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Food Matters
Hot Lentil Soup
on a cold April night
You can eat soup any time of year, but cooking it is a seasonal endeavor. Standing over a bubbling caldron for four hours on a blistering summer day can be kind of nasty.
Normally, soup season concludes by April Fool’s Day, but not this year. Not in Boston, at least. I just made a new batch of lentil soup the other day, and it warmed my unseasonably chilly bones nicely.
Hold on to your cats, everyone, because this is not your grandma’s lentil soup. I took my mother’s recipe and twisted it to a point where it’s almost unrecognizable. There are lentils, of course. And water. But the rest is completely original.
Ok, I guess my mom also puts escarole in hers. And parmesan cheese. And garlic. But does she put in an entire Vidalia onion? Or red cooking wine? Or a boatload of ricotta cheese? Or slices of mozzarella? Or eggs? No, no, no, no, and no.
Making lentil soup is easy but time-consuming. There’s a lot of stirring and chopping and stirring. The good news is, you won’t have to combine the oxygen and hydrogen atoms to make water. We happen to live on a planet that does that for us! Unfortunately, the rest of the lentil soup assembly is your responsibility.
