It’s about this time every year that I start needing to have a big pot of delicious lentil and vegetable soup in my life.
OK, maybe my soup won’t save us all. But it does save me every year, in so many ways.
It’s a mood-changer as it simmers on the stove, the aromas of warm spices, cumin and coriander seed and garlic and onion and herbs swirling seductively through the kitchen.
It’s dinner for the family the night I make it. This soup is much quicker to make than most hearty legume-based soups. It doesn’t involve an Instant Pot, so it’s also therapeutic in its old-school simplicity. If you enjoy cooking at all, it’s soothing to make. You chop things up — an onion, carrot, celery, sweat it slowly in olive oil, add spices, then lentils, tomatoes and water. Add any veg, fresh or cooked, taking up valuable real estate in your fridge. Just before eating, add tender leafy greens, like the end of that bag of arugula or baby kale, or the gnarly spinach that came in your CSA box last week.
It uses up all the vegetables that are on their way out in the fridge, so it’s zero-waste-friendly.
It’s filled with ingredients — vegetables and spices — widely recognized by science as being extremely good for health. (You know, superfoods.) It’s chock full of antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, phytochemicals and flavonoids. (Read more about its benefits, and building its flavors, here.)
Warming Lentil Super Detox Soup II, with ginger and arugula
It’s lunch for as many days during the week as you feel like eating it. Like Reid Branson, the Seattle nurse-manager whose daily lentil-and-vegetable-soup went viral in a Washington Post story by Joe Yonan last year, I could eat this soup every day (and sometimes do!). Like Branson’s soup, which came from Crescent Dragonwagon’s 1992 cookbook, Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread, ours is vegan and gluten-free, but unlike his, ours does not include any vegetables that are high on the glycemic scale (his has potatoes), so ours is good for those who want to stay slim, take off weight or stave off diabetes.
And ours has another huge benefit: We have two versions of it — that use different types of lentils, different greens, different herbs — as well as a master recipe that lets you spin and riff and improvise to your heart’s content and your fridge’s contents. So if unlike Branson, you don’t want to eat the same thing for lunch every day, you can have various fabulous lentil soups from week to week with different spice and herb flavors to layer in.
Interested in sumac, turmeric or za’atar? Any would be excellent as part of the base. Are you a fan of harissa or chile crisp? Either are fabulous stirred in at the table — and so is sriracha, Cholula hot sauce or just about any salsa you want to conjure.
If you’re working at home, you can start it during your coffee break at 11, and it’ll be ready by lunchtime. Got lentils, a can of tomatoes and an onion? Then chances are you have everything you need to make it today.