I had spinach and chickpea and did a quick allrecipes.com search to see what can be made with these ingredients (other than salad). I found this fabulous-sounding soup recipe, and it is actually fabulous-tasting too. I ended up modifying it a bit because of different ingredients available.

TO START, the soup base involved:

1 medium onion, diced
5-6 cloves of garlic, chopped
5 small-med potatoes, diced
1 head of broccoli, diced (optional)
2 tsp of cumin powder
2 tsp ginger powder
6 cups of chicken/vegetable stock (I used 1.5 cans of chicken broth, made up to 6 or 7 cups of stock)

In a large non-stick pot, I fried the garlic and onion in olive oil with cumin and ginger until the onion was transluscent and tender. Then I added the stock, potatoes, and broccoli and brought that up to a boil.

I let that simmer away for a while, maybe 10-15 minutes, and then added a drained can of organic chickpeas, which I ordered accidentally from Green Earth Organics. I thought they were offering dried chickpeas, but I read the order sheet wrong. But the organic ones were great! Less salty and a bit more flavorful than the usual chickpeas of the canned variety. Anyway, I added the chickpeas and let that bubble away for another 10 minutes, or until the potatoes were quite soft. At this point I chose to blend the mixture in a blender (i wish I had a hand-blender!) which made the soup more consistently thick.

NEXT, to make a creamy soup, I mixed together:

1 cup of cream
1 tbsp natural unsweetened peanut butter
2 tsp corn starch

After it was thoroughly blended, I stirred this into the soup. A few modifications:
1) I used P.B. because I didn’t have any tahini (almond butter). I was cautious, so I only added 1 tbsp. It was great, so next time I would go for 2 tablespoons.
2) I definitely DID NOT NEED 1 cup of cream!! That is a lot of cream, but I decided to follow the recipe! It ended up being a very thick and heavy soup. Tasty for the first few bites, but I was keeling over by the time I got to the end. 1/2 cup of cream and 1/2 skim milk would be plenty.
3) Next time I would remember to dissolve the corn starch in some hot water/soup before mixing it in with the cream, since my corn starch clumped together when added to cold liquid.

FINALLY, once my potato-broccoli-chickpea-cream-P.B. concoction was simmering, I added a few handfuls of spinach. I would have added more spinach (the original recipe calls for 1/2 lb.) but I didn’t have any. Finally, I seasoned with some cayenne pepper, a bit more cumin, and a sprinkle of nutmeg. The soup is ready when the spinach is just cooked.
The number of spices in this soup and the nuttiness from the peanut butter make it very unique and flavorful. I will definitely make this again with less cream and more greens. Very tasty!

+ = good

I don’t really keep cream around for cooking. I do, however, keep plain yogurt around, which I eat with honey, jam, fruit, cereal, etc. I’ve also found that yogurt is a great light substitute for cream when cooking. It’s slightly more sour, of course, but sometimes that can work really well.

For instance, with tomato! The other night I was very hungry but all I felt like having was soup. I had a can of tomato soup in the cupboard, so I chopped up an onion, added a clove of minced garlic, and stirred in a few tablespoons of yogurt into my tomato soup. I ended up with a delicious cream of tomato soup.

Another good yogurt modification is to add it to tomato pasta sauce and make a simple rosé sauce. I do this all the time, and it makes the pasta sauce richer without being much heavier, as it would with full cream. I also like to add something like pancetta or bacon, where the saltiness will balance the tartness of the yogurt.

Oh yes! Make sure to add the yogurt at a lower temperature and to stir frequently (if not constantly) until you bring it up to a bubbling temperature. Otherwise the yogurt hits the high heat and tends to… well, curdle. And, no, we don’t like curdling!

This has been one of my staple foods this year. The base is always a bag of dried lentils, a big pot of water, and whatever vegetables I have in the refrigerator (it just occurred to me that “refrigerator” is such a bizarre word! it’s so… functional. i can just imagine a group of engineers sitting around a table in the 1950’s thinking of a name… colderator… chillerator… rechillerator… frigid… reFRIGErator!… brilliant).

This particular lentil soup was made by stir-frying a whole whack of carrots, celery, onions, garlic till tender (other possibilities – leeks, potatoes, squash, any other “hard” vegetable). For value-added flavour, I added some turkey stock I had made with some turkey bits the day before (so this version is not completely vegetarian, but usually i just use water). For seasoning I added bay leaves, cumin, just a bit of salt, and ginger.

I also chose to use red lentils. Red lentils are the cuter more attractive member of the lentil family. I like to use them because they cook faster and they look better once cooked, even though for some reason they tend to be more expensive than the green ones. Pureeing a lot of carrots into there would make it more orangey. But it was otherwise very tasty.

So there’s lunch! Fresh organic romaine lettuce salad, home-made soup, and multi-grain bread of the supermarket variety. The leftovers were frozen in boxes, which is why a meal like this is great for students when you’re at home feeling hungry and neglected and suddenly remember you have some thick soup in the freezer. For my next lentil soup I’m going to calculate the cost of it – $-wise I also think it’s quite student-friendly, depending on the veggies you add.

The preparation time is about 15 minutes for washing and chopping all the veggies, and 45 min – 1 hour of mainly unsupervised slow cooking on the stove (it just needs the occasional stir).

P.S. This is the first real entry, so I want you to know that I welcome comments, suggestions, adaptations!