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".

Lean Mean Smoke Meat Machine

Spousal Unit and I were all on our own one day and decided that we would go for lunch at the Deli down the street. The deli is owned by expat Montrealers who actually know what smoke meat is supposed to taste like.

Lean smoke meat makes more crumbs than medium smoke meat.

For some reason the place was ultra-packed. It was 2pm; why would so many people be having lunch at 2pm? This is a question that remains unanswered, but the result was that they were all out of the medium smoke meat, so I had to settled for lean.

Lean smoke meat is not quite as awesome as medium smoke meat. Medium smoke meat is soft and velvety on the tongue. Lean smoke meat tastes like meat. That said, any kind of smoke meat is better than no smoke meat.

The meal was finished off with a slice of apple pie à la mode. Unfortunately, because I decided to not be all Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, the apple pie was cold. Tsk.