Recipe #1: Lentil Soup

Okay, let’s do this thing! Time to cook!

Confession time: I eat a mostly vegetarian diet. I do promise, however, to enlist the help of my dear old mom to present non-vegetarian recipes in the future (and I’ve been known to cook seafood every now and again, so keep an eye out for a broiled fish supper coming up soon). But for now, we’ve got that old vegetarian stand-by: lentil soup. (Which you can un-vegetarian easily by making a simple tweak, noted below.)

This recipe is one of the first dishes that I learned to cook when I went away to college, and it sort of became my signature dish for a while. I know, it’s not exactly haute cuisine, but it’s filling, healthy, easy to prepare and people really do seem to love it.

So for each new recipe, I’ll first talk about the individual ingredients, and then we’ll get to the actual cookery bit. I’ve also included 2 videos, one of the prep work (cutting everything up) and one of the actual cooking. It’s all happening, beyond the jump:

Your shopping list for this dish is as follows:

1 bag of brown lentils: Brown lentils are a type of bean or legume, high in fiber and protein and really just fantastic for you. They are usually purchased dried and then prepared by boiling them (30 minutes or so). However, the older your lentils are, the longer they will take to cook. Like all dried beans, you should never add anything salty or acidic to lentils before they are fully cooked. Salts and acids toughen the skin of dried legumes and it makes them take longer to cook. If you are in the US and can’t find them in your grocery store, check the Hispanic foods section.

2 medium-sized, thin-skinned potatoes: In the video you’ll see I’m using red-skin potatoes. I like to use a potato with a thin skin, which is basically every type except the stereotypical baking potato (a variety known as Russet). Look for potatoes that are smaller than your fist and have either red or yellowish skins. Using a thin-skinned variety of potato means I can leave the skin on and retain all the vitamins that are in it. Don’t forget to give them a vigorous wash in the sink under cold water before cooking with them!

1 onion: Any onion will do. There are yellow ones and white ones and red ones and they’re all fine to use in this recipe. I’m using a yellow onion.

1 Carrot: Again, it’s just a carrot, nothing special about it.

1 bag of frozen chopped spinach: I get the kind that comes in a bag, as the kind that comes in the square box is like a solid brick of spinach, which makes it impossible to just use some of it at a time without attacking it with an ice-pick.

Most of the ingredients, assembled in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

1 box of bouillon cubes: Bouillon cubes are purportedly the concentrated flavor of whatever they say they are (typically chicken, beef or vegetable), though mileage varies on how much of that is due to MSG. (I don’t knock MSG though, it’s an interesting substance that lends a pretty unique flavor.) I’m using Knorr vegetable bouillon cubes here, but you can use beef or chicken bouillon if you’d like. Beef would probably mesh the best with the assertive flavor of the lentils, but I’m sure chicken would be fine as well. Alternatively, you can use prepackaged liquid broth instead (I’ll tell you how to make that replacement later).

1 sprig of fresh rosemary or 1 bottle of dried rosemary: Rosemary is a Mediterranean herb with a very distinctive piney, astringent sort of flavor. I’m using fresh rosemary because I grow it in my herb garden. You can purchase fresh rosemary in many grocery stores these days, in the produce section (look for little clamshell plastic packages of many different sorts of fresh herbs), or you can use dried from a bottle. Your choice.

1 bottle of red wine vinegar: This is actually the secret ingredient, and it completes the flavor profile of the soup. I often add acidic things to dishes that are otherwise quite salty and earthy to give them a spark and pep them up. Red wine vinegar is, as you might have guessed, vinegar made by adding a vinegar “mother” (you actually don’t want to know what this is all about, believe me) to red wine and letting it ferment. There are lots of different sorts of vinegar, some sweeter, some more purely acid. Red wine vinegar is on the sweeter end.

Kitchen gear-wise, for this you’ll need your cutting board, vegetable peeler, mid-sized knife, and measuring cups/spoons. Use your mid-sized pot if you’re making the quantity given in this recipe (or less).

Here we go with the recipe. Metric amounts are in parenthesis (and if anyone spots a conversion error, please let me know).

Lentil Soup
Serves 4 (cut amounts in half to serve 2, or in quarters for a single serving), takes about an hour to make, but half of that is it cooking without your assistance.

