There is a better soup than this. I have made it. It has roasted carrots in it and cumin seeds that you toast first, and the first time I made it Tom said, unprompted, that it was really good, which in fourteen years is a review.
We have made it three times.
We have made this one about forty. I stopped counting properly in the spring but it’s roughly weekly from October, and the difference between the two is not quality, it’s friction. The good soup needs the oven on for forty minutes and a tray and a shopping list. This one needs four things we always have in — it is the first entry on the six-meal card — one pan, and about twenty-five minutes of which fifteen are unattended.
The soup
Onion, red lentils, stock, a tin of tomatoes. That’s it, and I want to be honest that written down like that it looks like something you’d be served in a church hall.
Onion in the pan with oil, low, until soft — not brown, soft, which takes longer than you want and is the only part where being patient pays. A mug of red lentils, the cheap ones from the big bag. A tin of tomatoes. A litre of stock. Lid on, twenty minutes, and then blend it in the pan.
Then salt. More salt than you think, and then a bit more, tasting each time. Unsalted lentil soup is the single most disappointing food I know and I have served it to guests, so I say this with some feeling.
If there is a lemon, half a lemon at the end. There is often not a lemon.
The stick blender
Ours cost fourteen pounds from Argos about nine years ago and has now outlived two more expensive ones, including a very handsome brushed-steel thing my sister gave us that died in under two years. I have no idea why. It isn’t a recommendation, exactly — I don’t think you can buy the same one any more, and nobody has paid us anything to say this — it’s just that when people ask what we use, that’s the honest answer, and it seems worth writing down that the cheap one won.
Blending in the pan is the whole point. Every recipe that says “transfer to a blender” is describing a second thing to wash, and a second thing to wash is how a weeknight recipe becomes a weekend one.
What it’s actually for
Two portions get eaten immediately. The other half goes in the fridge in the plastic box with the blue lid, and it gets eaten within two days, usually by Tom at half past nine after a job overran, reheated in the microwave, stirred once.
That reheating is the reason this soup and not the good one. It is a soup that survives being ignored. The roasted carrot version separates and looks sad and you have to do something about it. This one goes back to being exactly itself.
I froze it in big tubs for a while, in a burst of organisation in January. Do not do this. A litre of frozen lentil soup thaws at roughly the rate of a glacier and nobody, at nine at night, begins by chiselling. If you’re freezing it, freeze it flat in bags, and I say that as somebody who is still not doing it.
The ceiling
We let Nell hold the stick blender once. She lifted it out while it was running. There is a fan pattern of orange on the ceiling above the hob that I have washed twice and which is, I have accepted, now part of the kitchen.
Things people email to ask
- Do red lentils need soaking?
- No. Red lentils are split, so they cook from dry in about twenty minutes and collapse on their own, which is why this works as a weeknight thing. Rinse them if the water runs cloudy, but soaking gains you nothing and adds a step you have to remember the night before, which is the step that kills recipes in this house.
- Why does my lentil soup taste bland?
- Almost always salt, and almost never spice. Lentils absorb a lot of it and unsalted lentil soup is the most disappointing food I know — I have served it to guests. Salt at the end, in stages, tasting each time, and go past the point where it feels reasonable. If it still tastes flat after that, half a lemon does more than any spice will.
- Can you freeze lentil soup?
- Yes, but freeze it flat in bags, never in a tub. A litre-tub of frozen lentil soup thaws at roughly the speed of a glacier, and nobody at nine at night starts by chiselling — ours sat in the freezer until it was thrown away. Bags lie flat, thaw in twenty minutes in a sink of warm water, and get used.
- How long does it keep in the fridge?
- Two to three days in a box with a lid, and it reheats better than the fancier version does. That is the actual reason we make this one: it survives being ignored and then microwaved by someone who is not paying attention, where a roasted-vegetable soup separates and looks sad and needs something doing to it.
Printable
Red lentil soup — recipe card
The four-ingredient soup, on a card small enough to prop against the kettle. Doubled, because there is no reason to make one batch.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
The traybake that covers three dinners
One tray, one oven, forty minutes, and no attention required in the middle of it. It is the only thing I cook that produces a second and third meal without me having decided to make a second and third meal.
Six dinners on a bit of card
Not a meal plan. A list of the six things we can make without thinking, stuck inside a cupboard door, which has done more for our week than three years of proper meal planning ever did.
Feeding other people’s children
Nell started being invited places, and then people started being invited here, and I discovered I had no idea what I was doing — including a fairly frightening twenty minutes about a peanut that turned out not to be a peanut.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
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