Lentil sausage soup, and the dsicovery of my new favorite appliance!

I made lentil sausage soup tonight, and it was yummy! I asked my mom for the recipe that she has used in the past, and she laughed. "Recipe? You don't need a recipe for that!" And to be perfectly honest, I don't usually follow recipes for non-baked goods anyway, so I'm not sure why I wanted it. but I copied it down nonetheless, and then mostly ignored it while cooking my soup last night.

Ingredients that I had on hand:

• 1 lb. breakfast sausage links
• onions, bell peppers, carrotts; chopped
• garlic; minced
• 1 cup dry lentils
• 1 can tomatoes (stewed or diced) with juice
• liquid to 5 cups
• seasonings

Here's what I did:

• Brown 1 lb. breakfast sausage links, set aside. Keep about 3 T fat in the pot.
• Add chopped onion to pot and sweat until almost translucent. Add whatever other veggies you want (I added carrotts, red and yellow bell pepper, green onions, and roasted garlic.) Mom's recipe calls for parsnips, but potatoes would be good, too!
• Simmer until softened, about 5 min. Add chicken broth, water, or whatever liquid you want, about 4-5 cups. Clint likes his food salty, so I added homemade chicken stock and 2 bouillon cubes.
• Add 1 cup dry lentils.
• While that's simmering, I sliced my sausages into little pieces and added them back into the pot.
• Add 1 can tomatoes (mine were stewed, but diced works, too) with juices.
• Season to taste and let simmer 20-30 minutes, or until everything is sifficiently hot and lentils are soft. I added: Bay leaf, sage, thyme, oregano, Frank's Red hot, salt, garlic powder.

I served the soup with fresh, hot biscuits. which leads me to the other part of this post; I discovered a new favorite appliance! My toaster-oven! Yes, I made my biscuits in my toaster oven! Clint, who was te driving force behind registering for a toaster oven in the first place, sent me this great article yesterday about 10 great uses for a toaster oven, which inspired me! I figured, eh, what do I have to lose besides about 10c worth of flour and butter and 0 minutes of sticky, gooey mess?

So, I popped my biscuit dough under the element for about 10 minutes, and my buscuits came out great (not to mention the cost and energy savings by using the toaster-oven instead of the conventional oven)! I can't wait to try more things in there!

Click here for the article referenced above:

http://lifehacker.com/5380566/save-energy-and-get-more-mileage-from-your-toaster-oven