Soup Friday – a clean eating recipe that’s just plain good.

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I like red lentils.  They look cool – though I think they’re more orange than red but, whatever.  I don’t see them at too many stores so when I do find them I try to pick some up.  They’re more interesting than the plain old brown ones which look more olive green than brown to me.

So I’ve had this big bag sitting around for a while and finally happened upon a interesting recipe.  That is interesting to me right now is using my crockpot, an interesting spice combination and simple ingredient list. 

This recipe seemed to fit the bill:  Clean Eating Red Lentil Stew. But I actually found it via another blog site:  motherAwesome.  I’ve been interested in Indian spices and foods for several years.  These are not flavors of spices I grew up with so I’ve been educating my palette and have been taking my family along for the experience.  At first bite, I thought I needed to add some salt but upon further consideration/a few more bites it didn’t seem necessary.  To bulk up the meal and because I don’t really like to eat just soup/stew  (I need to eat it with something else).  I decided to make rice – a combination of brown, white and what my mom calls “black” which actually cooks up purple (what’s with the wacky colors and this recipe?!).  At any rate, Jon dug in although, as only Jon would do, he first wanted to add cheese.

“Try it first before you add to it.”  was my response since we only had sharp cheddar cheese.  My toes curled at the thought of adding that to this dish.  Luckily, he agreed and added nothing.  Sofia, at first, balked, which I expected – too many flavor combinations, plus the carrots and unidentifiable beans.  But she’s a good sport and was willing to at least try it.  If I avoided the carrots I could coax her into several bites – enough to make a meal although she was pocketing her bites in the corner of her mouth but once I started alternating bites with homemade applesauce it all went down.  Little stinker.

In typical Sherry fashion, I did add a little twist by dicing up a pear and throwing it into the crockpot.  I like the idea of adding fruit to a savory dish.  I’m not sure if this pear added a whole lot but I don’t think it took away from the end result.  I would have added an apple if I hadn’t used all my apples the day before in the awesome homemade applesauce we ate with dinner.

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