Category: Soups

Coconut lemongrass galangal soup from Thailand. This can be made vegan by omitting the chicken and using tamari sauce instead of fish sauce, and adding pureed butternut squash for some more body.

A simple chili that is pretty quick to make after you've soaked the beans overnight. It's just spicy enough, so if you like really spicy, you might want to up the ancho. Note that this recipe uses a pressure cooker, but if you use canned beans, you could skip that step--you'd need 4 cups of canned beans instead, and cook it all together. The dried beans have to be cooked first with NO ACID (tomatoes, that is) or they will remain crunchy, but that wouldn't be an issue with canned beans.

I first formulated a version of this for New Year's, and each version is usually a little different, depending on what is in season and what I can get. I don't always put tomatoes in it, but I have so many in my garden now, I'm struggling to find uses for them all! If you do use tomatoes, be sure to cook the beans first, as they will be forever crunchy if you try to cook them for the first time with the tomatoes, from the acidity. It's fine to add tomatoes AFTER the beans are soft. Canned beans would work as well. For cooking dried beans, a pressure cooker is invaluable!

The origin of this recipe comes from a tourist mag I picked up in Nassau, Bahamas, but I did my own tweaks to it perhaps make it less "Bahamian." It was one of the cheapest to make recipes in the magazine, so I was glad I tried it. The original recipe calls for soaking the lentils for 4 hours, but I usually soak them overnight, or even 24 hours, pouring off the old soaking water, and rinsing them.