Scottish Christmas Dinner: Cullen Skink

 Cullen Skink is a traditional part of a St. Andrew's Day menu and is a good starter for a Scottish Christmas dinner.  It is rich and smoky, with just a hint fish.  Traditionally it is made with smoked haddock, but that is next to impossible to procure in Cromar Valley, so we settled for the acceptable substitute of smoked salmon. 

Yes... I know what some of you were thinking, but this soup has absolutely no connection whatsoever to a particular bit of popular young adult romantic fiction set in the Pacific Northwest.  The name actually comes from the coastal town in Scotland named Cullen.  A skink is a soup less hearty than a chowder but more hearty than a bisque.  Regardless of the origins of the name, it is a delicious soup either as a starter or served with a warm, crusty loaf of bread as a meal by itself.

Vegetarian Black Bean Soup

Disney is very generous with their recipes.  I can't think of any other business that employs so many top chefs and hands out recipe cards with such wild abandon.  (Notice that there are no Disney recipes in the Top Secret Recipes line of cookbooks.)  This is good news for home cooks because it means that we can recreate beloved favorites, restaurant quality meals, and try new mouth-watering dishes many miles away from Disney's theme parks and resorts.

This recipe, from Shutters at Old Port Royale at Disney's Caribbean Beach resort is one of the easiest to recreate at home.  It's one of my favorites of the hundreds of recipes that I have tried from the web pages with Disney recipes and the Disney cookbooks in the last year for several reasons.  First, it's relatively inexpensive.  (Most of the handful of recipes that we haven't tried yet use cuts of meat or seafood that are either hard to procure in our little college town, expensive, or both.)  Second, it's fairly easy to put together.  And finally, for a vegetarian dish that is very, very good for you, it is also very tasty.  This soup got seven enthusiastic thumbs up (well, okay... six and a half) and has made several repeat appearances.  It even got taken over to a cousin of ours, a student at the local college, who managed to develop pneumonia last summer.  It's just that good.

Onion Lentil Soup

It's been a busy week.  We are getting our oldest son ready to go out on a two year adventure, and there has been a flurry of purchasing, packing, mending, and assorted appointments in the last few weeks.  You probably have those busy times, too.  Times when even regular home chores seem to take a back seat to cannot-be-missed events (and preparation for those events).  The laundry gets backed up (and that's a whole lot of laundry at our house!), everything but the most basic necessities go by the wayside, and meals get simplified down to menu items that take very little prep time to put together.

It's times like these that I really, really remember how much I like soups and stews.  Twenty minutes of chopping and opening of cans--and that's about it.  It may take an hour of simmering spread cut into two or three bits, but then you can squeeze in another load of laundry.  (Yeah... because that's really what you are going to do with an extra half hour away from the stove, eh?  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) The fact that lentils are in this soup is just an added bonus.  All of that good protein, fiber, and vitamins... yeah!

The Test Kitchen: Coconut Lentil Soup Recipe

Lentils have two advantages for the home cook.  First, they are super inexpensive for a recipe ingredient that is both filling (the fiber) and power packed with nutrients (add rice to the mix, and you have a complete protein for a fraction of the cost of meat).  Second, they cook up really fast. These two factors mean that lentils frequently make an appearance in dishes that are both quick and easy.  (College students and families on limited incomes, take note!)  Of course, that's not always the case.  Some lentil dishes require horrific amounts of chopping.  Some require you to cook the lentils separately along with three other pots of this or that, all to be poured over a fifth thing at some point.  And then there are the lentil dishes that call for expensive and obscure ingredients.

Heidi Swanson's recipe for Coconut Red Lentil Soup is both quick and relatively inexpensive.  It is packed with flavor, but it is not so hot that your average family member will balk.  I made a few adjustments to the recipe for our family to use, but you can certainly follow the link to the original recipe.  One change I made was to use regular brown lentils rather than the red ones called for.  The red ones are pretty (as in the photo above), but they are also harder to obtain in small college towns out in the middle of nowhere--as well as being slightly more expensive.  And frankly, there will be very little change in the flavor of the dish.  Second, I left out the raisins.  Most of my family members hate raisins with the heat of a thousand suns.  I kid you not.  My husband refers to them by a rude term that is NOT appropriate at the dinner table.  And third, rather than using the Madras Curry Powder that Heidi suggested, I used a Garam Masala curry blend.