Lentil soup recipe

Chris made this lentil soup the other day for lunch and it was SO GOOD, I thought I’d share it here. We ate it with grilled cheese, but the next day, we added a bit more curry to it and served it over leftover coconut rice (the curry in the recipe is very subtle, which made it perfect for eating with grilled cheese, but it needed a bit more oomph when served over the rice.)

This recipe comes from the Williams-Sonoma Soup cookbook (with paper pages and everything OMG), which I bought Chris a couple years ago. Chris and I were recently discussing online recipes v. cookbook recipes — Chris is a great cookbook user/referencer, whereas I’m more of a recipe Googler — but it gave me pause to think about the recipes I get online. As I’ve mentioned, I “ask the Internet” for a lot of my recipe/dinner ideas, but as far as websites I frequent, I’ve become a bit more discerning.

I’ve found that I’ll almost always trust a recipe from Epicurious (which I only recently realized was where recipes from Bon Apetit, Gourmet magazine, etc. go to live on in perpetuity) and Ina Garten. There is just nothing bad that I’ve ever gotten from Ina and I think she’s one of the few who takes recipe testing very seriously.

I’m not on Pinterest, but I’ve been seeing a lot of complaints about some of the recipes people have found on there turning out to be shit, so I thought it was an interesting discussion to have. Should you take a gamble on the “pretty” and “shiny” Pinterest recipes or go for the tried-and-true recipes, even if they’re old or in a cookbook with no pictures or whatever?

Anyway, enough food for thought (pun intended) and onto the soup!

We halved the liquid and lentils in this recipe, but kept the vegetable amounts the same, and got four meals out of it. In parenthesis below, I’ve noted the full recipe amounts in case you want to make a whole mess of this.

What You’ll Need

1 onion, diced
1 celery stalk, thinly sliced
1 carrot, peeled and thinly sliced
1 clove of garlic, minced
Almost 1 cup of lentils, rinsed (recipe called for 1 1/2 cups)
1 can of diced tomatoes (recipe called for 1 cup, but what the hell am I supposed to do with leftover canned tomatoes? No. Just use the whole can)
3 cups broth or stock (recipe called for 6 cups)
1 cup coarsely chopped spinach
2 lemon wedges (recipe called for a whole lemon, cut into quarters)
1 bay leaf
1 tsp. curry powder (2 tsp. if you’re making the whole recipe)
Salt, pepper, and olive oil

What You’ll Do

– Saute your vegetables (onion, celery, carrot, and garlic) in a bit of olive oil until softened, then add the curry powder and bay leaf.

– Add the diced tomatoes, stock or broth, lentils, and lemon slices and simmer on medium-low heat for about 30 minutes, until the lentils are cooked through.

– Taste for salt and pepper and add each as needed; remove the bay leaf and lemon slices. A few minutes before serving, add the spinach to warm/wilt through.

– Serve with a grilled cheese sandwich or over coconut rice or with avocado slices on top or whatever you fancy! Enjoy!