Confused chefs? Corn in the soup, radicchio in the pan

Corn soup, chopped radicchio with millet, and mâche with wild garlic salad.

Do you ever open your refrigerator only to find that the head of lettuce you bought at the store a few days ago seems to have tripled in size? It's getting a bit old and needs to be used up... but what to do with all of it? Our radicchio was sitting around a whole week and it was high time we put it to use before it spoiled. In addition to this, we once again had mâche (Valerianella locusta) since it would have gone to flower if we left it in the garden and would not keep long in the fridge.

How did we solve the problem of all these greens? This time, we used our radicchio in the main dish rather than the salad by preparing it with millet. But first, let's talk about that soup.

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To prepare our corn soup, we first pan fried onion and carrots in small pieces to bring out their flavour. Once these have cooked a bit, we added beans, corn, and buckwheat groats, along with a sufficient amount of water. We let our soup cook for about 15 minutes, but that was mostly for the buckwheat since we had used corn and beans from the can. If you were to make this soup without the buckwheat you would not need as much time.

For our main dish we first reduced our radicchio’s volume by pan frying it in olive oil. This is a great trick to decrease the volume of leafy greens and we easily got the whole head in with space to spare for the other ingredients that followed.

Once we were satisfied with the volume of our radicchio, we added the millet and continued frying. We let this cook a bit, and only added the water after a few minutes. We also threw in a bit of salt and garlic powder (easily replaced by chopped garlic fried for a few minutes before adding the radicchio, should you wish) to season this dish. We simmered everything together for about 10-15 minutes so that the millet was properly cooked but still firm. If you need to, don't be afraid to add a bit of water as you go.

Today's salad was a special one, because in addition to the mâche from the garden we also collected some wild garlic (Allium ursinium) from the forest to add a nice spicy zing to our side dish. We then decided to get even more wild than the garlic and mix both pumpkin and olive oil together to season the greens.

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Price and nutritional value

The price of this lunch for 4 came out to just under 3€, thus making it less than 0.75€ per person. This low price was helped out by us having gotten our salad fresh from the ground; mâche, for example, is actually quite expensive to buy and would be around 0.45€ per 40g portion. Cheaper salads like iceberg lettuce though can be bought for about 0.10€ per 100g portion.

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Now, nutrition time. The first thing that warrants mentioning is that the weights we display here for canned beans and corn are the weight after they have been drained, so this does not include the water in the can. With this meal, we covered 25% of the daily energy requirements (calories) for an average person, as well as sufficient quantities of protein and most minerals (we got a whopping 50% of our iron needs for the day, for example). Among the minerals only calcium (9.9% daily requirement) and selenium (12.2% daily requirements) fell short. Most of our calcium came from the beans, radicchio, and mâch, while selenium was primarily obtained from beans, buckwheat, and millet. Even though we only used a measly 15g of buckwheat, it was the second largest provider of selenium! Keep your eyes peeled for a special post in the future about calcium and selenium and what foods can help you out with them.

This lunch also covered our nutritional needs for all vitamins except for vitamin B12 and vitamin D (pesky repeat absentees in vegan food).

For further details on the calculations, click on The nutritional values chart!

Have a great weekend filled with lots of good food!

The Hungry Pumpkin team.

P.s.: if you have any questions about today's lunch, its nutritional value, or if you have suggestions for future lunches, fire them off to us at hungry.pumpkin.blog@gmail.com. We don't bite (unless you're a tasty vegan dish) and love to hear from you all, so don't be afraid to get in touch.