Pease Porridge

One day last October, I undertook to make lentils and rice, one of our old faves.  At that time, I had been experimenting with adding more vegetables to the broth, celery, carrots, onions, etc. to add depth to the flavor.  This time, I went out to the garden and just started picking one each of the end-of-season vegetables - a beet, a carrot, celery, a stalk of chard, a stalk of self seeded dill, and so on - I don't remember what all at this point.  I added everything I could find, roots and greens including the carrot top and the beet greens.  In no time, the soup outgrew the pot and had to be moved over to the 12 Qt Revereware.  Soon it was no longer lentils-and-rice-with-some-added-vegetables-for-flavor and had become end-of-season-pease-porridge-with-lentils-and-rice.  Turned out to be excellent, a real hit.

I tried a reprise a couple of week later by which time there really wasn't anything left in the garden except chard so it turned out to be chard-soup-with-lentils-and-rice.  We discovered that chard soup is really not very good, so the second try was a real disappointment.

Here we are coming to the end of the garden season again, so yesterday I took another crack at Pease Porridge with Lentils and Rice.  I found a beautiful carrot in the garden with really spicy greens, a beet with greens, a double handful of green and yellow beans, several stalks of celery with leaves, three stalks of chard, fresh parsley, some red potatoes, a really nice selection of colorful (red, orange, and green) bell peppers which were really good this year, and a few end-of-season tomatoes still good enough to dice.  I also cut up some red, yellow, and green pepperocini into pepper rings and minced half of a hot red pepper for a little zing and added some sprigs of winter savory, thyme, and marjoram from the herb garden.  All this in 14 cups of water with ~1 1/4 cups of green lentils and ~ 1 1/4 cups of rice.  Oh yeah, onions and garlic, of course, dash of mustard, salt and ground pepper, etc.

Mom really liked it.  I liked it well enough but not as much as the original - still too much chard flavor.  So in the future, no more than one stalk of chard, ever, maybe even just leave it out.  Chard is not a soup flavor.  The other thing, I started adding the vegetables at the same time as the lentils.  Some of the tougher veg (e.g. beets) needed extra cooking time so by the time everything had cooked up, the lentils and rice were way over-cooked.  Probably better to make the veg soup first then add the lentils for 55 min and rice for 20 min at the end.

So, the concept of cooking up whatever veg you have in a flavorful soup then bulking it out (and adding protein) with lentils and rice makes a nice pease porridge.  Be creative and enjoy.

Dad