All makin' food posts

Owning a house is expensive, especially when you start with no furniture. So we've been keeping ourselves on a tight budget, rarely eating out, and being extra conscientious about how we spend our grocery money. It's turned out to be easier than we would have thought, because our home is near quite a bit of farm land and where there are farms, there are farm stands.

Every Sunday, we pack into the car, find another little road to travel and pick up fresh tomatoes, zucchini, corn, garlic, onions, carrots, apples, eggs and anything else that looks fresh and delicious. During our drives we've even found vineyards and an alpaca farm. All of this and we live just 15 minutes from downtown Portland. We even found a u-pick farm with everything from cantaloupes to brussels sprouts. What a life.

As we adapt to less take-out and more stay-in, I'm trying to flex my rudimentary cooking skills and take full advantage of our stocked veggie drawer.

1. Fried Zucchini, 2. Sweet corn is sweet, 3. Blueberry crisp, 4. Slow grilled tomatoes - after, 5. Braised Chicken, 6. Braised Short Ribs with Tomatoes
Created with fd's Flickr Toys

Click the individual picture names for the recipes.

I'll be sad when the farm stands close down for the winter, and we have to go back to getting our produce at the grocery store, but in the mean time, we're having a great time finding new farms and coming up with filling and healthy meals to prepare.

I'm not so much the domestic type, especially in the kitchen, I have a few decent dishes I can pull out in a pinch but mostly I classify my cooking style is "faux-made," whereby I spruce up ready-made dishes. But hey, I can do things to ramen that would rock your world.

Still, there are a few things that are easy enough that even I can make them from scratch (I get a pass on broth and canned tomatoes, right?) and stews are top on that list. I love stew, with its big chunks of yummy goodness and lots of veggies and some sort of starch. (I have a love for carbs that knows no bounds.)

Lately, I've been exploring lentils. I don't much care for beans but I wanted to get more legumes into my life, so, lentils it is. A little reading online and what I discovered (no attempt has been made to determine the veracity of these claims) about lentils is:

• Don't cook your lentils with salt, they get tough
• Standard lentils are better for soups than the various color ones because they stay firmer
• The "best" lentils for soups are the French Green
• Hard water can make lentils tough
• You don't have to soak the lentils ahead of time but it's often recommended anyway.
• Otherwise, you really can't mess them up

So, with that in mind, I created this fairly simple concoction.

Not Quite Vegetarian -- but could be -- Veggie Lentil Soup

a whole lotta stuff

Makes oodles, halve or quarter if you don't plan to freeze some of it.

Ingredients

• 1 c. - dry standard lentils
• 1 c. - dry french green lentils
• 1 - sweet onion
• 1 - head of garlic
• 2Tbs - fresh thyme
• 3lbs - fingerling potatoes (I really like taters, adjust to your taste)
• 1.5lb - carrots
• 3 c. - mushrooms
• 3 oz - pancetta (1 package, give or take) leave out for vegetarian
• olive oil
• 2 cans - diced tomatoes
• 1 quart - chicken broth replace with vegetable broth for vegetarian
• 2Tbs - tomato sauce (or to taste)
• salt to taste
• pepper to taste

Garnish goodness. Use some or all.

• olive oil
• fresh cilantro or parsley
• fresh thyme
• fresh grated parmesan omit for vegan