This week’s soup was going to be Chicken Little Noodle Soup but my gal put in a request for lentil, which wasn’t a bad idea either. Of course, she wasn’t talking about plain old grayish green lentils. She wanted red lentils, which I’ve never cooked with and you can’t find at the nearest grocery store. Well, I can’t anyway.

Red lentil’s aren’t really red lentil’s by the way. They’re actually yellow lentil’s with their shell’s milled off to show the red inside. As a result, they’re a fast cooking legume, ready in minutes.

Fortunately, from the depths of the pantry she produced a 16 oz bag of red lentils. The label said that it made two quarts of soup and they only took 20 minutes to cook into mush. Since I need about twice that much soup, I suspected a trip out into the wilds would be necessary, at some point, but  that could wait a bit until I saw how things were going. Since red lentils cook so fast, I could make the soup, leave it simmering, and add more when I got back from the store. If I had to, which as it turned out, I didn’t.

Red Lentil Soup with Bacon
Yield – 10 servings (12oz ea)

• 2 Cups red lentils (dry)
• 1 lb bacon (diced into 1/2 inch squares)
• Three tablespoons [amazon_link id=”B00016LA7K” target=”_blank” ]Better than Bullion Chicken Base[/amazon_link]
• 1 large onion
• 3 large carrots
• 4 celery stalks
• 2 leeks
• 1 14 oz can of pureed tomato
• 1 tbsp Cumin
• 1.5 tsp Cayenne
• 1 tsp Coriander
• 1 tsp salt, or to taste

Optional: Parsley Sauce

• 6 oz Greek Yogurt
• 1/2 cup minced parsley

First I took half a pound of uncured-bacon and chopped it up into 1/2 inch pieces, then sauteed it in my 8 qt stockpot to render out the bulk of the fat. Uncured Trader Joe’s bacon doesn’t have much salt or flavor and didn’t especially want to fry and I had to add a teaspoon of olive oil to it to get it going. After about ten minutes I had a scant cup of not especially interestingl bacon, which just didn’t seem like enough, so I chopped up the other half pound and cooked it up too. Next time I’d dice it a bit finer than one inch by half inch.

While the bacon was doing its thing I chopped up a large onion and two leeks, which I’d had left over from last weeks adventure: Lobster Bob and the Tails Go Bisque-O!

After the bacon was rendered and strained, I wound up with about a half cup of bacon fat, of which I returned about two tablespoons to the pot, to which I added the chopped onion and leek. Waste not want not.

I may have cooked them a little longer and not stirred them quite as much as I could have, which points out that sauteeing is no time to let yourself get distracted. Note to self…don’t scrape the bottom of the pot.

I added in three quarts of water and, chopped up three carrots and four stalks of celery and added them to the stock, along with  one tablespoons per quart of [amazon_link id=”B00016LA7K” target=”_blank” ]Better than Bullion Chicken Base[/amazon_link], and things started to get pretty tasty. Fortunately, it seemed to have dodged the bullet on buring the leeks. Did I say that out loud? I meant. lightly colored. Oh wait, black’s not a color. Never mind. It’s getting blended when I’m done so nobody will ever know.

I let it simmer for 30 minutes or while I cleaned things up.

After thirty minutes, I got out my immersion blender and went to town on the stock. Why now, when I’m going to do it again after I add the lentils and they soften up? You’re thinking it’s because it’s my favorite part, and you’re half right. The other half is that I want the stock completely pureed, while the lentils only lightly broken up, which they’ll do without any help.

At this point the stock just plain rocks. I’d stop now, add some noodles and thicken it up a bit and be a happy camper. But there’s no quitting.

The bag of lentils said it was good for two quarts, half the batch I’m making. I decided that since the stock already had some body from the pureed vegetables and no matter how thick it wound up it was going to taste good I’d go with what I had on hand. So, the two cups of lentils went into a medium simmer and cooked for twenty minutes.

After twenty minutes there wasn’t any need to blend the lentils, as they were already pretty mushy. I did get to play with the blender again though, because I wanted to add some pureed tomato to the soup and only had a can of whole tomatoes. A few seconds with the blender, and two cups of tomato puree were ready to join the fun, along with the bacon bits.

Pretty much the last thing for the soup I did was to add spices. A tablespoon of cumin and a teaspoon each of coriander and cayenne . I could have added them back in the stock stage, but well…never got around to it.

Then I left the soup on the burner on low to come together for an hour or so.

There are two garnishes for this soup suggested in the recipe I based it on: A Greek yogurt and parsley cream sauce and crisped shallot rings. The first was easy, especially since I like chopping up herbs with my favorite knife, a [amazon_link id=”B0000DDVFV” target=”_blank” ]santoku[/amazon_link] my gal gave me last year on Valentine’s day.

Chopped fine the half a cup of parsley gets mixed in with 6 oz of Greek yogurt and a dash of salt finishes it off. I added a tablespoon of water to make it thin enough to come out of a plastic squeeze bottle, my kitchen tool acquisition for the job.

The crisped shallots…well, slicing them thin was fun, but I seem to have a heavy hand today on the burner. Black probably means they stayed in the oil too long, though they were still pretty tasty.

Final adjustments were too add a pinch of salt and another half teaspoon of cayenne. It could easily take another teaspoon of cayenne, but I’m playing it safe this week.

To serve, I made little cream spirals in the soup added the crispy shallots and dug in. Pretty darn tasty, not to mention economical. My gallon of soup probably cost about $7, or seventy cents for each 12 oz bowl, or one one-hundredth of the cost of last week’s soup though I’m betting I could get that down to half its cost without losing any quality.

Still, this is what I love about soup. The Red Lentil soup is delicious, hearty, and very economical. Long live the revolution!