Stone Soup & Blog As You Go

My favorite ways to cook are to either plan the meal and purchase the ingredients the day that I need them or to invent something to eat from what I have in my fridge and cupboards.  Seeing as it is 10pm and I just got home from class where we talked about muscles and food and cells and food and disease and food,  I'm pretty hungry and I have to go with option B.

(There's also this really huge pressure in holistic nutrition school to appear to be as healthy as you can.  I'm sure I'm inventing the pressure and that my classmates really wouldn't judge me if they knew I had a big bag of peanut m&ms and a chocolate milk on my way to class...)

I decided during break halfway through class that I should base my meal off the frozen lentils that are left over from making a mushroom pilaf that turned into a casserole a few days later when I added a can of cream of mushroom soup.  Yeh, I'm thrifty.  So, Stone Soup it is.  I also know that the only way I'm going to write about this is if I do it as I'm cooking and load the pictures while it's simmering.

Step 1: Accumulate ingredients on the least appropriate surface.

My mess of ingredients: frozen lentils, canned garbanzo beans, 1/2 an onion, 1 1/2 carrots, yellow squash, fresh basil, banana peppers, garlic powder, cayenne, curry, spinach, Better Than Bouillon, olive oil. (Sesame oil got added in in the last minute.)

Step 2: Prep the vegetables and saute them in a pot with olive oil.  Don't forget the spices!

Step 3: Add beans, lentils, and water and cover for a while.  Bring to a simmer and stir when you feel moved to stir.  Add bouillon at this time if you feel like it.

Step 4: Clean and take pictures as you go!  Time to prep the fresh-but-dilapidated basil and the nearing-its-last-legs spinach.  I thought I'd cut them into strips and put them in towards the end.  So much for what I thought!  The basil much preferred to be mangled.

Step 6: Stir it and smell it and decide if it's done or needs a few more minutes.  Take the opinion of your grumbling stomach and serve it up with (a measuring cup because you don't have a ladle) the remnants of a bag of tortilla chips!

PS- My pictures from my last Avotacos were blurring because I took them on an actual digital camera and not my phone.  I am not out of avocados so pictures will have to wait.