Cold Wave Lentil Soup

(I realized when I sat down to enter this week's pannier that I had not posted in over a week, in spite of having written a couple of entries on my writing program. I simply forgot to make blogs out of these thrilling adventures. This is the first one, another and maybe more will follow.)

Although posted today, this entry was written a week ago.

France, along with much of Europe, is under the deepest cold wave in decades. Depending on where you are, the record low temperatures may go back as far as the 1870s, as they have in Perpignan. We’re lucky here in Catalan France, where the geography and climate create a pocket of coastal plain protected from the severest weather by mountains. We have had a few centimeters of snow, and even more rain, off and on. For most of yesterday, our street’s thin blanket of snow retained its pristine texture: blank, white, and crusty on top.

When it gets really cold, the way it has been around here for the past few days (really cold around here means zero centigrade, plus or minus a few degrees), you think of a good, hearty lintel soup. Lucky for us, we have a good larder of winter roots this year, so we were able to try out a different combination of ingredients, getting away from the standard lintel soup with potatoes.

Into the braise pot I threw the following (after dicing, of course): An onion, one large parsnip, a medium potato, a large black radish, two stalks of celery. For oils, herbs, and spices, Juliette adds these: four whole cloves of garlic, one soup spoon of miso, a soup spoon of curcumin, celery salt, cayenne pepper.

The lentils we have on hand came in one of the Weekly Panniers, and we’re pretty sure that the lentils were grown by the bio farmers who pack each week’s basket. The grains are dense and dark green and turn the soup stock into a complex broth.

Water, wine, what else?