1 heaping teaspoon sweet Hungarian paprika

.5 cup tomato paste

4 oz. chopped rapini leaves and heads, washed

1. Add the lentils and barley to the chicken stock in a large stainless steel pot, bring to a boil, and bubble on the boil gently about one hour, until the barley is tooth tender.

2. Heat the oil over low heat in a heavy sauce pan, press the garlic, chop the onions and carrots, and saute these together, covered, over gentle heat, about ten to twenty minutes, stirring now and again, until the onions are translucent and the carrots softened. Let rest covered off the heat.

3. Wash and dry the rapini, accumulate 4 oz. of leaves and heads and chop up finely.

4. To the cooked lentils and barley, add the salt, pepper, paprika and tomato paste. Stir and adjust seasonings to your liking. Then add the onion and carrot mixture and stir. Bring to a boil and simmer for fifteen minutes, and then add the chopped rapini and simmer for ten minutes more.

It's a pretty soup to serve, with little green, orange and white colors bobbing in a reddish brown sea. Perfect for today's blizzard in Michigan.

Sour Cream Blackberry Pie

I had no intention of making this. The blackberries were on sale, half off, and they were enormous. So I bought three packages, just over a pound, for three bucks. And they sat there in the refrigerator, screaming at me, "Make something with us already!"

So my first impulse was to reach for the Project Love Bethesda Cookbook, Volume III, courtesy of my cousin Ruth, in Iowa Falls, Iowa. And low and behold, there was the recipe, and I knew I had to make it because it also called for the left over sour cream which also has been waiting to be used up.

This is NOT a super foods recipe. It has fresh fruit in it, and some oat bran, which I used in place of the called for bread crumbs for the topping, but other than that, we're just talking fresh fruit delivery device here, that's it. But when you try it, you'll agree you've just had a slice of heaven. And for all you Sheboyganites out there, I guarantee it will remind you of the sour cream coffee cake we used to get from the bakery down by Prange's, and so? Same unique combination of sweet and sour, the German way. Mm. Mm. Mm.

Sour Cream Blackberry Pie

Filling:

1 cup sugar

1 cup dairy sour cream

3 T flour

.25 t salt

18 oz. fresh blackberries, washed

1 unbaked pie shell (or make your own, as the lady of the house did for me)

For the topping, mix together in a separate bowl:

.25 cup oat bran

1 T butter, melted

2 T sugar

In a medium bowl, whisk together the sugar, flour and salt, and the sour cream. Drop the berries into the unbaked pie shell prepared for the oven, and spread the sour cream mixture over the top. Sprinkle with the oat bran topping and bake at 375 degrees F. for 40 minutes.

Allow the pie to cool down completely before serving, or the filling will not hold together and ooze out all over the place. Really good ooze.

Quick Chicken Stock for Soup

A big bunch of rapini on sale means you've got left overs after you've made my Italian meatloaf. And leftovers means soup, which I consider fundamental to the menu everyday, despite the comments of a young French visitor to Michigan a few years ago who scoffed at me saying, "Soup is for old people!" Hot liquids have been shown in studies to satisfy and turn off the hunger impulse, which makes soup, as well as hot liquids like green tea, a daily imperative if you are trying to watch your calories.

Soup from scratch is easy, but requires a little planning. The plan always begins with the cheapest chicken I can find. The right price is about 79 cents per pound, and the right quantity is about five pounds. But I usually buy fifteen or twenty pounds and throw the chicken in five pound flats into my freezer for future use. With five pounds you can make copious amounts of broth quickly, and better and much cheaper than the best broths and stocks found on the shelf in aseptic packaging.

I use a poultry shears to cut the chicken into individual pieces as necessary, and I layer them skin side up in a large stainless steel roasting pan. Under the broiler they go for about fifteen minutes, and then on bake for about 45 minutes at 350 degrees F. Roasting the chicken first intensifies the flavors, and when it comes out it goes right into the crock pot on low for about eight hours, covered in fresh, clean water. Alternatively, you can use a large dutch oven with a heavy lid in a gas oven set on warm for eight hours if you prefer. Don't forget to scrape the roaster pan clean into the crock pot or dutch oven. Every extra bit of the caramelized stuff just adds to the flavor of your broth.

At the end of eight hours, scoop out the chicken from the crock pot into a large stainless steel stock pot. Then strain the broth from the crock pot through a colander or sieve into heatproof bowls and allow to cool a while before refrigerating overnight. In the morning you can easily skim off the hardened fat from the surfaces leaving some very fine broth behind. Use this to start your soup, in combination with an equal amount of fresh water.

Back to the chicken in the stock pot. Using your poultry shears, cut up all the chicken into pieces, making sure to cut the bones in half. Cover with two quarts of water, bring to a boil, and simmer on the bubble for at least one hour, two if you've got 'em. The marrow of the chicken bones will produce a second batch of broth which is creamy and gelatinous. Strain and cool as with the first batch, and supplement with equal parts water when making your soup. The chicken meat, by this point, has had it. It won't even satisfy the cat, so just pitch it.

You can get much fancier in the making of broth by adding onions and garlic and other vegetables to the roasting pan to make your broth more complex if you wish, but for people in a hurry this bare bones method works very well without too much fuss. And did I mention how cheap it is?