Okay, that title might be a tad histrionic, but we’ll get to that later.

Whenever I’ve fallen off the healthy, plant-based wagon for a bit, I’m always desperate for my super-healthy red lentil stew. It’s filling, healthy, super-quick (particularly for a legume-based soup) and always delicious. You can vary the vegetables depending on what you have in the garden or larder, but you always need potatoes and lentils.

Lentils I have; potatoes, I have none.

Indeed, we haven’t been in to Courtenay for groceries for a couple of weeks, and, as I’ve mentioned before, I always like to see how long we can go between visits into town.  And there’s always SOMETHING I can make: we have tons of canned and dried beans of various varieties, tofu, flour and yeast aplenty, and bushels of kale and romaine in the garden. We even have some great veggie burgers we’ll likely have for dinner this evening. Heck, I could have made any number of meals…

But…I wanted my special lentil stew because I always feel healthier almost immediately after having a bowl.

Here’s what I had:

Yes, two carrots, an onion, garlic, and a bunch of kale and half of a zucchini from the garden. My zucchini plant this year yielded exactly ONE zucchini and I used the other half to make a loaf of zucchini bread for friends visiting Hornby yesterday. It was only when Em asked if I didn’t have any frozen vegetables that I had the brilliant idea to use frozen hashbrowns in place of fresh potatoes (I also noticed frozen corn in there, so I threw a handful of that in as well).

Now, the frozen hashbrowns might seem like a bit of an odd choice, but, first off, they’re McCain’s Shredded Hashbrowns and they contain nothing but potatoes (no salt, oil, nothing….oh, there is some citric acid to retain colour). If you like hashbrowns, these are the bomb-diggity: spray your sandwich grill with a bit of oil, line it with a layer of these babies, close it for fifteen minutes, and voila: delicious, crispy, low-fat hashbrowns!!). In fact, I must’ve read the ingredients on EVERY damn package of hashbrowns in the freezer case before I discovered the beauty of these relatively healthy frozen potatoes.

Anyway, I thought I’d try them in the soup:

And believe it or not, the soup turned out to be surprisingly delicious (though I think I’d give the corn a pass in the future)!!