After a very long (feeling) week, last night was a welcome change. My friend Sara and I went to the home of my friends Kofi and Theresa where we decided to make them dinner (since Theresa had treated us to amazing homemade black bean burgers the week before.)

We spent the entire week planning our (ultimately simple) menu. Soup, salad and dessert. Salad was simple - romaine lettuce, tomatoes, and artichoke hearts. But the soup! And the dessert! Boy, howdy.

THE SOUP: Sara follows many vegan cooking blogs and she sent me a link to a Valentine’s Day food competition on one of them where Liz of Food Snobbery is my Hobbery posted her recipe for Squash and Beet Dal.

OMG. A++++ WOULD BUY AGAIN!!

Roasted vegetables (I used butternut squash with the beets and onions), spices most often used in Indian cooking (mustard seed, coriander seed, fennel seed and cumin seed), garlic, tomatoes, red lentils and salt. That’s essentially the soup. It starts smelling awesome about, oh, a minute into the cooking process when you toss those spices into a pot with a little bit of hot canola oil (we used sesame) and they all start popping and releasing flavors and scents. Mmmm. I pureed the roasted vegetables before adding them so it would be a creamier soup, and also took about a third of the cooked lentil, tomato and spice portion of the soup (before adding the roasted veggies) and pureed that, too. It worked out nicely. And the color is just gorgeous - as you might imagine from something that’s got beets in it.

THE DESSERT: From PostPunkKitchen (ppk.com), Sara procured a recipe for vegan Apple Crisp… which she made with Bosc and Anjou pears and Roma apples. Mmmm.

OMFG - SECONDS! SWEET TREAT!
Warm and sweet and crispy and cinnamoney and syrupy and tangy and delicious. (And since I’m not a vegan, I gave myself a little extra treat of whipped cream on the side.) I can’t say too much about the preparation since she was peeling and coring and cutting up the fruit while I was working on the soup (so that we could put the crisp in the oven whilst we ate soup) but I didn’t hear her swearing or otherwise disliking the process. (Feel free to testify in the comments!) But so good - it just needs to sit for about fifteen minutes after you pull it out of the oven so you don’t burn your mouth and so the crispiness gets crispier and the syrupiness thickens up (cornstarch, ahoy!)

All in all, we decided that we done good.

We each took some soup home with us to relive the glory. And I’ll probably make it again sometime. Though in a smaller serving since this was a LOT for one person to enjoy. It was a lot for four people to enjoy, though I did increase the recipe by about a half since serving sizes/yield weren’t provided and it seemed that the author of the recipe was cooking for two… so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make more.

A three-day weekend is also quite enjoyable (even if it fills me with the usual “what will I do with this extra free time?” worry). On Monday, I can bum around the bookstore… maybe take myself to see a movie - but a less serious one this time. Far less serious - like “The Spiderwick Chronicles” mayhaps? I haven’t read those kids’ books, but I remember that the trailer in the theatres looked pretty creepy for a kids’ book/movie.