Lentil Soup

Lentils, unlike some other legumes, cook pretty quickly. This should take less than an hour unless you chop vegetables very slowly. My brother made this a Le Creuset enameled dutch oven, but a large enough pot works too.

Ingredients:
One onion

One cup of carrots-- about five small carrots

three small celery stalks-- less than one cup

six and a half to seven cups of water

two cups lentils

one sixth cup extra virgin olive oil
tomato paste
vegetable stock (we used the stuff that comes in a jar. If you have the liquid stock, substitute that for some of the water)
oregano
rosemary
pepper
bay leaves
basil

Procedure:
Chop the vegetables into small pieces as shown:



Sauté them in olive oil in a large pot until the onions ad celery are translucent.



They will have cooked down and begun to smell like celery at this point, and lots of steam will be coming up.



Add the lentils and two or more bay leaves.



Add the water. a few tablespoons or so of tomato paste, a few teaspoons of oregano and basil, a couple spoonfuls of vegetable stock, and pepper. Stir it up, put a lid on it, and let it steam for 20 minutes. About halfway through, add a sprig of rosemary.



My brother suggested not adding as much vegetable stock as the jar says to use, since there are so many other vegetables in the soup. The rosemary doesn't go into his soup until near the end because it is so strong and he thinks it overpowers the other tastes. If you disagree, add it earlier with the other spices.

Add salt to taste, and the soup will be done.



Cut up some rye bread and eat it with the soup. I put several slices in my bowl and poured the soup over it.

Madeleines

Every time I visited a thrift store in the last year or so, I kept an eye out for a madeleine pan. One finally turned up about a week ago. I tried a couple recipes on my brother, who has been to France and eaten the madeleines there. The recipe he says tastes more French is from http://www.mercotte.fr/2008/09/30/pas-de-doute-il-ny-a-pas-de-recette-de-madeleine-sur-ce-blog/. Since it is in French and Celsius, I will translate it. I also had different cook times because I think my oven is hotter.

Yield: Between 30 and 36, depending on how much batter is used for each.

Ingredients:
3 eggs
250g flour
200g sugar OR 80g sugar and 40g honey
125g butter (about a stick and an eigth)
50g milk
10g baking powder (about 2 tsp)
1 sachet of vanilla sugar

I don't have vanilla sugar, so I just put in a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract. Using a mixture of honey and sugar makes moister madeleines. The first time i made them, I only used sugar, and they were drier than I would have liked. The second time, I replaced three of the spoonfuls of sugar with one spoonful of honey, and they were nice and moist.

Special equipment: A madeleine pan. I found a recipe in English that suggests using a mini muffin pan if you don't have a madeleine pan.

Mix the eggs, flour, sugar, milk, baking powder and vanilla until the batter is smooth. Add the melted butter and stir for about a minute. Cover with a dish towel and let it rest for two hours at room temperature.

The mixture contains milk and eggs, so I checked to make sure it was okay to leave it out. Apparently egg dough can rest for up to two hours unrefrigerated, which is just right for this.

Preheat the oven to 425° F (220° C). Butter the madeleine pan (or pans). Butter it even if it is nonstick. I forgot to butter mine once, and the bottoms broke off and stayed stuck to the pan when I tried to get them out. Fill the madeleine molds up halfway with batter.

Bake them for 5 or 6 minutes at 425° F, then turn down the temperature to 390° F (200° C) and bake for two and a half to four minutes. They are done when the edges are turning brown.

I used a chopstick to get the madeleines out of the pan because it is thin and won't scratch nonstick. They should come out pretty easily if the pan was buttered. While you preheat the oven back to 425° for the next batch, you can wipe the crumbs off the pan with a paper towel and put in more batter.

The sea shell shape from the madeleine pan (And lines from the cooling rack)

The final result after I ate five or six of them:

This batch made thirty-three madeleines. The previous one with the same amount of ingredients made thirty-six. 

Black Skimmers!

I went for a walk on the beach and found a flock of terns and black skimmers. Since I had never seen black skimmers before, I ran back to my car for my camera. As it turned out, I had left my telephoto lens on my bedroom floor, so I had the choice of my 90 mm macro lens or my 10-20 mm wide angle lens. I chose the macro lens.

Elegant terns in the flock too

This Heerman's gull was standing right in front of me for a while.

The sun finally went down and pictures started getting blurry.