Make your own hat here: Washington Post

Legumes. Yuck! Am I right?

However: the USDA suggests an intake of 3 cups of legumes per week for someone on a 3000 calorie diet (your typical male). The DASH Diet, voted #1 by health experts, suggests 1 cup of nuts, seeds, and legumes per day, for someone on a 2600 cal diet.

Now why did they have to go and suggest something foul like that? Just because legumes "supply valuable vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals" (Nutrition, Concepts and Controversies, 13th Edition, p. 119) doesn't mean my gustatory cells are fair game. I'm not about to offend my palate, just because a single serving of legumes supplies the daily recommended amount of fiber, whose known health benefits include:

1. Promotion of normal blood cholesterol concentrations and reduced risk of heart and artery disease.
2. Modulation of blood glucose concentrations (reduced risk of diabetes).
3. Maintenance of healthy bowel function (reduced risk of bowel diseases).
4. Promotion of a healthy body weight.

(ibid.)

Urg! I guess what we have here is what the dictionaries call a conundrum. We are situated between a Scylla and a Charybdis. On the one hand I want to avoid bad health. On the other hand, I don't want to hurt my taste buds: they're my buds! We hang out all the time!

Picture of taste buds hanging out.

But what if we're dead set on navigating the narrow passage between the hard-to-pronounce Greek Goddesses, and finding our way to a better health? Well, then, I guess we have no choice but to make legumes tasty again! We're gonna take that Charybdis whirlpool and make something good out of it, or its name isn't Charybdis! (If you're thinking "oh now you're just repeating the name on purpose", you're right.)

The Charybdis whirlpool and/or how our final product's gonna look like.

Grab your kitchen utensils gastronauts! We're going on a cooking expedition!

This recipe will feed you for 4 days (if you're eating alone), and take about 30 minutes active time to make. It's called Red Lentil Soup with Curried Drizzle, and it's from p. 138 of the book How to Cook Everything. We're combining it with Real Croutons from p. 877 in order to create a complete protein. (Legumes and grains yield complementary proteins containing all the essential amino acids. See ibid, p. 218.)

Now you may purchase a copy of that book, or you may procure a pirated copy of it online. I can only recommend one of those ways, but I'm mentioning the other for the sake of completeness.

Let's just not jump right in

Before you jump right in (and order the book and wait days for it to arrive and then flip to the right page) and make the recipe, you might wanna heed the following advice and/or alterations.

First, we're making this soup with split yellow peas. Not red lentils. This is what split yellow peas look like:

Do these look split to you? They look quartered to me.

Regular dried split green peas will do as a substitution, cos apparently they have a similar flavor profile, but I can't vouch for that.

Then, we're using water, not chicken stock. And we're replacing one of those cups of water with a cup of (preferably less than 40% water) coconut milk. Here's what a cup of coconut milk looks like.

Yup, exactly like you thought it would look like.

Pro tip: First use the cup to measure the coconut milk, then use it to measure the water. That way, you get all that creamy coconut goodness out of that cup and into that soup.

See? Clean as a whistle.

These pro tips are the result of much hard-earned culinary experience. They only come a few times in your lifetime. So savor these moments.

The recipe calls for a potato musher. Use it. No need to dirty a blender over this, even if it's hand-held. This is what my potato musher looks like.

Cool ain't it?

I use 6 to 8 slices of whole wheat bread for this recipe. I often make my own, but I won't burden you with that. I'm not completely inhuman. So, you can buy it at the store. But note that whole wheat bread really doesn't require more than 4-5 ingredients. In this case, 4: sourdough or starter, yeast, salt, whole wheat flour. Or, if you prefer it in Greek:

As I said, I use 6 to 8 slices. That's very imprecise I know. And this ain't called 'the OCD foodie series' for nothing. So here:

"He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled." - Aristotle

Not sure that's relevant, but I like wise quotes.

In case that wasn't OCD enough for you, here's how much the slices weigh in total:

Hulk chop. (Fans of my food series will recognize this hilarious reference to the last episode/post.)

I always weigh the butter. No need to dirty a clean measuring spoon over this. 1 tbsp (that's tablespoon) = 15 grams. Or 14 grams if you wanna be OCD about it, as you should.

That's 4 tbsps. I was having a bad OCD day.

OCD overload

The final result (croutons and curried drizzle aside) weighs 1460 grams. That's 365 g per portion if you wanna plate your portions accurately.

Refrigerate it

Unless you live on one of the two poles, you will want to store the soup inside the fridge. When you reheat it, you might wanna add some water to liquefy it.

And refrigerate the Curried Drizzle and Croutons too. The Curried Drizzle will get tough as butter (refrigerated butter, that is), so you might wanna get it to room-temp before drizzling it over the soup. That might take up to an hour in cold weather.

Separate it

Don't add the croutons into the soup. They'll get mushy, and the flavors will interfere. Have them separately. Draw a clear line between them, like so:

Move along. Nothin' to see here.

The 3 tables from the Mount

Below are the nutritional contents for the soup, for the croutons, and for a single serving of soup plus croutons. For seasoning the soup, I use 2 tsps (that's teaspoons) salt and half tsp finely ground pepper. For the croutons, I use 1/4 tsp salt and an equal amount of finely ground pepper. To make the Fragrant Curry Powder, I use butter. To make the images larger you may right-click on them and click on 'view image' for firefox, or the equivalent for other browsers.

The numbers in red are the ones derived from the packaging of the product itself. The rest I had to get from here:

For the split peas: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/legumes-and-legume-products/4353/2
For the coconut milk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_milk
For the salt: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/spices-and-herbs/216/2
For the butter: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/133/2
For the curry powder: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/spices-and-herbs/185/2
For the whole wheat bread: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/baked-products/4876/2

The amounts for the curry powder are highly speculative, given how curry mixtures vary greatly.

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So there you have it! Taste this soup and you'll never say Yuck to legumes again!

Follow me for more OCD recipes like this one. And here's the last episode in case you missed it: Minimize your Risk of Osteoporosis with these Healthy Smoothie Recipes!

Eat well and prosper!