Yesterday I baked a rather plain bread and jazzed up half of it by making pizza. This morning I cut two slices from the loaf to go with my over easy egg and mug of tea. A hearty soup with bread, a salad or stir fried vegetables, cheese, and fruit makes a good spring lunch.
Here are the ingredients for red lentil soup, arranged into a still life.
Shorabat Addas (Red Lentil Soup)
Ingredients:
1 cup red lentils
4 cups water
1 onion, chopped
2 teaspoons flour
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 teaspoon cumin seed
Juice of 1/2 lemonRinse the lentils with cold water, then place in a 2 quart or larger saucepan with the chopped onion and water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for an hour.
Mix the olive oil, flour, salt, pepper, and cumin in a small bowl. Add 1/4 cup of the soup from the pot, stir, then pour the spice and oil mixture into the pot and mix well. Simmer until the lentils are well cooked.
Before serving, add the lemon juice and simmer for 5 more minutes. If desired, garnish with lemon slices.
After breakfast I checked web logs stats and email, then dropped some stuff off at the Chalet office downstairs on the way to the mall to get milk. The produce stand had asparagus (in season now) so I picked up a bunch for 99¢. It really feels like spring out today.
Lemons and onions are readily available most places year round. Most of the remainder of the ingredients in this soup keep on the shelf well. This recipe will serve four.
It is a good idea to sort through the lentils or any dry bean type product to remove any pebbles or clumps of earth. I must have been shakier than I thought because when I picked up the cup of lentils I spilled them on the stove top. This is a reminder of why I stopped doing lab work around 1992. In the lab a spill might require calling a hazmat team. With dry lentils, I only had to pick them up.
Although they are called red lentils, they are actually an orange red before cooking. The finished soup is a lemony yellow color.
Like with bread, making soup from scratch looks like it takes forever, but once I put the lentils and water in the pot and added the chopped onion, I covered the pot and stirred it every 5 minutes or so to keep the soup from boiling over. Lentils, like many other dry legumes tend to foam when they first begin to boil. Once it reached a boil, I turned down the heat and let it simmer. Another tactic is to cook the soup in a large pot.
Next I ground the cumin seed in an electric coffee bean mill. It was a freebie from Neil Trilling when he moved to a smaller office at UWM. I don’t drink coffee, so there is no problem, but if you do, make sure to use separate mills for your coffee beans and spices! If you don’t have a mill, a mortar and pestle work OK. I bought one from the Chemistry Department store room when I worked at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in the early 1980s. Their most popular item was dry ice. Ice cream in Utah is incredibly good. In fact, the Snellgroves recipe was supposed to have come to the originator in a dream. It is not considered at all odd to want to take ice cream along when car camping or backpacking.
The reason you buy whole cumin seed then grind it is that the whole seed keeps its flavor longer. I stirred the flour, salt, pepper, and ground cumin into the olive oil. I think the oil extracts more of the flavor from the pepper and cumin. If you can’t tolerate gluten, skip the flour or substitute another thickener you can tolerate, such a rice flour or corn starch.
I then used the time while the lentils and onion cooked to do chores around the apartment and work on the computer. I stirred it occasionally.
By noon it smelled really nice in the apartment and the lentils looked mushy. It is almost soup! I used my prep blender to puree the soup in the pot, but have also run the soup through a strainer or both to puree it. If you don’t mind a less smooth texture, skip this.
After using the blender, I brought the soup back to a boil, then stirred some into the bowl of olive oil, flour, and seasonings then stirred that into the soup. I then turned down the heat and let it simmer about 15 minutes then added the lemon and served it with a large lemon slice because I like lemon.
Tips for the frugal
Red lentils and spices such as cumin are considered specialty items in supermarkets, so are usually relatively expensive. Look for the lentils in ethnic markets (Middle Eastern, Italian, Asian) or health food type stores where you can buy bulk goods. For the cumin check speciality spice shops. I got a 5 lb bag of red lentils at the Asia Mart on Old World Third Street for less than $5. I store them in a metal cannister.
Peel the lemon or use a zester to save the zest before squeezing the half for the juice. Lemon zest perks up things like casseroles, scrambled eggs, and baked goods and keeps well in the freezer if you don’t have an immediate use.
Run the squeezed out lemon half through your disposal to make it and the kitchen smell fresher.
This soup will freeze, just needs a stir to make it smooth when it is heated through. I usually make batch then fill one or two 12 oz cartons (recycled from cottage cheese or frozen fruit) to store in the freezer for later. The recipe can be doubled, use 7 cups of water instead of 8 then adjust the thickness after it is cooked.
