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Lentil Soup With Lemon Yogurt Cream

As long as I can remember I have been a fan of lentil soup.

When I was younger I would heat up a can of Progresso, cook pasta shells in it, and then proceed to dump at least a quarter-bottle of grated Parmesan into the mix. This is not an exaggeration. You know how the bottle has two settings? One of them is the sensible trio of holes that will simply dust your food with a socially acceptable amount of cheese, the other is one gaping hole that is intended for quick and sudden evacuation for large amounts of cheese. I used the gaping hole side. This dish is what my Italian father dubbed “Pasta Fazool.” It was simple and tasty and I am sure that our Great Italian Grandmother is rolling over in her grave somewhere at the thought of us using canned soup and buckets of pre-grated Parm.

For a long time this satisfied me. Opening up cans, dumping the contents, saturating the finished product with buckets of gritty cheese. This got me through most of college… along with a suspicious amount of turkey sandwiches and vodka. Then, one year I got bit by the soup bug. I am sure this was during the first year that I started teaching. I was constantly sick. I started making soup from scratch and it was a revelation. I experimented with everything from chicken noodle, beef stew, chicken and rice, spicy sausage soup with spinach and of course lentil. […]

Just Hanging Out…

Happy Friday, Lovelies!  How was your week? Let’s take a minute to hang out, shall we?

My week was kind of a doozy.

Here is the picture of how it all went…

I managed to catch the flu. The middle of this week was spent on our couch watching TV programs that I had vowed never to watch.

I dipped my toe into the  program Totally T-boz , a reality show featuring Tionne “T-boz” Watkins made famous by the 90’s girl group TLC. As someone who once dressed up as Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes for Halloween (It was sixth grade, let’s just say I was (am) a HUGE TLC fan – like, life-size poster on the bedroom wall, subscribed to both VIBE magazine and Word Up magazine, mostly to cut out the pages and paste them on my walls. It was serious. These were my people.) it is awkward to see them out in the world, “chasing waterfalls” if you will, to save their careers. In my head I like to imagine T-boz still clad in silk jammies and a belt made of condoms, creepin’ somewhere, being fly. Instead, she is just like the rest of us, hustling to find work and baking pancakes at one in the morning because she can’t sleep. Reality is sometimes harsh. In the process of trying to find you some TLC reference photos/videos, I happened across this “The 40 best R&B videos of the 90s”  hoopla and I currently have the “No Diggity” video blasting as I write this. No apologies. […]

Zucchini Lasagne | Gluten Free

I love lasagne.  It’s bubbly cheesy goodness, it’s wonderfully savory sauce and all of its hearty comfort. Italian food feels very comforting to me.  When I was sick, my Dad would always make me pastina with butter and cheese or lentil soup with pasta shells.  My Italian grandmother is also a mean cook!  Her lasagne actually has meatballs inside of it.  Does that sound amazing?  Yup.  Yup, it is.

Ever since becoming gluten free, I have not had this wonderful dish.  I couldn’t find the motivation to create it with rice or corn or quinoa noodles.  I felt like it would be a disappointment, and might turn out to be the mushy counterpart to my Grandmother’s lasagne.  Don’t get me wrong, I do indulge in gluten free pasta now and then, and it can be quite tasty, but it can also be finicky and unfriendly. […]