Red Lentil Soup with Leftovers

Legumes.

They are healthy, they are delicious, they are full of fiber and minerals, they are really, really cheap (you should buy them dried by the bag), and yet many people here in the West have no idea how to prepare them, nor how to eat them on a regular basis.  Granted, that may be due to the fact that if you want your beans and chickpeas to taste really good, you don’t want them to come out of a can – you need to pre-soak and you need to boil them yourself.  So, while it is not difficult, that method does require thinking ahead.

But, not all legumes are created equal.  Lentils, especially the red ones, cook in minutes without any pre-soaking, and green peas these days are sold frozen in large inexpensive bags which are very easy to just store in your freezer for when you need them.  And thankfully, the Middle Eastern kitchens – Persian, Lebanese and many others – have long ago come up with a fantastic way to feed people based on those, cheaply and in a hurry.  Frugality and convenience attended to, the easiest way to incorporate legumes into your diet in a gloriously delicious way, is a lentil soup.  And you can then impress your friends with your creation, presenting it as a Mid-East inspired dish rather than “I have some leftovers in the fridge that we can probably do something with.”

Because red lentils cook so fast, and because legumes go with a huge range of savory seasonings, this soup pulls together in about half an hour, and it is a wonderful way to use up various leftovers looking sad and forlorn in the corners of your fridge.  Or freezer.  And the result is a warming, hearty soup that is thick and satisfying enough to serve as a large lunch, or even a dinner if served with some bread on the side.  And you can feel good for having done something great for your health in the process, to boot!

It can even be made vegetarian, or indeed, vegan, if you omit the bacon, and if needed, the dairy I like to garnish it with – and for all I am a definite carnivore, this soup will really be not much worse for the omissions.  Or if you have aging smoked lamb or pastrami, or ham, it can be sliced and tossed right in alongside with everything else to make the soup richer.  Though if you are skipping bacon, I would suggest a teaspoon of smoked paprika to add the smoky scent without the smoked-pig component.

And if you are cooking for yourself only, and are daunted by the prospect of having a large pot of soup, this both, keeps fine in the fridge for a few days, and freezes fantastically well if you have some of those plastic tubs handy.

There is no set-in-stone recipe for lentil soup, as it literally uses up whatever you have around your fridge, but there are a few simple guidelines.  It needs onions, it needs a good amount of greenery, and it needs enough fat to cook those onions.  The rest is honestly mutable.

You will need (this will make about 3L of soup):

• 1-1.25 cup (3 dl) red lentils
• 2-4 tablespoons cooking oil or bacon fat
• 2-3 onions, chopped
• 3-5 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped finely
• 1-2 dl green peas (frozen – if you have fresh, I’d just eat those fresh!)
• A couple of handfuls of frozen chopped spinach pellets
• Half or whole pack of bacon (75-150g), cut into small bits (can be omitted, or substituted with shredded cooked beef, chicken, smoked or roast lamb, pastrami, or whatever you have handy)
• Salt and black pepper and chili flakes to taste
• 1 very heaping tablespoon of curry powder, or Middle Eastern 7-spice (Baharat), or a thyme-based mix like Zaatar, or really whatever you have on hand and feel like – toss in that Italian pasta or salad seasoning, it will work just fine too.
• 1 teaspoon hot paprika or hot smoked paprika
• Leftovers:  in my case – a couple of aged salad onions, trimmed, but you can use up a slightly-mushy tomato, some root celery (peeled and chopped into small bits), green celery (sliced crosswise), a potato or two, and you get the idea.

• Extra virgin olive oil to drizzle on top – or you can be like me and use up herb-infused olive oil that some sun-dried tomatoes were sold in.
• Greek or Turkish yogurt or creme fraiche or sour cream to serve – optional, but really nice.

How to achieve soup in record time:

• Put a large pot (enough to fit 3+ Litres) on the stove and add 2 tablespoons of oil or bacon fat.  Start heating it on medium-low heat.  Put a non-stick frying pan on the stove, add 1 tablespoon of cooking oil or bacon fat and heat that to medium heat as well.
• Toss your chopped bacon into the frying pan, stir and allow to cook on medium heat while you add your “leftover” vegetables to the pot, and saute them gently in it.  Add your seasoning (curry, 7-spice, seasoning mix – but not the paprika), whatever the choice is.
• Once bacon is cooked, lift it from the pan and add to the pot with leftover vegetables.  Add your chopped onions to the pan, and fry them in bacon fat on medium heat until they turn golden and a little crispy on edges.
• While your onions are frying, rinse your lentils and add them to the pot.  Add approximately 2 L of water (the process is made faster if you boil it in your water boiler while at it), and bring soup to a slow simmer.
• When the onions are nearly done, move them a bit to the side, add a tablespoon of oil if needed, and toss the garlic into the pan.  Cook just until it goes bright white and fragrant, a few seconds – now this is ready to add to the pot, whatever stage that is at – soup is forgiving like that!
• Bring your soup to a bit higher boil (higher simmer?  We don’t want this at rolling boil, not really!), and cook for approximately 15 minutes until lentils are nearly cooked through (they will fluff out at edges and will be nearly soft to the bite).
• Add the frozen peas and spinach, and enough boiling water to make 3L of soup in total.  Add the teaspoon of paprika.
• Cook, stirring, until spinach pellets are completely dispersed and the soup is back at a low simmer.  If the lentils are not cooked through at this stage, give the soup another 3-5 minutes until they are.
• Season with salt and pepper and chili flakes to taste, and serve with yogurt or creme fraiche and a drizzle of olive oil.

