Tuesday: Comforting Winter Stew

Chestnut-lentil soup with homemade biscuits.

In our pre-blog life, we had purchased chestnuts a few times and had always roasted them and eaten them plain. But this year we've discovered how versatile chestnuts are in cooking. Perhaps chestnuts have faded from the American culinary memory because of the blight, but good recipe ideas can be found in other countries, particularly Italy and Japan.

This thick soup, really more of a stew, combines chestnuts with brown lentils and carrots. The chestnuts and carrots both add a little sweetness and texture to the otherwise fairly standard lentil soup.

Biscuits are surprisingly easy and quick to make from scratch, and they require very few ingredients. You'll probably see them from time to time on this humble blog.

Saturday: Unattractive but delicious dinner

Mashed purple potatoes and "lentil loaf."

Ok, this dinner is, in fact, ugly. (Nykki saw it, looked concerned, and inquired whether I was eating play-doh.) But we've really been struggling with incorporating mashed potatoes into our mostly-vegetarian diet. Mashed potatoes go well with steak, fried chicken, pork chops...name a meat and they make a good side. But if you're not eating a chunk of protein, what to pair it with?

Our latest attempt at a complement was this vegetarian "meatloaf" substitute, which incorporated brown lentils, red quinoa, grated carrot and ginger, bread crumbs, and a little tomato paste. The recipe is linked to above, though as you can see we made a few substitutions. The result was one of the denser foodstuffs we've ever encountered, but honestly I think it might be superior to the food it was replacing...and it did go well with the potatoes.