Easy Curried Red Lentil Soup
This curried red lentil soup just happened despite my efforts to make more of an effort of it. It’s finally super easy, requires only one cutting board and one pot (out of which you can eat, if you’re that sort. I am.). It’s delicious with a range of ingredients, amounts, accoutrements,… In short, it’s the easy-going friend you want on a chilly Sunday night. Here’s how it happened.
The weather turned cool, the sky grey, and Mr. Hollywood left the pup and me mid-afternoon to head to his lab where he planned to work through the night in an effort to secure funding to… er… work? Me, I was getting hungry.
In my mind’s eye: a beautiful bowl of rich red lentil soup photographed with tawny chickpeas here and there, a scattering of cilantro over the top. Or was it diced jalapenos?… It’s so clear in my mind. I just can’t remember where I saw it or its recipe. So I googled it. I googled permutations of it. But no picture among the many matched the one in my mind.
Solace in my search: the music of Jason Pierce as Spiritualized in his six-years-coming And Nothing Hurt. Somewhere around “Here It Comes (The Road) Let’s Go,” hungrier and hungrier, I finally closed the computer.
Truth is, I knew what I wanted – smooth curried lentils with the jazz of fresh ginger, sweetness of cooked onion and carrot, some tomatoes from the garden, cilantro AND jalapenos on the top. Chickpeas optional. Daggone, I thought to myself. I know how to make this thing. So do you.
On the fridge door, I happened to have two small knobs of ginger and half a head of garlic from the farmer’s market, which seems less pungent and a little moister than most. I used two generous cloves. In an old plastic takeout container, I had a hunk of peeled carrot and half an onion.
So, heavy on the ginger and garlic, I sautéed the lot – chopped garlic, onion and ginger, and grated carrot (because I’m not in the mood to have discreet pieces of carrot in the soup) – all together over low heat until they looked pretty soft (five minutes or so). Then, I dumped in a good bit (2-3 T.) of curry – a prepared mix that I’d bought in bulk at a local shop – and stirred that around until fragrant.
I used what dried red lentils I had (about three cups, I can say because I actually measured), rinsed. I slid those in with enough water to more than cover. I say all this casually because if I’d only had one knob of ginger and smaller cloves of garlic,… if I’d had a whole carrot already peeled and a whole (if small) onion, then that would have been the proportion.
As for the lentil to water ratio, there’s a lot of wiggle room there, too. I knew that I want the soup to be thick (so minimize the water) but also for the lentils to be cooked beyond a shadow of a doubt. They can cook indefinitely, so if I needed to evaporate some liquid, that’d be okay. I’d had the lentils for longer than I care to admit, so I figured they’d take longer to cook than if I bought them more recently. You can’t tell just by looking at them, though, so I gave myself between twenty minutes and an hour to get the lentils cooked to desired consistency.
Oh, and I had a small container (about 1.5 C.) of garden tomatoes that back when the sun was high and heat heavy, I’d run through the food processor and frozen. I dumped those in, too, knowing they’d add liquid as they thawed and cooked into the mix.
Turns out, even with those tough old lentils, they cooked up nicely within 30 minutes. I let it run another fifteen minutes while I assembled the toppings – chopped cilantro and jalapenos.
At the end, tasty as the soup had become, I yearned for something just a little richer. Enter, butter. Plug your ears, my vegan friends – ooh, or experiment with coconut butter? I stirred a knob into my soup, French style. It took the soup to a whole new level.
Together with a bowl of air-popped, butter-topped popcorn and the pup, of course, I took my soup and retired to the sunroom to become completely captivated, moved, and inspired by Ken Burns’s Mayo Clinic on PBS.
Check it out, if you haven’t already. Nice to know the soup you’re eating would have met with the Mayo brothers’ approval. And the popcorn – complementing the lentil protein – makes for a meal that’s easy on the planet, too.