The bread in the photo that we ate it with, is a rye-blend folded cheese sourdough (I promise a recipe with stage-by-stage folding photos another day!), but this soup would go just as well with any – or none at all.

Carnivorous Plants, Omnivorous Thoughts

Day before yesterday, the boyfriend and I visited Gothenburg.  Gothenburg is a very nice city on the West coast of Sweden, and we were there to see our friends, go to the dissertation defense party, and while we were there, we also took the time to visit the Gothenburg Botanical Garden.  (Very, very recommended if you are interested in botany, conservation, or just like to walk around in a pretty park and look at flowers.)

Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia sp.) - aren't they cute?!

Among other things, the garden is famous for its collections of orchids and carnivorous plants, and while it was the orchid collection which originally drew me there, it was the carnivores which made me think.

These cute, fluffy red-patterned pitchers eat animals.  Specifically, they eat bugs – they lure them in, drown them, and digest them.  They photosynthesize too, like most other plants, but for their nutrients, they depend largely (if not solely) on killing and eating what flies or creeps their way.  They can, of course, survive without eating bugs – though not incredibly well – but they do far, far better if they can eat what is natural to them.

And, of course, I’ve never heard anyone say that it’s not ethical to feed them flies, or that it’s murder.  It’s – well, it’s natural, and that’s the end of it.

In general, I don’t care what other people eat, so long as they don’t hurt themselves and I don’t consequently have to pay for their health care via my taxes, and so long as they don’t tell me what I should and should not eat.

The former is an ongoing social problem.  People eat whatever the heck they feel like, and then think that others should pay for the problems they give themselves.  Rant for another time.  The latter is a problem with fewer people, but they are far more voiciferous.  I am talking about all those who scream that eating animals is not ethical and that I am a bad person for wanting to, and doing so.

The question I would like to ask is, why?  Why is it unethical and why is it bad, precisely?

A side note before I launch further into rant – I do my best to buy grass-fed meat, and free-range chickens (essentially more or less the only kind available in Sweden anyway), and I do not in any way condone bad conditions or treatment of livestock.  In fact, it is people like myself who pay a premium price for good-quality meat from well-treated animals who contribute to well-being of livestock in good herds.

Furthermore, while there is an argument that humans are not obligate carnivores, but rather omnivores, the latter term should not be taken to mean that humans can therefore subsist on vegetable matter only, or not easily or well.  In fact, omnivores cannot subsist by grazing at all – that would be the province of herbivores, which humans certainly are not (our digestive system is just not adapted to such diet).  Meaning, I am not about to give up eating fruit, grains, legumes or vegetables and greens – that’d be mad (not to mention constipating!), but I also do not see any ethical reason for me to stop eating animal tissue – so long as no animals live in horrible conditions because of it.  I mean, let’s face it – no sane carnivore would prefer a miserable and sick animal to eat to a fat and happily sleek one.  I am not mad either.  When I eat an animal, I want to know it was healthy and lived well – if nothing else, because it would taste better if so (nutrition aside).

As to nutrition – well yes, you can (with help of some intensive and environment-costly modern technology) survive on a purely vegetable and fungal diet.  But mind you, I can’t imagine that any manner of eating which requires serious industrial processing of said plant matter, and industrial-level extraction/synthesis of vitamins and other nutrietns, and heavy supplementation with those can be called anything like healthy or natural.  This is to say – ovo-lacto-vegetarians and pescetarians, for example, do just fine.  It’s vegans who have a real serious industry dependency.

The question which made me wonder is – why is it that some people (no names or links here, I am being nice!) feel the need to try to load me with guilt for wanting to eat what is natural to me?  (That, by the way, being, a nice selection of fruit, vegetables, grains, legumes, eggs and yes, meat.)  Is any of it more wrong for me to eat than for a carnivorous plant to get fed a few flies?  Why?  Because I am not red and fluffy and don’t live in a pot?  And what about the plants themselves – why is it that some people consider it to be perfectly fine to eat a cucumber but not a cow?  What makes plant life worse or less precious than animal life, precisely?  After all, plants are the reason why we, animls, have oxygen to breathe and something, anything to eat – they are the only form of life on this planet which converts inorganic matter into organic matter which the rest of kingdoms of life can eat.  I’d say that ought to make them more revered, not less!

So, here’s what I have to say – just like the adorable Sarracenia in the photo, and her many cohorts, I do not buy your “you shouldn’t eat animals because they are cute and have huge Disney-Bambi eyes“.  Animals are a natural part of my diet, they have proteins and nutrients I need (and yumminess I love), and I will continue to eat them untill and unless you come up with a better reason why me and my Pitcher plant buddies here should consider them off-limits.

P.S.  If you drive a car, then don’t even start on how it’s better for the environment – sell your car and take public transit or walk like I do, first.