Good Equipment Really Does Make A Difference

As someone who loves kitchen gadgets and cooking, I have wanted one of these beauties for a long time.  It's a heavyweight... and so is the price!  Eeek.  I know I spent over $100 on a pair of green shoes once, but this is just a little too crazy.

Well, long story short, over the course of a few special occasions my boyfriend got me gift certificates to Williams Sonoma for the express purpose of purchasing a Le Creuset pot.  Even his parents contributed!  It's really nice to have rational/practical support for my extravagant tastes.  :-)  And after Christmas and a mail-order mix-up, my BEAUTIFUL cast-iron dutch oven arrived.  Joy!

And there it sat in my kitchen.  January and February were so busy at work that I hardly had time to cook, much less think about trying to find a recipe to use in my newest kitchen addition.  At least I unpacked it out of its box and cleared a space on my microwave cart for it to sit decoratively amongst the cookbooks, right?

Well last week I got the idea to make my favorite lentil soup recipe - mostly because I'm tightening the purse strings (see previous blog post) and need to spend less on dinners, and I already had all but two of the ingredients for the soup.  So I went to the Meadville Market House (which I LOVE - I buy my milk there now like a total crunchy-granola hippie) and bought some lentils, swung by the grocery store for crushed tomatoes, and came home to get to work.

So you start by chopping up lots of pretty vegetables, and you think "wow this is going to be a beautiful soup!"

Pretty right?  And just check out that dutch oven... sigh!  So lovely.

Well, it cooks for an hour and makes the kitchen smell beautiful... and then you lift off the lid:

If I hadn't thrown that spinach in at the last minute, this would be one muddy pot of stew!

This is the third time I've made this lentil soup (p.s. you can find the recipe here), and I have to say that this is the absolute best batch, hands-down.  It rocks.  The lentils aren't mushy like the last batches, the flavors are robust (what does that even mean?) and because I added some more vegetables than called-for it actually is a little prettier, too.  While I could give some credit to the fact that I used fresh lentils from the Market House, I am instead going to give full credit to the super-expensive dutch oven!  I think the dutch oven will continue to get full credit for any and all successes for the next 20 years in order to make me feel good about spending that much money on a pot.

Yum!  Cheap, delicious, nutritious, local, and dinner for a week!