• 2 medium-sized potatoes, washed and cut into cubes about the size of a sugar cube (it’s fine if they’re a bit bigger—we’re going for “fits on a spoon and can be eaten in one bit” size).
• ½ of an onion, diced (no need to labor over the dicing, just chop it up real good)
• 1 carrot, peeled and then diced (again, just chop it up so that the pieces are fits-on-a-spoon-with-some-other-stuff sized)
• 1 cup (240 mL) of dried brown lentils
• 2 cups (480 mL) chopped frozen spinach
• 2 tablespoons (30 mL) of fresh rosemary (that’s just the leaves, not the woody stem) OR 1 tablespoon (15 mL) of dried rosemary OR no rosemary at all if that’s how you want to roll
• 1 bouillon cube of your choice OR 3 cups of pre-made chicken, beef or vegetable broth
• 6 cups (1.5 liters) of water (or 3 cups water + 3 cups of the broth from above)
• 1-2 tablespoons (15-30 mL) red wine vinegar
• Salt and pepper (optional)

I picked this for the first recipe because the amounts are flexible. Don’t want four servings? No problem, just use ½ cup ( 120 mL) of lentils, 1 potato and 3 cups (700 mL) of water instead. Furthermore, none of the measurements need to be exact here.

First, chop all of the fresh veggies (the onion, carrot, and potatoes).

Put your pot on the stove, turn the burner on to high and fill it with the water (or broth + water), then the vegetables, then the lentils, then the rosemary. Let that come to a nice boil.

You may notice that as your lentils begin to boil, they develop a bit of a scuzzy brown foam. That’s actually totally normal. You can skim that off or just stir it right back in.

Once your soup has achieved a vigorous boil, give it a stir and then turn your heat down to medium-low (if you think of your burner’s dial as a clock face, with High at 1:00 and Low at 11:00, medium-low is somewhere around 9:00). Place a lid on the pot, but give it a bit of a jaunty tilt. This is to let some steam escape without letting so much out that all the water boils off.

You’re now going to leave that bad boy to do its thing for about 20 minutes.

Now go back and check on it.

Does it seem too thick, like too much water has boiled off? Feel free to add an extra cup or two of water. No big deal.

Get a spoon, dip it in and get a few lentils to taste. A fully-cooked lentil should not be crunchy or toothy in any way. (Undercooked legumes give you wicked gas.) You can even examine a lentil (after blowing on it! I don’t want to hear any tales of burned fingers!) and see if you can see any bit in the center that is a lighter color than the rest, indicating that it is not quite done yet.

If your lentils aren’t done yet, give it another 5 minutes, and repeat the above process.

If they are done, then now is the time to add the bouillon cube (if that’s what you’re using) and the frozen spinach. Give it a couple minutes to come back up to a temperature that will dissolve the bouillon cube fully and cook the spinach. Give it some stirs, mix it on up, and then taste it again.

What do you think? Does it need a bit more salt? If you think it might, add a teaspoon (5 mL) of salt now. If it’s plenty salty enough for you as-is, skip the salt. Do you have some pepper? Add a pinch of that if you’d like.

Now taste it again. Good level of salty? If so, move on. If not, add another teaspoon of salt.

Turn your burner off at this point. Acidic things like vinegar and lemon juice, I find, don’t do well with high temperatures.

Add 1 tablespoon of your vinegar. Stir the pot, then give the soup a taste.

Acidic enough for you? If it is, then stop here. If it isn’t, add that other tablespoon of vinegar.

Everyone’s taste buds are different, which is why it’s so important to continually taste what you are cooking. Just because I’m a bit of a salt fiend and a supertaster on top of it (get away from me, cilantro) doesn’t mean that you are going to delight in the sorts of ultra-savory, cilantro-less meals I make. So taste as you cook and add ingredients a little at a time so you can stop when you get to a flavor that really speaks to you.

And now you have just made lentil soup!  It’s a great Sunday dinner sort of meal if you’ve got some bread and cheese (some pita with some feta cheese is divine) on hand to have along with it. It keeps in the refrigerator well for several days, so if you’d like, save some to take to work for a mid-week lunch. The flavor actually improves as all the ingredients get super comfortable with one another.

I made you some lentil soup, but then I eated it.

Advertisement

Posted by justtheblogger on October 9, 2011

http://justthefoods.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/recipe-1-lentil-soup/