I followed a banner-ad link on a SourceForge.net page, and found the ThinkGeek page of Valentine's gifts. The poem alone makes me long for a geek girlfriend:

ROSES ARE #FF0000
VIOLETS ARE #0000FF
ALL MY BASE
ARE BELONG TO YOU

I won't reprint the text that is on the panties here. I won't.

In my on-going quest to cook more and better, I've made the following soup that turned out incredibly good. However, this isn't quite my recipe; it's a combination of the original soup, a recipe from Riverbend's recipe blog, with some changes suggested by a friend who's cooking put a lot of extra weight on my frame. The original is itself very tasty. I made it first, before experimenting, and you may want to as well.

(Eventually, I'll use something like RecipeML, if I find a useful application to make it worth adopting.)

Ingredients:

• 1 cup dry lentils (red)
• 1 medium onion
• 1 medium sweet potato
• 1 ½ teaspoon curry powder
• 1 ½ teaspoon brown sugar
• Vegetable or corn oil
• Salt and pepper to taste

You have two choices for preparing the lentils: Soak them in cold water overnight (at least 8 hours), or cover with cold water and cook at medium heat for one hour. If cooking, check every 15 minutes or so to make sure the water has not completely evaporated. I prefer soaking them in favor of a shorter cooking time.

Peel and chop the onion. Peel and cube the sweet potato. Set both aside.

Empty the lentils and a small amount of their water into a blender or food processor. (If you cooked the lentils rather than soaking them, allow them to cool before this step.) Blend/process until roughly the consistency of applesauce. Add three cups of water and blend again.

Sauteé the onion in 5 tablespoons of oil until golden brown. Add the sweet potato when the onions are about halfway to brown.

Add the lentil mixture to the pot, and set over medium heat. Add the curry powder and brown sugar. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Cook the soup over the medium heat for one hour, stirring as needed.

When done, the soup should be the consistency of cream of mushroom. Depending on how finely chopped and diced, some of the onion and potato will have completely cooked down. The soup will be a greenish color, almost that of split-pea soup.

I usually eat this with baguette bread topped with sliced brie and sprinkled with toasted almonds, the whole assembly put under a broiler until the brie is melted and the almonds browned.