Lentil Soup & Hearth Bread

If there's one thing I love, it's a good food tradition. The eating of lentils on New Year's is a tradition that can be found around the world. We already fulfilled one New Year's tradition with a pork roast on New Year's Day, but we're trying for some extra good luck this year, so we made lentil soup and fresh-baked bread on the first Saturday of the new year.



Lentil Soup

2 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, diced
2 medium carrots, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
1 15 oz can chopped or pureed tomatoes
1 1/2 cups dried lentils
6 cups chicken stock
2 cups water (if necessary)
2 bay leaves
3-4 sprigs fresh thyme
Salt and pepper to taste
1/4 lb cubed ham
Splash of red wine vinegar

In a Dutch oven, sauté onion in butter over medium heat for 2-3 minutes. Add carrots and celery, and cook until vegetables begin to soften (5-10 minutes). Add tomatoes and cook for 5-10 more minutes. Add lentils, chicken stock, bay leaves, thyme, and ham. You don't have to pick the leaves off the thyme -- just fish out the stems with the bay leaves at the end of cooking. Simmer for at least one hour.

Add water as needed if the soup gets too thick. Taste lentils for doneness, and taste for seasoning. I've read that you shouldn't cook legumes in salted water, because it can toughen them. I'm not sure if that's true, but I didn't add any salt until I was satisfied that the lentils were cooked through. Make sure to add enough salt as the soup will be very dull without it.

I just used sliced ham that was leftover from making sandwiches, but a ham hock, salt pork, or bacon would all do well in this soup. This is the first time I've used tomatoes in my lentil soup, and I think it's a good addition. Next time, I might try pureed tomatoes or tomato paste. A splash of red wine vinegar at the end adds a final accent. A simple but satisfying soup.



Hearth Bread

On a recent visit, my father-in-law shared stories of his bread-baking adventures in the 70s. Inspired by that conversation and the Leftover Queen's bread rant, my wife and I decided we wanted to try some bread baking ourselves. This was a good weekend project, since we spent most of the day making one loaf of bread.

We consulted Rose Levy Beranbaum's Bread Bible for our bread recipe. Her recipes are exacting and time-consuming, but the first bread that we made was a huge success. It isn't the best bread I've ever tasted, but definitely the best bread I've ever baked. I won't try to reproduce a recipe, but a similar recipe for hearth bread can be found on her blog. We did a four-hour fermentation, followed by three one-hour risings before baking the bread in a loaf pan. The bread was chewy and had nice holes throughout. The crust also had a nice chew -- outrageously delicious still warm from the oven with butter.

That loaf of bread will hopefully be the inspiration for many more in the future. We just ordered a baking stone for our oven so we can bake breads and pizzas. I would love to be able to make a really good homemade pizza, and I'll be sure to write about it when I do.