Slightly Less Awful Lentil Soup

You know what sucks about winter? It's that no matter how much climate change makes it warmer and less snowy and generally less gloomy, the produce still sucks ass. So you're basically stuck eating root vegetables or canned beans for a few months.

Sure everyone says that frozen veg is great and awesome and tastes fresh and whatnot, but it's all a lie. Frozen broccoli tastes like nothing. And you can never get just regular frozen broccoli; it's always vegetable mixes, filled with vile crap like snow peas and sliced anemic carrots. Lastly, who the hell knows where these vegetables are from! They could be grown on toxic waste in a Chinese industrial city for all you know.

Anyways, the long and the short of it is that I don't like frozen veg and I'm not a big fan of root vegetables (screw Jamie Oliver!), so it's cans for me all winter. All. Fucking. Winter.

You know what the easiest thing is to make in winter? Canned lentil soup. It takes talent to make canned lentil soup taste like anything beside dirty water. You have to add spices or balsamic vinegar or tomatoes to it, and you have to do it in such a way that it doesn't just taste of whatever you added in.

A long, long time ago, my mom had a crunchy granola vegetarian recipe book that included many unremarkable soups that tasted like the inside of a health food store smells. However, there was this one recipe for curried apple lentil soup that was actually pretty good. My mom only made it once because she hates curry -- and because my mom is a traditionalist who will forever make lentil soup the same way.

The other day I found a bunch of bruised apples in the vegetable crisper. They were starting to go bad, but were still salvageable. So I said to myself, "Self, why don't we give curried apple lentil soup a try! We have a bottle of random curry powder in the pantry, so let's do this."

So I made it. It turned out OK, though not quite as awesome as I remembered it. But it was better than regular lentil soup.

Less Terrible Than Usual

As usual, I brought leftovers for lunch the next day and had one of those stupid low-fat yogurts for "dessert".

Low-Fat Lunch With Vogue

There's been all this brouhaha of late about this article in the April 2012 Vogue about this lady who put her daughter on a diet.  Everyone on the internet has had their knickers in a knot for days (which is like years in internet time), so I had to buy the magazine and read the article.

Let's get skinny!

I read the article over lunch.  This was probably the first time a Vogue magazine had ever been in the breakroom at work.  Amazingly, no one said anything.  That was surprising because they all made such a fuss when I brought in Of Human Bondage, the novel by Somerset Maugham.  Though Vogue only has "editorial" "fashion" pictures of bondage, rather than "bondage" in the title, which I guess makes all the difference.

Anyhow.  The article wasn't anything that anyone needed to flip out about.  But I did think it was funny that the add next to its first page showed a bride "eating" a piece of wedding cake.  I would have loved a piece of wedding cake for dessert instead of the low-fat "key lime pie" yogurt that Spousal Unit gave me.  He said "It tastes like dessert!"  No.  What it tasted like was tart artificial lemon flavouring.  And what it looked like was light yellow-green paste.  But at least it was low fat, right?

Ugh.

My "main course" was leftover lentil and rice soup.  Low fat, vegetarian and probably all of 1 point on the Weight Watcher Jenny Craig LA Weight Loss scale of food you can eat piles of without worrying about thunder thighs.

Mac'n'cheese: The leftovers that eat like slime.

Mac'n'cheese is one of those dishes that is really tasty on day 1, but becomes a congealed mass on day 2.  Actually, it becomes a congealed mass about an hour after it's made.  You'd think that it would microwave OK, that the sauce would re-become saucy and whatnot, but no.  It just kinda gets gross and oily and the pasta turns to mush.  It's not my favourite leftover.

Less than satisfactory lunch.

Now, if you fry leftover mac'n'cheese, it's a totally different story.  A nice crust forms and you get a lovely crunch out of it.  But, you know, the break room doesn't have a stove top or even a hot plate and I'm guessing that keeping one at my desk would violate some fire safety policy or something.  Which means that I won't be having fried mac'n'cheese at work.

For "dessert" I had one of those low-fat Greek yogurt thingies that promise a decadent, creamy texture without loads of fat, gelatin or cornstarch.   I gotta say that it wasn't bad, but it still lacked the fatty mouthfeel of full fat yogurt.  But I probably shouldn't be eating full fat yogurt.  Or at least the guys in the office tell me I shouldn't.  Apparently even though they down Wendy's burgers for lunch, they are very health-conscious.