As a recovering vegetarian, Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook is in regular rotation around here.  When I’m in a panic and don’t know what to make for dinner I often make this from-memory, tweaked-for-my-family version of her Lentil soup. It’s really simple since it only uses one pot, takes one hour and you don’t need to presoak the lentils.

In addition to being delicious, lentils make a such a nice naturally iron rich first food for babies. This soup was one of baby Robin’s first solid foods around the middle of his first year and he gobbles it right up off a tiny vintage baby spoon every time I serve it.

3 cups of dry red Canadian lentils

8 cups of water (sometimes I use a cup or two of chicken stock if I have some around)

1 glug of olive oil

2 stalks of celery with leaves

1 peeled yam

3 peeled carrots

8-10 cloves of garlic

2 large shallots or onions

1 bay leaf

2 teaspoons of sea salt

1/2 teaspoon of thyme

1/2 teaspoon of freshly ground pepper

red wine vinegar

Start by giving your lentils a quick rinse and strain under cold water.
Then combine your lentils, water, olive oil and salt in a large thick bottomed pot and bring to a boil. Once things are boiling, lower the heat to the lowest setting, cover and gently simmer for 30 minutes.  While the lentils are cooking you have plenty of time to prepare the rest of the ingredients and remind your children to use gentle touches.

Now you start your chopping. Soup is pretty much all about chopping.  I have some new cutco knives and I have to say having the right knives has greatly improved my mood while making dinner with littles at my feet or on my back.

I cut all my veggies into slices and then smash the 10 cloves of garlic with the side of my knife before cutting it finely. I like to think that the more garlic and onions in a recipe, the more love. The more smashing of garlic, the more fun.

After your lentils have been simmering slowly for 30 minutes you can add all your chopped up vegetables and herbs. Turn the heat up a little bit and gently cook, partially covered for another 30 minutes.

When you’re ready to eat, drizzle the top of each bowl with red wine vinegar and enjoy.

This recipe is my entry in the Love Your Lentils Canada Challenge.  I’d love it if you could take a second and vote for my soup over at  http://www.loveyourlentils.ca/recipes/gentle-lentil-soup

It’s winter and so I want to go into hibernation mode just as the seed business starts to ramp up. So here’s the answer to that haunting question; What’s for dinner? It’s “I’ll just make that Jamie Oliver recipe, you know, the one with the chickpeas but with more onions and some carrots” soup. We’ve just shared this tonight with the Lovely Clara who came and helped fill an overwhelming amount of seed packs (check out clarabeelavery.com for some great illustrations and musings).

Pasta e Ceci from Jamie Oliver’s Italy but from memory since we make it all the time and with carrots for colour and more onions since its winter.

2 onions

2 carrots

a few sticks of celery

1 clove of garlic

extra virgin olive oil

rosemary

2 cans of chickpeas

2 ¼ cups of stock

2 cups ditalini pasta

sea salt and black pepper

a handful of chopped basil and spinach in each bowl

I like that this soup cooks really slow and gently. Life is really distracting and full of good things like a busy business, 3 year old shenanigans, and a bouncing baby boy. So I have a tendency to walk off in the middle of making dinner.

This soup cooks long and slow, filling the house with a great oniony soup smell and won’t burn if you have to go nurse the baby for an hour.

Over low heat in a nice thick bottomed pot combine a few glugs of olive oil with finely chopped onions, carrots and celery. Cook slow and gently with the lid on for at least 20 minutes until the onions are clear.

Add 2 cans of well-rinsed chickpeas, stir it all up, and cover with stock or water (according to your level of vegan/vegetarianism). Cook over low heat for another 30 minutes.

Using a slotted spoon, remove about half the soup and whizz it up in a food processor, blender, or use an immersion blender. Once it’s properly whizzed, throw it back in the pot.

Add your little pasta, we like ditalini, the little “o”s. You throw it in dry, add some salt and pepper, maybe some dried basil from last summer, and keep simmering gently for another 15 minutes or so until the pasta’s cooked.

Serve it up with some torn or chopped up basil and spinach. So delicious and really just a bunch of chopping and slow easy cooking.

I make quite a bit of pesto in the summertime and it seems I have posted variations on our pesto recipe a few times too (here it is with garlic scapes, and then again with arugula). Somehow I keep skipping our classic basil version though. Which is a real shame as it is really so delicious! So without further delay, here is Cubit’s Classic Basil Pesto recipe.

It’s really quite simple and you can add or subtract ingredients based on what’s in season or your personal food rules (ie please feel free to just skip the cheese, this recipe can handle it).

My parents came to visit the farm for the first time last week. They were our very first visitors and they make no secret that they think we have lost our minds by taking on this project. Their visit just happened to coincide with a major heat wave and drought conditions. So after a few days alone in a tin can, in the middle of a field, with sporadic water supply, a bug bitten toddler, at 33 weeks pregnant I was starting to wonder the same thing.  What had I gotten us into?  I mean it was 37 degrees in the shade, except that we have no shade.

So glad my photographer mother was able to help photograph the mood.

Then Ryan came back from working in the city and despite the heat, some nice things happened to remind me why we need this land and what the point of it all is.

1st we woke up to this deer: She looked at us and shook her tail just like Hazel would then returned to grazing our freshly hayed field.

Then we got just a tiny little bit of rain so we were able to weed the herb garden a just little and save what we thinned out for dinner.

Most importantly, I borrowed Almerinda’s amazing stove, kitchen and running water and made my parents a fantastic meal. Using local zucchini and cherry tomatoes, herbs from the garden and the new Foodland Ontario booklet this easy dinner brought home the point that growing your own food is simply one of the most enjoyable things there is in life.

Following this recipe for Mediterranean Grilled Vegetables and Rigatoni was pretty simple. I often stray from recipes but this one doesn’t need any tweaking at all. We’ve made it a few times now as the ingredients are all in season, it has two vegetarian sources of protien in the beans and copious amounts of goat cheese, it’s really quick to make and it uses at least 2 zucchinis which is pretty important this time of year.

Start by grilling local veggies like zucchini and cherry tomatoes on the bbq while the water  for the rigatoni boils.

Then I used my gorgeous mortar and pestle that Ryan got from Clam Labs on Etsy for me this past christmas to mash up the herbs in oil.

 It’s really the perfect summer meal.

It’s really the perfect farm too.

Gardening with small children in an exercise in letting go of any tidy gardening habits you may have had in the past.  When letting a toddler help you out, you are likely to get thick masses of seedlings growing together.  Rather than fighting it and trying to grow things in straight lines, I find it easier to let them sow to to their hearts content and then do some damage control at the the thinning phase.