Ham and Lentil Soup

Ham and Lentil Soup In my soup I used to sauté up some onions. These are sweet onions. They are my onion which is similar to like vidalia or this should be the best way to describe in vidalia or the Maui onions. They have higher sugar content so that’s why they call them sweet onion. Sautee this a little bit with butter and then add some garlic and then we’ll with deglaze it with some white wine. A little bit of butter, they say butter makes it better. So, a trick with garlic is to press it like that. the skin comes off real easy. And if you want to loose it and not use your garlic press, you can use the back of the knife. You see the onions are caramelizing. Now it’s really important to do that because it brings out some really good flavors. These are going to caramelize this for a few minutes. This might be sweet but they’ve got a little heat on. When you are cooking with alcohol, especially wine, you want to use a wine that actually tastes pretty good because what we’re doing is we’re concentrating flavors so this is a lousy bottle of wine. And we reduce the time of this to be really lousy. So, it’s always to produce this wine while you’re cooking. Good, perfect wine, this is a Chardonnay. And on the side, we’re going to sauté my ham, maybe some slice I want to get some color on it and that sure goes in this as well. Now, we’re going to put tomatoes in, a little bit of water. Does this smell good? Also when I’m making a soup I generally use chicken bouillon is both my flavoring and my salt. So, if you use it as your salt, by the time you get it salty enough, you generally have enough body in the soup. I put a little bit in now and then add some as it cooks. And I used big chunks of onions but I’m going to use ham blender in a minute so that will get it all nice and smooth. Usually when we’re doing—when we’re cooking usually if you have a lighter colored soup or a lighter colored sauce, used white peeper if you’re doing something dark, then you use black pepper, mostly just a little bit of specks and don’t look so weird in there. It’s a good idea to get really fresh, ground because they lose their herbs and spices, lose their potency. So, if you get some sitting in your cabinet for six months or a year, I’m sure it lost its previous flavor. I have smelled this black pepper now and it’s not a good idea but the company this stuff from, they’re local made, actually grind when we order it. So, right when it comes in just very fresh. And we put half in to the soup now and these are much dark and I used it as part of my garnish. I sprinkle it on the top. So, this way I got the ham flavor where they puree that and we’ve got some color to put on top of the soup. Our course is pretty salty. No one ever knows what to do with them. You could do this in a blender. The problem is when you’re doing a hot soup in a blender all that heat gets release and you get a big chance of burning yourself so these hand blenders are definitely preferred. Now for a crunch, we’re doing some flour tortilla strips. It’s so good to do with the older tortillas here if you have some that dried up you haven’t used. I’ll start one of those and I’ll let you know when the oil is ready. We’ll give this a taste and see how my peas are doing. A little hot, two more minutes, put more water in. Just make sure it’s bunched upped that they’ve got some shape to them. You know just a little bit water into that. Anyway they add some shape to them so they seep up in the soup. I’m going to finish this off with a little bit of cream as well. For some reason, cream containers are always hard to open, that part is easy. I just say something in that every time they really mean they’re alright. We’re having cream in the soup behind. You can do two different things. This is what we call tempering. We put the cream on the side and we add a little bit of hot to it. That’s so it brings up the temperature of the cream that way it don’t break it or you could pour in really fast and what the heck out of it and that will go suffer from breaking while tempering is by the way the safest way to go. It’s a little bit more pureed here, almost done. And we’ll just add a little pepper to be a little bit more. Then we’ll add the salt you wanted maybe half a little you think at the beginning and then finish off the dish with the salt especially if you’re cooking down something because if it’s salty it’s going to be salty, and salty and saltier, add some moisture just beats from your pot a.k.a. reduction. This is Parmesan cheese. That’s the soup.