(and my favorite French soup recipe)

Happy Fall, y’all!

I know it sounds silly and cliche, but I’m back in Texas, it’s not hot hot today, and I’m cooking soup for dinner tonight!

TWO USEFUL COOKING TERMS

Mirepoix.
Refers to a mixture of carrots, celery, and onions; sometimes called “the basis of all French cooking.” It’s beautifully aromatic when sautéed and incredibly flavorful as the base of many dishes, including the soup I’m about to link to for you.

Mise en place. (This one is THE BEST.)
Translates to “everything in its place,” and refers to the practice of doing ALL the prep first, so that when it’s time to cook, you feel like a chef on TV effortlessly dumping cute bowls of ready-to-go ingredients into your pan.

For me, being pressed for time while hungry is a foolproof recipe for stress. In my early days of cooking, I remember ending up with one part of my recipe getting cold (or burned!) while I finished chopping up something I forgot needed to be chopped until I reached the step when I needed it. And since I had no culinary training, my chopping was slow at best and dangerous (Proper form? What’s that?) at worst. I began to learn that for my personality and my skill level, in order to cook successfully and without nervous sweating, I needed to just do all the prep beforehand. That meant selecting pans, chopping, measuring, can-opening, and combining spices or other ingredients that needed to go in at the same time into one bowl. I felt like that made me a high-maintenance cook, and it seemed so inefficient: for one thing, the pre-prep took more time, and for another, any time the food had to sit to simmer, brown, etc., I just stood around, waiting.

Then I came across the term mise en place. Life. Changing. Moment. I felt validated, and I felt cool–“real” chefs do this! TV chefs aren’t just flaunting their behind the scenes help when they use pre-chopped and -measured ingredients. It’s really a better way to cook!

These days I usually do my mise en place while the kids are napping, so that when it’s close to dinner time, all I have to do is turn on the heating elements and reference the recipe for what goes where when. This also has the bonus of allowing me time to clean up the prep space before making a cooking mess on top of it. Justin has said, “I always know if you were in a hurry cooking…because the kitchen looks like a tornado came through.” *shrug*

FRENCH LENTIL SOUP

One might not expect something “vegetarian” and something “soup” to make it onto one’s Top Five Favorite Meals list, but this soup does it for me. It’s hovering up there slightly below the Wagyu dry-aged steak Justin cooked to perfection for my 25th birthday.

I got this recipe from a college friend, who got it from Epicurious. Here’s the link:
French Lentil Soup

YUM, y’all.