Greek red lentil soup

[shadowspar]

How have I not posted this yet? I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

This is a great warming recipe for winter. It's thick enough, especially after a night in the fridge, that I like to serve it over rice like curry.

It's from the Rebar Cookbook, the best cookbook in the history of forever. Go buy it, and be sure to go eat at Rebar if you're ever in Victoria, BC, Canada. Trust me, you won't regret either decision.

Greek Red Lentil soup

• 2 cups red lentils, sorted, rinsed
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 ea large yellow onion
• 2 tsp salt
• 8 cloves garlic
• 2 ea carrots, diced
• 1 tsp cracked black pepper
• ¼ tsp red chile flakes
• 1 tbsp minced rosemary
• 2 tbsp minced oregano
• 2 ea bay leaves
• 8 cups vegetable stock
• zest of ½ lemon
• juice of 2 lemons
• 1 cup crumbled feta cheese
• 2 tsp minced rosemary
• additional cracked black pepper to taste

Sauté onion with 1tsp salt until translucent. Add garlic, carrot, pepper, chile flakes, herbs, bay leaves & remaining salt. Stir well & sauté until the until the carrots are just tender. Add lentils & stock; bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook until the lentils are soft and falling apart.

Remove bay leaves. The soup can be puréed or left as is.

Season the soup with lemon zest, lemon juice, salt & pepper to taste. Before serving, stir together the feta cheese + 2tsp rosemary. Sprinkle over hot bowls of soup & serve.

ETA: Two things re this:

• The herb measures listed up there are for fresh herbs. We usually end up with fresh rosemary, but never fresh oregano -- swapping it out for 2tsp of dried instead seems to give a good result. =)
• Just a heads-up: how lemon-y the soup gets can be highly variable, depending on how large/sour/juicy the lemons you get are, and how aggressively you zest and juice them. I've ended up giving myself a big lemony punch in the face by dumping all the lemon materiel in without tasting, so, uh, maybe don't do that if that's not the kind of thing you enjoy. ^_^;;

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

I overdid the lemon, but still tasty!

[shadowspar]

Yay! And thanks again for pointing out the lemon factor -- I should have thought to add a note a while ago. ^_^;