Easy homemade vegan red lentil soup.
All this cold snowy weather in New York City has had me seriously craving soup. Today I caved in and decided to cook a giant pot of one of my favorites: red lentil soup! The instructions I’m posting here are the fruits of my own experiments after playing around with several other recipes.
INGREDIENTS:
- cooking olive oil (my recommendation: O&CO.’s Mantinea & Avia)
- 2 cups chopped onions
- 1 cup chopped carrots
- 7-8 cups water
- 15 oz can of crushed tomatoes
- 2.5 cups of dry split red lentils
- 0.5 cup grated ginger (or less, depending on how much you like ginger)
- 1 cup soup greens (for those who lack the time to chop a bunch of fresh veggies)
- 1 vegetable bouillon cube
- the juice of 3 or 4 lemons
- 1 tbsp garlic powder
- 2 tsp cumin
- 2 tsp chili powder
- vinegar (my recommendation: O&CO.’s Purple Basil Vinegar)
- finishing olive oil (my recommendation: O&CO.’s Basil Olive Oil)
- fresh ground black pepper
- salt to taste
(I was lame and forgot to buy regular carrots, so today I’m using baby carrots instead.)
DIRECTIONS:
1. Heat up a bit of cooking olive oil over medium heat in a pot large enough to hold all the soup you want to make. Add the onions and carrots, and stir them around until the onions are soft. (If you prefer fresh chopped garlic to garlic powder, this would be where you should add that in. You can also add a bit of dried basil at this point if you feel like it.) Let all this cook together for a couple of minutes!
2. Add water to the pot and turn up the heat. Stir in the crushed tomatoes, lentils, grated ginger, soup greens, and bouillon cube. Bring all this to a boil. Then reduce heat and let it simmer for forty minutes.
3. Add lemon juice, cumin, garlic powder, chili powder. Simmer for another ten minutes. (Add water if the soup is getting too thick.)
4. Add purple basil vinegar, a drizzle of basil olive oil, salt, and freshly ground black pepper to taste! (Note: depending on my mood, I might switch up the finishing oil I use here. This time it’s basil, but other times I like to play around with O&CO.’s chili oil or green lemon oil, or even just one of their spicier New Harvest olive oils!)
All this makes, as my boyfriend would say, hella servings. Hella = around 12 very thick servings, I would estimate. I usually make a giant pot of soup all at once like this so that Loren and I have ready-to-eat lunch for a week or so. (At least, that’s always the plan. He typically ends up devouring all of it in just a couple of days.)
You can of course cut down on the quantity of these ingredients if you only want to make a few servings at a time. Also, I like my soups nice and thick, so I tend to make them with an overwhelming proportion of solid ingredients. I’ve discovered that with lentil soup especially, the proportions of everything can be adjusted however you like, so feel free to experiment!
(Another note: I actually felt that the ginger flavor didn’t come through enough in the soup I made today. Perhaps the flavor was boiled to death. Next time I’m going to try sautéeing the ginger separately and then adding it to the soup closer to the end!)
And the final result:
Now all that’s left is to eat and enjoy!
