Saturday, May 24, 2008

Ginger Garlic Red Lentil Soup

We tried this recipe recently onehttp://vegeyum.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/gingergarlicsoup/ for a Friday night quickie. I made a few minor changes, as per below :

~Ginger Garlic Red Lentil Soup~
2 cups red lentils
1.75 l vegetable stock
2 bay leaves
5 cloves of garlic, peeled and mashed
5 cm piece of ginger, grated
2 carrots, grated
1/2 cup diced tomatoes
1 medium sliced onion
1/2 cup sliced scallions, green tops as well
sploosh olive oil
2 tspn ground cumin
2 tspn ground coriander
1/2 tsp dried chilli flakes
juice of 1 lemon
salt and black pepper

Wash the lentils, and add to vegetable stock, bay leaves, garlic and ginger in a large pan. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the carrots and tomatoes and simmer until the soup thickens to the consistency you like (mine was around 20 minutes).

Heat the olive oil in a frypan and sauté the onions and scallions until translucent. Add the spices and sauté a further minute. Remove the bay leaves from the soup and add the onion mixture with the lemon juice. Serve and add salt and pepper to taste.

Lovely and fragrant, super quick to prepare, nourishing, cheap, easy ingredients - but eating this reminded me that I'm not so keen on the texture of cooked red lentils. Somehow they seem a bit like cardboard-ish, and I forget that between times. Maybe that is the quality of the lentils or my ignorant cooking? I'd make this again though - the ginger/garlic was lovely on a winter night, and if you increased the heat it would be a very good soup for headcold days.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Em, how lovely that you made this soup! I am thrilled. I love watching recipes go around the net, being tweaked a little by each person that cooks it.

I am glad that you liked it, but too bad about the lentils. I can't think what might do this unless the lentils are really old or poor quality. And they should be cooked in this soup until they fall apart - maybe if they are older, they need more cooking time?

Can you try some organic lentils? The really are quite different. Also, I used some split mung (moong) dal when I made the soup recently, so try making it compeletly with mung next time. They are a sweet lentil (in taste as well as in nature :-) ) and fall to mush really easily. One of my fav lentils.

Thank you once more for trying this and linking back to me. I so appreciate it.

Em said...

Hello there! I do love your blog, it's beautiful to read with a cuppa and full of inspiration... and I enjoy watching recipes migrate and change too, wondering where the first one came from.

Thankyou for the suggestion on the split mung - I'll try that :) Usually lentils are an addition to our food, rather than a feature of the meal, if that makes sense, so I'm still learning what works.