Quote:
Originally Posted by HobbyHorse
Blarg -
I remember you mentioning once that you liked lentil soup and cook it (from scratch I'm assuming?) for yourself. Have a favorite recipe?
Also - question for anyone - have you ever used a rice cooker to cook soup? Does the soup turn out alright if you do that?
I do a few variations on it, and do it either in a slow cooker or pressure cooker mostly these days, but the basic recipe is so simple that you can do almost anything to it and it will still turn out great. I can give a basic guide to doing the soup, and you can adjust it as you like. I guess I'll talk about doing it the regular stove-top way, since that's easiest to relate to. Warning that it is really a sort of catch-all soup more than a purely lentil soup. Lentils are just the base.
A key point first -- if you don't have garden fresh tomatoes, used canned. The regular supermarket ones are picked for lack of perishability, not flavor. They are very bland. Canned ones are bred/picked for flavor.
Anyway, here are the ingredients for what will make four tupperware containers -- the ones that are about the size and shape of a one pound loaf of bread -- worth of dense soup. You can thin it out to taste, but I like it extremely heart, a one-pot meal. Still I usually thin it a little.
--2 large onions
--half a dozen segments of fresh garlic
--2 to 3 14.5 ounce cans of diced tomatoes (I like Glen Muir organic best, and they have them cheap at Costco); whole canned tomatoes are fine too, with liquid
--1/2 a bag of supermarket dried lentils, soaked overnight in water, rinsed well and drained
--1/4 bag of black beans and/or 1/4 pound of white beans/great northern beans, dried, soaked overnight then rinsed and drained
-- 2 to 3 pounds of potatoes, cubed
-- 3 large carrots, sliced thin
-- 3 to 6 stalks celery, with leaves, chopped
-- thyme to taste
-- marjoram to taste
-- white pepper to taste
-- fresh ground black pepper on serving, to taste
-- olive oil
variations: add shredded chicken (1 or 2 pounds) and/or turkey sausage sliced extremely thin (no more than 1/4 pound)
Dice your first onion and start sauteing it in vegetable oil while dicing the next. Mince garlic and add in when both onions have started to wilt. Don't let it burn. I will often let do the first, or an additional onion, without oil, on very low heat, letting it caramelize(not burn!) to get the extra flavor out of it. This can be time-consuming so it's a good thing to do while chopping up all the other stuff.
Add thyme to taste (lentil soup has heavy flavors and can take plenty of spices without getting overwhelmed) and stir. Enjoy the aroma! Give it time to meld with the onions and garlic.
Add thinly sliced celery and carrots, stirring occasionally as veggies wilt. If in danger of sticking, add a little more oil. When veggies are well wilted but before celery leaves start to caramelize too much, add canned tomatoes(or fresh if available). Use the liquid to help you scrape up any fond(caramelized brown yummy bits) off the bottom of the pot and stir them into what is becoming your soup. Add cubed potatoes, lentils, and beans, and water to cover. Stir in a couple/few teaspoons of white pepper and marjoram (a tablespoon or so is fine).
Cook, covered, until carrots, beans, and lentils are tender. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil. Serve with freshly ground black pepper and salt to taste. If the taste is a little dull, add fresh squeezed lemon juice before serving. A side of fresh buttered bread is pretty sweet. This soup freezes very well.
Note: Salt is easy to overdo in this kind of soup. Additionally, they say it can toughen the skin of beans and lentils as you cook, which may or may not be an old wive's tale. So, I save salting till the end, only doing a little and letting others put in what they want at the table.
Re Variations: This is a very hearty and low calorie soup with plenty of protein already, but adding some meat can make a nice change and make it heartier/more man-friendly too. You can add chicken either raw or cooked, but I like to brown it then dice it. Flavors sometimes get muddier if the chicken is in the pot the whole time, but it's a very small thing. If adding sausage, add it when adding the potatoes, as the flavor permeating the soup is nice. You'll never need more than a 1/4 pound of sausage, or it starts to overwhelm the other flavors rather than perking them up.
Substituting potatoes with rice makes this a dull and muddy soup. Either have it with potatoes or without, but forget rice.